Turkey has recalled its envoy to the Vatican after Pope Francis described the mass killing of Armenians under Ottoman rule in World War One as “genocide”.
Turkey has reacted with anger to the comment made by the Pope at a service in the Armenian Catholic Rite in Rome on Sunday.
Pope Francis said that humanity had lived through “three massive and unprecedented tragedies” in the last century.
“The first, which is widely considered ‘the first genocide of the 20th Century’, struck your own Armenian people,” he said, in a form of words used by a declaration by St John Paul II in 2001.
Armenia and many historians say up to 1.5 million people were killed by Ottoman forces in 1915.
But Turkey has always disputed that figure and said the deaths were part of a civil conflict triggered by the First World War.