Orphan boys study in a crowded schoolroom. Miamia, 1922.

Item Detail

Miamia was a village about four kilometers east of Sidon, in the hills above the city, where the American mission ran an educational and orphan-care campus before Near East Relief arrived. Beulah Home was the mission orphanage and Ramapo Hall its high school. Near East Relief took over both in 1921 and 1922 and added Ford Hall, workshops, a director's house, an infirmary, and dormitory space to house children displaced by genocide and war farther north. The school ran in one large hall, with the boys packed at rows of iron-framed desks.

Context

Bayard Dodge (1888–1972) taught at the Syrian Protestant College, later the American University of Beirut, and was its president from 1923 to 1948. The son of Near East Relief's treasurer, he helped build the network of orphanages that received Armenian children moved south out of Anatolia, and in April 1921 he secured French assurances that 1,000 children from Marash and 700 from Urfa could enter Syria.

The album records that movement and its aftermath through 1921 and 1922: the refugee camp at Alexandretta, the convoys out of Marash, the sailing of 1,500 Harpout orphans to Constantinople in September 1922, and the orphanages at Aleppo, Antilyas, Jebail, Nahr Ibrahim, Sidon, Miamia, Ghazir and Shemlan. A December 1922 count puts some 10,740 children in the Beirut-area institutions. Most were survivors of the Armenian Genocide.