The former German orphanage shelters 103 children. Marash, 1919.

Item Detail

After a feast, the 103 children were not sent back to the streets but taken into this building, once a German orphanage. Glen Russell Carrier photographed it in 1919 on the survey he made with Loyal Lincoln Wirt, Near East Relief's International Commissioner, to assess the needs of survivors of the Armenian Genocide in Cilicia and northern Syria.

Context

American photographer Glen Russell Carrier served as the official photographer of Near East Relief. In 1919, he traveled with Dr. Loyal Lincoln Wirt (1863–1961), NER's International Commissioner, who had been sent to assess the needs of survivors of the Armenian Genocide and report back on relief operations in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Carrier's photographs in this collection document inland Cilicia and northern Syria — Aintab (Gaziantep), Marash (Kahramanmaraş), and Aleppo — and the Armenian refugee camp at Port Fouad, Egypt. They record NER relief workers, orphans and children, refugee families, prisoners of war, and the destruction across the region. These photographs are one part of the larger Near East Relief Collection (AKP061) at the Harvard Fine Arts Library, which holds 487 prints from the survey.