Small boys stand at attention in the yard. Jibail, 1922.
Location
Jebail (Byblos), Lebanon
Year
1922
Item Detail
Near East Relief bought an old silk factory on the shore at Jibail, below the Crusaders' Castle. The smallest boys stand in a long line along the compound wall, most of them barefoot, and a man in a suit waits at the head of it. Near East Relief housed nearly 600 Armenian boys from Aintab there.
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.
Bayard Dodge Photograph Albums, Volume IV, American University of Beirut, Archives and Special Collections; digital surrogate by the Near East Foundation.
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