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Stamboul workshops employ 800 women. NER Weekly, 26 Mar 1921.
Location
Constantinople (Istanbul), Turkey
Year
1921
Item Detail
James H. Crutcher's workshops in Stamboul occupied the old Riza Pasha School, down a lane from the Dette Publique, where refugee women combed wool, wove cloth for the sails of fishing boats from thread brought from Malta, made silk curtains for an American household in the city, and worked fillet lace, with a room of grandmothers on the top floor. Eight hundred more women took piecework home. The Acorne Shop on the Grand Rue de Pera had closed after a clearance sale. Six thousand five hundred Greek refugees fleeing Batoum lay in Constantinople harbor aboard the Kios and the Panyatis, bound for Salonica, where more than 60,000 were already gathered.
Context
The Near East Relief Weekly Bulletin was a four-page weekly printed in Constantinople for the organization's own staff. It continued The Acorne, the bulletin of the American Committee for Relief in the Near East, and took the new title with Vol. II, No. 42 on 23 October 1920, when the organization itself was renamed Near East Relief.
Because it was written for people already in the field and not for donors at home, the Weekly is plainer than anything Near East Relief printed in America. Station reports give the numbers (e.g., children fed, beds occupied, pairs of shoes made, tons landed at Batoum) and the personnel notes record who arrived, who transferred, who married and who died.
The run covers the fall of Kars, the landing of Russian refugees in Constantinople in the winter of 1920, the famine in Armenia through 1921 and 1922, and the French withdrawal from Cilicia.
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Holding Institution
Columbia University Library
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External Link
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Attribution
Digitized by Columbia University Libraries; available through HathiTrust (Public Domain).
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Rights
No known copyright restrictions. Based on available information, NERHS is not aware of copyright restrictions on this material. Items are presented for non-commercial research and educational use. Users are responsible for determining rights status and compliance with applicable law. If you believe you hold rights in this material or have information about rights holders not currently reflected, please contact [email protected].
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Notes
Masthead: 'Near East Relief. Vol. III. No. 12. 25 Rue Taxim, Pera, Constantinople. March 26, 1921.'
Most of the people described in these pages were survivors of the genocide of the Ottoman Armenians and of the killing and deportation of Greeks and Assyrians in the same years. The bulletin does not use the word "Genocide," which was not coined until 1944. Its writers say "the deportations", "the massacres", or simply "the troubles", and often say nothing at all about how a child came to be an orphan. Where an issue documents the events or their aftermath, the record indicates this in the Subject field. The period's own vocabulary is kept in the original article titles and in quoted phrases.
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Document Contents
James H. Crutcher's industrial plant in the old Riza Pasha School employs refugee women in weaving, sailcloth, silk, fillet lace, embroidery and wool preparation; 800 women take piecework home; Glee L. Hastings describes 6,500 Greek refugees aboard the Kios and Panyatis on their way from Batoum to Salonica, with bread and milk supplied in Constantinople; Bernice J. Everett reports relief distributions, soup kitchens and schools at Broussa; Selene van Liew writes from Batoum about Near East Relief kitchens and families displaced by the Bolshevik advance; boys at the Essayan orphanage form a bucket line and save their building from a neighborhood fire; arrival and personnel notices identify new workers and field assignments.