Ashghen Hanikian, who had gone to the Kokinea camp, Syra

Item Detail

Ashghen Hanikian sits for a studio portrait on a wicker bench. Her name, which is Armenian, and a note that she had gone to the Kokinea camp are written along the lower margin of the print. Kokinea is very likely Nea Kokkinia, the refugee quarter at Piraeus, though no source has been found that settles it. On the back she inscribed it to Carrie Midgley: Dearest Mrs. Midgley, with a signature and the date 25 January 1928, Syra, Greece. The portrait is a gift from a young woman who had left the orphanage to one of the Americans who had run it.

Context

Fred Midgley (1865–1939) was born in England and brought to Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1869 at the age of four. He and Carrie A. Midgley, formerly Carrie A. Bancroft, ran a market garden and were long active in the Grange. Near East Relief wanted an American market gardener to take charge of the farm work at its orphanage on the island of Syra, and Fred Midgley signed a two-year agreement in August 1926. The couple sailed that September and served until 1928, he directing the agricultural work and she assisting him. The children there were survivors of the Armenian and Greek genocides and of the destruction of Smyrna (Izmir) in 1922. Near East Relief's own history calls Syra the last of its orphanage centers.

This photograph is one of a group of loose prints the family kept alongside their two scrapbook albums. They show the orphanage buildings and farm, the children and the American staff, and several carry inscriptions on the back naming individual children. Nancy Winter Taylor, their granddaughter, gave the papers to the Near East Foundation. They are held in the Near East Foundation records at the Rockefeller Archive Center, Accession 2012:071, RG 6, FA 1309.