The Armenian quarter stands in ruins. Harpoot, c. 1919-1922.

Location

Harpoot (Kharpert), Turkey

Year

c. 1919–1922

Item Detail

Harpoot stood on a ridge above the plain, with the government seat at Mezereh below it. Of Harpoot's twenty-one neighborhoods, six held Armenians and five were wholly Armenian before 1915. Roofs are gone, and windows are empty holes across most of the slope, with large plastered buildings of three and four stories above. Euphrates College and the mission buildings were turned into relief centers.

Context

Ruth Azneve Parmelee (1885-1973) was born in Trebizond to American missionary parents and studied with them until the family returned to the United States when she was eleven. She earned her degree at Oberlin and her medical degree at the University of Illinois, then sailed back to Turkey in May 1914 as the first woman physician to settle in the Euphrates Valley. In Harpoot she practiced obstetrics, trained nurses and cared for war orphans, and she was there through the deportations of 1915. She held the post until 1917, resumed it in 1919, and was compelled to leave in January 1922. She reached Salonica that October, opened a maternity hospital under the American Women's Hospitals, and founded Greece's first school of nursing. She stayed in the country, in one post or another, for thirty years.

View in the Digital Archive

  • Holding Institution

    Hoover Institution Library and Archives

  • External Link
    https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt596nf1c5/

  • Attribution

    Ruth A. Parmelee papers, Box 6, Folder 2 (Harpoot, Turkey, 1914-1922), Hoover Institution Library & Archives

  • Rights

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  • Notes

    Houshamadyan's account of the Harput American mission places the Euphrates College complex in the Armenian Upper Quarter at the western end of the town, on the side and summit of a hill, and lists five educational buildings: two for boarders, the president's building, two for the missionaries' living quarters, one for the teachers, Wheeler Hall, a chapel, and a trades' training building. A keyed panorama reproduced there, from the Houghton Library and inscribed "One ward of the City of Harpoot," numbers ten of the buildings. https://www.houshamadyan.org/mapottomanempire/vilayetofmamuratulazizharput/harputkaza/education-and-sport/schools-part-i.html

    Town and quarters: Houshamadyan, Harput kaza, locale and demography. https://www.houshamadyan.org/mapottomanempire/vilayetofmamuratulazizharput/harputkaza/locale/demography.html

    Mission buildings: "The buildings of the American College at Aintab; Euphrates College, Kharput; Anatolia College, Marsovan; and of schools in Cesarea, Marash, Mardin and Sivas were turned into relief centers." James L. Barton, Story of Near East Relief (Macmillan, 1930), p. 60.

    Quarters: "Kharpert was made up of 21 neighborhoods of which 6 contained Armenians, 5 purely Armenian." Houshamadyan, Harput kaza, locale and demography.

The Armenian quarter stands in ruins. Harpoot, c. 1919-1922.