Dispatches
Orphanages & Field Sites
Places where Near East Relief cared for children, refugees, and displaced communities.
Syra: The Island Orphanage
In the summer of 1923, several thousand Armenian and Greek orphans stepped off boats onto the dock at Syra, a small island in the Cyclades. They would spend the next year living in tents, digging wells, and helping to build...
Constantinople, Part 4: Saving the Children
By the summer of 1922, Near East Relief was supporting approximately 10,000 orphaned children across more than twenty institutions in Constantinople. They were Jewish, Greek, and Armenian. They lived in former palaces, rented buildings, and on the Princes’ Islands. NER...
Constantinople, Part 3: Saving Lives at Selimieh
On the Asian shore of the Bosphorus stood the Selimieh Barracks, an Ottoman army facility dating to the late eighteenth century. By the summer of 1922, it held more than 9,000 refugees. Christopher Thurber, a NER relief worker newly arrived...
Constantinople, Part 2: Refugees in Peril
Near East Relief is best remembered for its orphanages, and the photographic record from those institutions has shaped institutional memory ever since. The Constantinople of the early 1920s tells a wider story. By 1921, the organization was running soup kitchens,...
Constantinople: Queen of Cities
At the start of the twentieth century, Constantinople sat at the meeting point of Europe and Asia, capital of an empire that had governed parts of three continents for six centuries. Armenians, Greeks, Sephardic Jews, and Levantine Christians lived in...
Athens: Henry Morgenthau & the Refugee Commission
In late 1923, the League of Nations appointed Henry Morgenthau chairman of the Greek Refugee Settlement Commission. Morgenthau had served as U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916; his cables to Washington had become some of the...
Athens: Strangers in a Strange Land
Follows NER’s work in Athens as a reception and transit hub for Asia Minor refugees, linking camp life, housing, and services to the wider Greek refugee crisis.
Near East Relief in Aleppo
In 1915, the Ottoman government deported hundreds of thousands of Armenians from Anatolia toward the Syrian desert. Aleppo, an ancient trading city on the route, became a way station and, for tens of thousands, a destination. Three waves of refugees...
Alexandropol: Making the “Orphan City”
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...