The enthusiasm stirred up by the return to Cilicia infected the refugees in Port Said as well. The result was that the camp had been almost entirely emptied by the end of 1919. The central board in Cairo accordingly decided to transfer the three hundred fifty children in Port Said’s Sisvan orphanage to Mersin. The orphans arrived by ship in the Cilician port city late in November, accompanied by Levon Asadur, the board’s representative and president of the Armenian Committee for Orphan Relief and Education, and Makruhi Nedurian, director of the Port Said orphanage. The AGBU’s local chapter lodged the children in a big khan in the city. The khan proved rather ill-adapted for use as an orphanage, even if a certain amount of renovation work had been carried out in anticipation of the children’s arrival: it had neither a dining hall nor classrooms and was infested with rats and vermin. But the Union had been unable to find a more suitable building in Mersin and would not be in a position to construct a new orphanage for some time. It therefore weighed plans to send these orphans to Dörtyol.16 Nevertheless, in May 1921, ... Read all
The AGBU's Return to Cilicia
Hmayag Ughurlian, native of Cesarea, supervisor of the AGBU's orphanages in Dörtyol (Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris).
Father Mampre Sirunian, supervisor of the AGBU's Mersin orphanage in 1919 (Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris).