New Armenian Neighborhoods in amascus and Alexandretta
The plan to create new urban housing was put into effect in Damascus and Alexandretta as well. In Damascus, thanks to the construction of more than one hundred new houses on lots purchased by the Nansen Office in Bab Sharki in 1929, seven hundred thirty-seven people had, by the end of 1932, left their shanties for homes in this new neighborhood.97 Yet, in 1935, there were still four hundred fifty shacks in the city, occupied by twenty-two hundred refugees.98 In the Alexandretta region, the Nansen Office carried on with the construction of new homes in Alexandretta proper and also in Kirikhan; the houses were erected on land acquired in the late 1920s. The result was that, by 1935, work on sixty-five houses had been completed in the Nor Tagh (“new neighborhood”) district of Kirikhan, and two hundred seventy-five people had moved into them. However, there still remained the three refugee camps opened after the evacuation of Cilicia almost fifteen years earlier: the Dörtyol Camp, Camp Amanus, and Punar ... Read all
The Building of Armenian Neighborhoods in Syria and Lebanon
An Armenian refugee shantytown near Alexandretta (Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris).
Building houses for Armenian refugees in Damascus in 1929 (CADN, Nantes).