Young men perform mass calisthenics on an open field, Near East Relief.
Location
Marsovan (Merzifon), Turkey
Year
c. 1919–1923
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.
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Likely the athletic fields of the Anatolia College campus at Marsovan (Merzifon), Turkey, circa 1921–1922. The mountain ridge behind the field in one frame matches the Akdağ massif profile that anchors the campus in Anthony's confirmed Marsovan series. Anatolia College was known in the region for its American-style athletics and "Field Days" on the flat plain below the campus buildings, and Gertrude Anthony directed the Near East Relief boys' orphanage at this station in 1921 and again in 1922–1923.
