Four refugees reach the American Relief Station in Urumia, Persia.

Item Detail

Four refugees who reached Urumia, Persia. They had nothing but the rags they wear. The American Relief Station was their only hope for a new start in life.

Context

These photographs come from the American Unofficial Collection of World War I Photographs (165-WW) within Record Group 165, Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs, held by the U.S. National Archives. The United States government assembled the collection during and just after the First World War from many sources, among them the publicity work of the American Committee for Relief in the Near East (ACRNE), the relief organization that Congress incorporated as Near East Relief in 1919. The Near East images date from 1918 and 1919, as American relief in the region moved from wartime emergency to organized operation.

The selection documents two sides of that effort. In the field, it records relief stations, hospitals, and orphan care among Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek survivors of genocide and displacement across the Caucasus, eastern Anatolia, and northwest Persia. At home, it records the American mobilization that paid for the work: fundraising drives, relief ships loading at New York and Hoboken, and the volunteers who sailed to distribute food and supplies.

In northwest Persia, the city of Urumia (Urmia) sat at the center of the Assyrian and Armenian catastrophe, where massacre and flight in 1915 and 1918 drove thousands toward the American mission and its relief station. These photographs record refugees reaching the American Relief Station at Urumia and the Assyrian, Armenian, and Kurdish families caught in the region's violence. The images date from 1918–1919, when American relief in Persia operated at the edge of the collapsing wartime fronts.