Back (60954): “Batum - Tiflis.” Imperial-railway boxcar. The corridor is named, not the program or direction: an NER child transfer or the Greek refugee exodus are both possible. (See the Batum-Tiflis thematic brief.)
Context
Harold C. Jaquith directed Near East Relief’s operations from Constantinople during the crisis years after 1921. After the Turkish Nationalist army burned the Greek and Armenian quarters of Smyrna in September 1922, NER moved tens of thousands of its orphaned wards out of Anatolia and the Caucasus to Greece. Children rode boxcars through Batum (Batumi) and Tiflis (Tbilisi) and sailed with white kit sacks. Greek refugee communities loaded the bells of their destroyed churches aboard. Jaquith pressed the Allied fleets to carry refugees and counted some 400,000 displaced people in the months after Smyrna.
These photographs show the transports: the quays, the boxcars, the crowded decks, and the church bells stowed among the baggage.
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