Lighters unload at the relief supply base. Derindje, 1921–22.

Item Detail

Derindje, on the Gulf of Ismid, was Near East Relief's supply base from 1919 until it closed in June 1922. Everything the organization moved into Anatolia and the Caucasus came across this quay, and Moffett's unit at Ismid drew its stores from it. When Derindje closed the base moved to a warehouse on the Bosphorus at Constantinople.

Context

Harry Clement Moffett (1879–1950) served with Near East Relief from February 1921 to May 1924, after serving with the YMCA in France and Poland. In spring 1921, NER made him director of its unit at Ismid (Izmit), where he stayed through the Greek army's withdrawal that June. In June 1922 he moved 270 orphan girls from Ismid to Constantinople (Istanbul). From August, he ran the orphanage work at Sivas, and that winter he sent its children by wagon convoy over the mountains to Samsoun (Samsun), a twelve-day journey on which, he wrote, many died. In 1923, he escorted orphans and refugees to Greece, once aboard a transport on which typhus and smallpox broke out.

The collection holds the first 114 photographs and postcards shared by the Little Traverse Museum in Petoskey, Michigan, where Moffett later lived. Most carry his own captions on the back. They show the Ismid orphanage and hospital, Armenian girls whom NER recovered from Arab households after the Armenian Genocide, the Sivas convoys, and children NER housed at Athens, Syra (Syros), and Edipsos (Aidipsos). Smaller groups cover his YMCA years and a 1924 visit to Jerusalem.