Credit for the first such urban-housing initiative goes to the Marash compatriotic association, which bought a 32-acre (150,000-pic) tract of land in 1929 and set out to construct a neighborhood baptized “Nor Marash” in Bourdj Hammoud.75 In the following years, several thousand Armenians who had originally found refuge in Beirut’s Big Camp, most of them from Marash, Zeytun, and Findijak, moved into this new neighborhood.76 It goes without saying that these refugee groups’ desire to rebuild their lives, and their wish to leave the camps behind them, were determinant factors in the realization of this project. In an outpouring of solidarity and mutual self-help, these refugees managed to bring together 800,000 francs to buy the land on which Nor Marash was built. This endeavor had the support of the Nansen Office and was also encouraged by Burnier, who contributed 400,000 francs to the fund toward the purchase of land and construction of homes, on the understanding that the money would be reimbursed by the new neighborhood’s residents over the following years.77 By 1935, around eight hundred houses had been built in Nor Marash. Four thousand people now lived there, two-thirds of them home-owners. The Nansen Office had supplied the cement and iron needed to build six hundred of these new homes.78
Also in 1930, the Armenians began work on... Read all
The Building of Armenian Neighborhoods in Syria and Lebanon
Aerial view of the camps in Beirut. The broad field in the southwest was the site of the “Big Camp,” destroyed by the 1933 fire. The three camps of Yozgat, Karantina-Amanus, and Maslakh form a horizontal line to the north (Coll. Archives Bibl. Nubar/Paris).