New Armenian Neighborhoods in Beirut
In Beirut, from 1930 on, the Nansen Office concentrated its energies on a stretch of land located in an area on the right bank of the Nahr Beirut known as Bourdj Hammoud. The land was all but uninhabited and covered with fruit trees, shrubs, and marshes. Burnier, one of the moving spirits behind this gigantic project, and a trusted colleague of the French High Commissioner’s, made no bones about the political objectives being pursued by way of this plan in his talks with Armenian leaders. The League of Nations’ representative planned to construct an Armenian city of eighteen thousand to twenty thousand inhabitants there, three thousand of whom would be non-Armenian; it would have its own municipal government, which would of course be staffed by Armenians.70 From the High Commissioner’s standpoint, the Bourdj Hammoud project had a twofold advantage: it would allow the High Commission to eliminate Beirut’s refugee camps for good and all, while also making it possible to fabricate, on the threshold of the Lebanese capital, a new voting district whose voters would be in the ... Read all
The Building of Armenian Neighborhoods in Syria and Lebanon
The Beirut refugee camp in the 1920s, before its inhabitants were resettled in new urban neighborhoods
(Coll. Michel Paboudjian).
The first houses being built in Bourdj Hammoud's Nor Marash neighborhood
(Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris).
Building Nor Marash's church (the primary school can be seen in the background)
(Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris).
Nor Marash's church
(Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris).