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By the summer of 1919, the Armenian Genocide and the collapse of the Russian Caucasus had driven tens of thousands of orphaned children toward a handful of overstretched relief stations. Famine was spreading across the region.

Near East Relief consolidated its Armenia operations at Alexandropol — a former Russian Imperial army base of 170 buildings on a rail junction in the Caucasus — and turned it into what staff and the American press came to call the Orphan City. At its peak, the complex held more than twenty-two thousand children.

Waiting for admission to the orphanage at Alexandropol, c. 1920.

A Staggering Need

In a letter published by the New York Times in August 1919, the American Red Cross nurse Blanche Knox — who would later join Near East Relief — reported that refugees in the Caucasus were dying at a rate of two hundred per day. She described one orphanage where seven hundred children were surviving on a pound of bread apiece and a thin soup of oil, water, and rice.

Most NER stations in the Caucasus were inland. Supplies for the region were shipped from the United States to the Black Sea port of Batum (now Batumi, Georgia), then forwarded by rail to Alexandropol, the regional railhead. From there, former Russian Imperial trains carried supplies on to Erivan (now Yerevan), Tabriz, Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia), and Kars for distribution.

Armenian refugee women in the Caucasus, c. 1920.

From Army Base to Orphanage

Alexandropol had served as a key Russian Imperial army garrison in the late nineteenth century. By 1919, its three posts — Kazachi, Seversky, and Polygon — had been standing empty for years. Near East Relief saw the potential in the run-down buildings: consolidating its Armenia operations on the site would let the organization care for far more children than it could in scattered facilities. The Armenian government agreed to lease the base.

The Alexandropol complex comprised 170 buildings in all, including forty two-story barracks that were rapidly converted into dormitories. Each held between 250 and 1,000 children.

Adult refugees built roads between the posts in exchange for a daily ration of corn grits. They turned the remaining buildings into bathhouses, bakeries, garages, hospitals, laundries, and schoolrooms. The Russian Orthodox church at Kazachi Post was reopened for Armenian Apostolic services.

View of the dormitories in winter, c. 1920.

Making a Home

The accommodations were spare. Furnishings ranged from rustic to nonexistent. In some dormitories, four children shared a single bunk bed. In others, there were no beds at all, and the children slept on flour sacks filled with straw.

The children improvised what they needed. Tin salvaged from condensed-milk cans became toy cars and trains. A stick, a scrap of fabric, and a lock of hair became a doll. Advertisements clipped from American magazines went up on the dormitory walls.

Winter exercises at Alexandropol, c. 1922.

A Precarious Existence

When the Turkish army captured Kars in October 1920, the thirty-nine Near East Relief workers in Armenia were urged to evacuate. None of them did. NER’s Caucasus Director, Ernest A. Yarrow, recorded the reasoning: “25,000 orphans in our care would have small chance of survival if we left.”

Turkish troops took Alexandropol in November. The children at the complex were cut off from supply lines, as were the more than two hundred thousand refugees who depended on the Alexandropol rail link for food and fuel.

The children and the staff lived through famine. The Alexandropol staff stretched the food supply by putting everyone on half rations and held the line until the first shipment from Batum reached the city in April 1921. Erivan was evacuated due to a lack of food and fuel. Through it all, the orphanage population kept growing as the war between Armenia, Turkey, and Soviet Russia drove more children into the complex.

Under pressure from the Turkish advance, the Armenian government accepted Soviet rule in December 1920. In January 1921, Soviet officials informed Near East Relief that the organization could continue its work in Soviet Armenia provided it took no political position.

The renewed refugee flow brought a new health emergency. Trachoma was the most pressing problem. By 1920, Alexandropol had 5,000 trachoma cases. Near East Relief converted Seversky Post into a children’s trachoma hospital and reduced the caseload to 3,500 within 2 years.

The Orphan City

The complex was already over capacity when seven thousand more children arrived from the evacuated Kars orphanage. Rather than turn children away, Near East Relief opened additional temporary housing in the town of Alexandropol itself, four miles away. By July 1922, the town and the complex together held thirty-one thousand children, ten orphans for every able-bodied adult man in Alexandropol. The name the staff and the press had used informally was now literal: it was a city of orphans.

Children lined up by age, c. 1922.