Girls from the orphanage train as nurses. Athens, c. 1923.

Item Detail

Near East Relief ran an orphanage, a hospital and refugee relief at Ismid, the ancient Nicomedia at the head of the gulf, and Harry C. Moffett directed the unit there from the spring of 1921 until June 1922. Five of the girls from the orphanage were taking nurses' training in Athens. They had been recovered from Muslim households in Anatolia, and girls reclaimed that way were among the first to be trained for paid work once the orphanages moved to Greece.

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.