Harpout boys load their belongings to continue their evacuation to Constantinople by sea. Beirut, September 1922.
Location
Beirut, Lebanon
Year
1922
Item Detail
Boys stand along the gunwale of a lighter at the Beirut quay with sacks and bedding heaped in the bow. The children carried their own bundles down from Antilyas, and the bedding was put aboard before the first group of boys reached the port. Behind them are timber sheds, an iron railing, and a group of Near East Relief staff. Nellie Miller stands among them in a white hat. Fifteen hundred Harpout children left Beirut on this day for Constantinople, the last stage of a movement that had begun with an overland march out of Anatolia earlier in the summer.
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. 136: “They had gathered their bedding and belongings into large bundles and were tugging and dragging them from place to place.” P. 137: “[T]hey were already loading the bedding and bundles on to a large lighter.”
