Bodies on the Islahiye road
View Full Document

Location

Marash (Kahramanmaras), Turkey

Year

1920

Item Detail

Letter to family, Mar 28, 1920

Context

Stanley Elphinstone Kerr (1894–1976) served as a volunteer with Near East Relief from 1919 to 1922, initially assigned to Aleppo as a clinical biochemist and sanitary officer, where he also worked as a photographer and assisted in recovering Armenian children from Kurdish and Turkoman households.

In the autumn of 1919 he transferred to Marash (present-day Kahramanmaraş), where he headed American relief operations during the Franco-Turkish conflict and the siege of January–February 1920, in which an estimated 9,000 of the city's 20,000 Armenians perished. After the French evacuation, Kerr remained with the surviving Armenian population before departing with the last group of orphans in 1922. He later published The Lions of Marash (1973), a detailed account of these events.

View in the Digital Archive

  • Holding Institution

    Zoryan Institute

  • Attribution

    Courtesy of the Kerr Family. Stanley Kerr Archives, Zoryan Institute.

  • Rights

    Some materials may be protected by U.S. copyright law. Materials are presented for non-commercial research and educational use under fair use. Uses beyond fair use may require permission from the copyright owner. Responsibility for rights determination and compliance rests with the user. If you believe you hold rights in this material or have information about rights holders not currently reflected, please contact [email protected].

  • Document Contents

    Skeletons and bodies of Armenians line retreat road from Marash to Islahiye; over a thousand died in snowstorm six hours from Islahiye; Mustafa Kemal telegram orders no American communication with enemy; Kerr renews contract

Bodies on the Islahiye road