"Written in 1921 before the great exodus of orphans from Turkey"One-page report titled “Zeitoon Refugees in Marash,” signed by Anna McIntyre, describing the Turkish Army’s escort of Zeitoon refugees into Marash in the last week of June 1921 and their subsequent forced re-deportation. After registration outside the city and emergency hospital admissions at the Bedvelli Abraham Hospital, civil governor Saladdin Bey arranged housing in the seminary compound and rations through the Army; but when Saladdin Bey left with the troops in July, the mutessarif ordered the refugees deported despite American protests, and the Zeitoonars were marched out at dawn on August 26, 1921. Saladdin Bey’s contradictory order forbidding deportation arrived too late, but McIntyre reports that nine hospital patients and forty women, infants, and cripples were saved, and that about 25 orphan boys and one girl who had escaped were eventually gathered into NER orphanages. The remaining Zeitoonar families and roughly 150 boys from the Ebenezer and Acoreme orphanages were housed in the seminary compound’s wool-department building (where Dr. Vartan and several families also lived) and the seminary’s industrial rooms, with the College’s gymnasium offered as an additional dormitory.
