Orphan boys work the garden before the campus buildings, Near East Relief boys’ orphanage, Marsovan (Merzifon).
Location
Marsovan (Merzifon), Turkey
Year
c. 1921–1922
Context
A. Gertrude Anthony (1873–1967), niece of the suffragist Susan B. Anthony, ran the Near East Relief boys' orphanage at Marsovan (Merzifon) from June 1921 until its evacuation the following year. The orphanage occupied the campus of Anatolia College, an American school whose buildings and hospital sheltered as many as two thousand Armenian and Greek children orphaned by the genocides.
In July 1921, Topal Osman's irregulars destroyed the town's Greek and Armenian quarters and killed roughly half its Christian residents in four days. The orphanage held on through that summer and the next. When the final ultimatum came in September 1922, Anthony led some five hundred children to the coast at Samsun in a caravan of fifty-six wagons, then left Marsovan for good in January 1923.
These photographs show the orphanage at work: boys gathered before the college's arcaded halls, classes in tailoring and cobbling, and the children at music, drill, and play.
Digital surrogate courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (Gertrude Anthony photographs, BANC PIC 1986.006). Some materials may be protected by U.S. copyright law. This material is presented in view-only mode for non-commercial research and educational use under fair use. Uses beyond fair use may require permission from the copyright owner. Responsibility for determining rights status and compliance rests with the user. Please write to [email protected] if you have any information about rights holders that we are not aware of.
Identified as the grounds of the Anatolia College campus at Marsovan (Merzifon), Turkey, circa 1921–1922. One frame shows the North College building in the background, with the same light-colored plastered façade and regular fenestration as in Anthony's portraits of the boys at the dormitory. That match places these garden portraits on the same campus. Gertrude Anthony directed the Near East Relief boys' orphanage at this station in 1921 and again in 1922–1923. The mature deciduous trees and garden benches across the frames fit the landscaped grounds documented for the campus.
