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Seven of eleven villages attacked. Acorne, 1 May 1920.
Location
Constantinople (Istanbul), Turkey
Year
1920
Item Detail
William S. Dodd's letter of 7 April reports that of eleven villages the Adana unit aided the previous month, seven were attacked. Harouniye was destroyed entirely with twenty or thirty killed, about sixty-five people were slaughtered at Kizil-Aghaj, and some two hundred orphans walked out of Harouniye at night under French escort. The issue closes with an orphanage count the editors call a minimum pending returns, 53,077 children in orphanages and homes and 38,255 more in soup kitchens, for 91,332 in all. Miriam K. Dasey describes Derindje ringed for a mile with barbed wire, dugouts and sandbag barricades.
Context
The Acorne was the weekly bulletin of the American Committee for Relief in the Near East, produced in Constantinople for private circulation among the Committee's own staff. By January 1920, it printed a thousand copies a week for station directors in the field and for supporters in America.
Issues ran to four pages of short field dispatches and unit reports: orphan care, medical work, refugee feeding, education and workshop programs, with operational notes on supplies, rations, transport and exchange. Personnel notices recorded arrivals, transfers and departures. The bulletin took the title Near East Relief with Vol. II, No. 42 on 23 October 1920.
No complete run is known to survive. NERHS holds seventeen issues of Volume II, drawn from the Harry Pratt Judson records at the University of Chicago, the Martin Weaver Documents at the Mennonite Historical Library, and the Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary.
These two issues carry William S. Dodd's April report on the Cilician villages and Charles F. Weeden Jr.'s diary of the siege of Ourfa. Martin L. Weaver was a Mennonite relief worker who reached Constantinople in March 1920.
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Holding Institution
Mennonite Church Archive
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Attribution
Mennonite Historical Library, Goshen College. Martin Weaver Documents.
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Rights
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Document Contents
'Derindje Today', signed Miriam K. Dasey and dated 13 April 1920, describes a base ringed for a mile by barbed wire that runs down into the water, white tents and Indian guards on the hills, dugouts and sandbag barricades, a scouting party of thirty-five searching the bushes between Derindje and Ismid, a cemetery wall holed for a machine gun, and a rusted double-walled tank between «Paradise» and the mess hall that is to be the dugout for the four American personnel. 'Kerassunde' describes a Black Sea town equally Greek and Turkish where the large pre-war Armanian population has, in the writer's phrase, almost completely disappeared in the usual fashion; the Greek orphanage holds 210 orphans in the public-school building alongside 600 day-pupils, and native doctors report 100 trachoma cases among 200 children. 'Latest Word from Adana', by William S. Dodd and dated 7 April 1920, recounts the night evacuation of about 200 orphans from Harouniye on foot to Yar-Bashi under French escort, then catalogues the eleven villages aided the previous month, of which seven were attacked: Harouniye entirely destroyed with twenty or thirty killed, Hassan Beyly besieged and since relieved, Kars abandoned by its Armenian population who took refuge at Sis, Erbez mostly destroyed with the people besieged in the great monastery, and about sixty-five slaughtered at Kizil-Aghaj. 'The Department of Individual Remittances', under Orie Hinson and now Nancy Benson, reports $359,209.52 sent from New York to the end of 1919, sample Advice Sheets from every state in the Union ranging from five to five hundred dollars, nine names in ten ending in -ian, and a remittance arranged through the British High Commissioner to a prisoner in Cyprus whose receipt was signed with a thumb mark. 'From the Near East News' covers kitchen gardens leased from the convent at Echmiadzin where 400 children aged fifteen to eighteen will work, and the American Red Cross move to Theodosia after the Bolshevik capture of Novorossisk, with the Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovina discovered among the refugees and now en route to Denmark. 'Personnel Notes' records eight movements, among them William E. Hawkes reporting the Marsovan to Samsoun roads barely passable and Robert H. McDowell sent to investigate transportation routes and warehouse facilities in the interior. 'Appropriations and Salaries' sets May at 110 piasters to the dollar. 'Orphanage Statistics' totals the orphans aided in Turkey, Syria and the Caucasus: 25,770 in the Anatolia area, 21,057 in the Caucasus and 6,250 at Beirut, making 53,077 in orphanages and homes, with 38,255 in soup kitchens, for a grand total of 91,332, described as the minimum figure and a nearest estimate pending returns from Harpoot, Sivas and Beirut.