Children pack a lighter at the quayside. Beirut, September 1922.
Location
Beirut, Lebanon
Year
1922
Item Detail
Fifteen hundred children from Harpout left Beirut for Constantinople on September 15, 1922, aboard a chartered steamer. They reached the port that morning from the camp at Antilyas, roughly seven miles up the coast. The harbor had no berth deep enough for ocean shipping, so each load went out by lighter to the steamer anchored off the pier, and a second lighter was filled as soon as the first pulled away. Men in tarbooshes and Europeans in summer hats stand on the quay above them, among them the Near East Relief staff running the movement.
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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Covered by the album card at BD-V04-219: “Sept - 15, 1922. moving 1,500 Harpout orphans to Constantinople by S.S. ‘Marie Louise.’” Handwritten on the print: “Marie Louise.”
Nellie Miller Mann, p. 137: “the lighter was piled up with teachers and children on top of the bedding... Before we left the second lighter was loaded in about three shakes.”
