Christopher C. Thurber Letters (1921–1930)

Christopher C. Thurber came to the Near East in 1921 as a worker for Near East Relief. He directed the NER orphanage in Sivas (Sebastia), survived typhus, and helped move thousands of orphaned children from the Anatolian interior to Constantinople (Istanbul) and Greece after the destruction of Smyrna (Izmir) in 1922. At the Selimiye Barracks camp in Scutari (Uskudar), he was beaten on the feet for shielding a refugee and walked with a cane thereafter. From 1924, he directed NER’s work in Greece from Athens, where he oversaw the schooling and resettlement of the orphanage generation until his death from a stroke in May 1930. The Greek government gave him a state funeral and a day of national mourning.

This collection gathers the letters Thurber kept. Most were written to him between 1924 and 1930 by the young people NER had raised — former wards of the Sivas orphanage and other survivors, now resettled across Greece in Athens, Salonica (Thessaloniki), Piraeus, Corinth, and the islands. They write as former orphans to the man many of them called father. They thank him, repay small loans, send birthday wishes, and ask for help with work, clothing, and passage. “I have no other relatives in the world but you,” one writes. Together, the letters trace what became of the orphanage children after the institutions closed, in their own words.

The papers survive among the records of Harold C. Jaquith, a senior NER administrator, and came to the Near East Foundation, NER’s successor, as part of his collection; the originals are held at the Rockefeller Archive Center. Alongside the correspondence, the folder holds related material Thurber or Jaquith kept, among it a memorial to NER chairman John H. Finley and printed accounts of the relief mission.