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Relief reaches prisoners at Nigdeh. Acorne, 18 Sep 1920.
Location
Constantinople (Istanbul), Turkey
Year
1920
Item Detail
John H. Kingsbury's report from Bardezag describes an orphanage that came through the fighting around Ismid untouched. The villagers began leaving on 31 July until forty people remained, seventeen orphanage boys carried along with them, and shoes sold to the Turkish guard at three lira a pair bought a goodwill that later protected the buildings. At Cesarea the unit obtained permission from Mustafa Kemal to inspect the French prisoner camps at Nigdeh, then issued blankets and mattresses and forwarded the men's home addresses to their families. Harpoot's alphabetical orphanage file turned up two Mullian sisters lost since the deportations, and the family is to meet their three brothers in Michigan.
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 ten issues open Volume II in January 1920 and resume in September and October with the Robert College conference, the Greek-Turkish fighting around Ismid, and the opening of the Kuleli orphanage.
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Holding Institution
Burke Library (Union Theological Seminary)
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Attribution
Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University Libraries; photographs contributed by Shant Mardirossian
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Rights
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Document Contents
'News from Station on the Firing Line', signed John H. Kingsbury, reports the Bardezag orphanage unmolested through the fighting around Ismidt. The flight of the village people began on 31 July and continued through 1 August until only forty people were left in town; the Turks offered guarantees of safety but, there being no honorable record behind the words, the Armenians hurried the faster to Ismidt, seventeen orphanage boys and one teacher swept along with them. Shoes sold to the Turks guarding the village at three lira a pair bought a friendship that stood the orphanage in good stead later. Thirty sick boys went to the newly opened Near East Hospital at Ismidt after the village pharmacist fled. On 19 August, three hundred Greek troops arrived with a British Intelligence officer, Captain Sumpter, who dined at the orphanage; the Greeks were ambushed the next morning, and Sumpter and many Greeks were killed. When three Turks entered the buildings looking for Greeks, Kingsbury told them it was an American orphanage, and they left without trouble. Extracts from Mary L. Kinney's letter confirm that she and her workers are safe at Adabazar, with hundreds of refugees arriving from surrounding villages and the suffering expected to be appalling in winter. A letter from J. H. Boyd in Aintab, dated 4 August, describes the French and Turkish artillery exchange and Armenian neutrality. 'Cesarea N.E.R. Aid French War Prisoners at Nigdeh' reports permission secured from Mustafa Kemal to inspect the camps eighty-six miles south of Cesarea; on 3 August Miss Loughridge, Miss Schaefer, Mr. Martin and Mr. Beach visited, and the unit afterward issued blankets, bed sacks and straw mattresses and forwarded the prisoners' home addresses to their families. Samsoun reports follow: the Greek Orphanage with 318 children on 31 July, a spinning class in which the boys became rivals to see who could spin the finest thread while the girls knitted their wool into stockings, aid to 21 groups of families in the Greek village of Chirakman where all but six had built themselves log houses, and a central soup kitchen serving 1,350 portions in under an hour at just over two and a half piasters a portion, signed George T. Pomeroy. 'Harpoot Orphanage Records Unite Brothers and Sisters' tells of three Armenian boys from Tiflis, the Mullian brothers Khachadour, Gapryell and Haigas, on their way to join their brother Haroutun Mullian in Grand Rapids, Michigan; their sisters Yepring and Markrid, lost since the deportation, were found in the alphabetical file at American Orphanage No. 2, Harpoot, and the family will meet in Michigan for the first time since the deportations. 'Personnel Notes' records nine movements, including Evyln Trostle's return from Mardin, where she had charge of an orphanage and remained with her orphans during the fighting.