Failed peace commission; Zeitun massacred
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Location

Marash (Kahramanmaras), Turkey

Year

1920

Item Detail

Letter to mother, Apr 18, 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.

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  • Holding Institution

    Zoryan Institute

  • Attribution

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

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  • Document Contents

    Lyman and Badveli Abraham visit Zeitun and learn all villagers have been massacred; same fate for villages around Marash; Mutessarif sends peace commission to Aintab but war breaks out; Mutessarif asks Kerr if he can take all Armenians into compounds on short notice

Failed peace commission; Zeitun massacred