High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh) is a 1933 novel by Austrian writer Franz Werfel based on true events that took place in 1915, during the second year of World War I and at the beginning of the Armenian Genocide. The novel focuses on the defense of a small community of Armenians living in the mountainous region of Hatay Province of the former Ottoman Empire—now part of present-day southern Turkey on the Mediterranean coast—as well the events in Istanbul and provincial capitals, where the Young Turkish government orchestrated the deportations, concentration camps, and massacres of the empire`s Armenian citizens. This policy, as well as who bore responsibility for it, has been controversial and contested since 1915. Because of this, or perhaps in spite of it, the facts and scope of the Armenian Genocide were little known until Werfel’s novel, which entailed voluminous research and is generally accepted as based on historical events.