These operations coincided with the departure of many adult orphans for France. On the initiative of the Nansen Office and with the Union’s collaboration, several groups of orphans between fifteen and nineteen years of age were sent to France in 1931 and 1932. These orphans were selected, especially in western Thrace and Macedonia, by local AGBU chapters and A. Kotelnikov, the Nansen Office’s representative in Greece. Most of them had lived in NER orphanages and been briefly employed, after the American orphanages were closed, as farm workers in Drama, Kavalla, Serez or Demir Hisar. After being brought in a group to Athens, they boarded ships for Marseille, where they were handed over to the Committee for the Protection of Immigrant Orphans, a French organization that found young men work on farms or in industries in France. Beginning in the early 1920s, this committee brought some twelve hundred Armenian orphans to the country.25
What of the plan to transfer the refugees in Greece to Syria and Lebanon? Only one group of them ever arrived in either country: a convoy of Armenians from Salonika reached Beirut on 12 January 1932.26 The reason they were not joined by others is that the project to relocate the newcomers in or near Tripoli “without fanfare” was rapidly abandoned.27 Read all
Greece and Armenian Refugees
A list of Armenian applicants for jobs on French farms. All are young men between the ages of 15 and 19 (Coll. Bibl. Nubar/ Paris).
The Nea Smyrni neighborhood in Athens in 1938. The construction of the Armenian neighborhood of Nea Smyrni was mainly financed by the AGBU and the Nansen Office (Coll. Bibl. Nubar/ Paris).
Building Nea Smyrni in 1938. The Gullabi Gulbenkian foundation made a large donation toward the realization of this project (Coll. Archives Bibl. Nubar/ Paris).