Eyewitness report by NER workers Murdock and Knapp on the Greek and Armenian deportees who passed through or were held at Arabkir (Arapgir), 1921–1922, including the forced winter march toward Harpoot.
Context
Near East Relief workers Murdock and Knapp ran relief at Arabkir (Arapgir), in the interior vilayet of Mamuret-ul-Aziz, during the 1921–1922 deportations of Ottoman Greeks and Armenians. Their report, transmitted to the State Department among the enclosures to Major F.D. Yowell’s May 1922 dispatch, records the convoys that arrived from the Konia, Ordu, and Black Sea districts — first men of military age, then women and children, then the aged — and the more than a thousand deportees held on an exposed hillside above the town, barred from the water ditch beside them.
On a freezing morning that column was started toward Harpoot and caught in a blizzard at Shorey, where the road was left strewn with the dead. Murdock and Knapp took about twenty abandoned children into the Arabkir orphanage; several did not survive the starvation and exposure they had already endured. The account is among the few first-hand American descriptions of the Arabkir deportation route. NARA Decimal File 867.4016, M353 roll 47.
Turkey/Social Matters/Race Problems/867.4016; National Archives Microfilm Publication M353, Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Turkey, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
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