Edward Joris (1876–1957) was a Belgian Flemish anarchist who was involved in the 1905 bombing in Constantinople known as the Yıldız assassination attempt, which was directed against the Sultan Abdul Hamid II as a retribution for the Hamidian massacres.

[1] Through his anarchism, he took an interest in anticolonialism and became involved in the attempt with his wife, Anna Nellens, after meeting two leaders of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), Vramshabouh Kendirian and one of the founders of the organization, Christapor Mikaelian.

[2] He was sentenced to death, which triggered a significant protest movement in Belgium, involving both the Walloons and the Flemish, drawing comparisons to the Dreyfus Affair in France, with numerous political interventions advocating for his release.

[2] In 1901 he travelled to Constantinople, where he was briefly employed writing commercial correspondence in French and English and then found work at the Singer sewing machine company.

'[4] Edward Joris later said that it was the reading of Quillard's journal, Pro Armenia, that motivated his choice to support the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF).

In total, 39 people were involved in the plot, including his wife, Anna Nellens, and Sophie Areshian, disguised as the daughter of Christapor Mikaelian.

He spoke during his trial and declared:[2]About a year before the attempt I read a manifest in the Parisian paper Pro Armenia for the poor Armenians.

[3] The movement quickly extended beyond the anarchist circle of Antwerp and spread throughout Belgian society, particularly among intellectual socialist and left-leaning elites, uniting both Walloons and Flemish.

[3] On June 22, 1907, in Les Temps Nouveaux, a French anarchist journal, Jean Grave and Segher Rabaud published two statements of support for Edward Joris.

In these, they declared, among other things:[8]Our comrades remember Joris, accused in the plot against the Yldiz-Kiosk bandit, sentenced to death by the judges of the massacrer a year and a half ago.

[...] The Armenians are arrested en masse, and Joris, the dangerous and terrible one, who from the depths of his cell makes the bombs dance, will suffer from closer surveillance due to the dirty exploits of the police scum.Due to diplomatic pressure from Belgium and France, the sentence was not carried out.

The proximity between an anarchist internationalist and the Armenian national movement has been questioned, but Maarten Van Ginderachter believes that during that time, anarchist figures like Bakunin or Proudhon were open to supporting small anti-colonial national movements, such as the demands of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation:Joris’s best friend Resseler explicitly mentioned Armenia in September 1901 as one example of bourgeois-capitalist violence toward the working class in a longer list: ‘Our whole bourgeois society is based on violence: all governments burn and kill in the Transvaal, in China, in the Congo, on Java, in Cuba and on the Philippines, in Armenia’.