The Lions Of Marash

The Lions of Marash is an eye-witness account by an American Near East Relief official of the tragic events which resulted in the annihilation of the Armenian population of Marash, in Central Anatolia, following World War I. On 10 February 1920, the French garrison at Marash withdrew abruptly under cover of darkness, thus abandoning more than twenty thousand Armenians to the Turkish Nationalist forces. The French pullout caused considerable embarrassment in Paris and roused a storm of angry protest in England and the United States, but for the Armenians of Marash, and all of Cilicia, it led to renewed massacre and to final exodus. American philanthropy administered through Near East Relief, successor organization to the American Committee for Relief in the Near East, saved thousands of starving Armenian women and children from Turkish marauders. Workshops and other rehabilitative establishments built by ACRNE and NER slightly mitigated the bitter disappointments arising from the American refusal to ensure the Armenian people a collective future by accepting a protective mandate over the independent Armenian state that had been sanctioned by the Paris Peace Conference. In Cilicia NER worked among the repatriates for four years and, after the total Armenian exodus in 1922, attempted to assist the refugee throngs to resettle in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and other lands of the Middle East. Among the scores of men and women who responded to the ACRNE call for volunteers in 1919 was Stanley E. Kerr, then an officer in the United States Army Sanitary Corps. First serving at Aleppo in a multiplicity of positions, including clinical biochemist, and photographer, Kerr transferred in the autumn of 1919 to Marash, where he took charge of American relief operations after the French withdrawal. In view of the fact that many Turks regarded the Americans as collaborators with the French and Armenians, it was at no small risk that Kerr and his courageous colleagues stayed at their posts to help the thousands of Armenians whom the French had deserted. Indeed, the uncertainties of a hostage-like existence did not end until Kerr departed for Beirut with the last caravan of Armenian orphans in 1922. Now, fifty years after leaving Cilicia, Dr. Kerr presents his account of the happenings of Marash. Although his personal experiences form the basis for narrative, the author has also utilized the studies and memoirs of French officers, and priests, Turkish military historians, and Armenian survivors, particularly prominent Protestant and Catholic spokesmen.

“[A] gripping, and at times unsettling, history of . . . the Zeytun Gospels, a lavishly illuminated Armenian book that miraculously survived centuries of war.” —The Wall Street Journal In 2010, the world’s wealthiest art institution, the J. Paul Getty Museum, found itself confronted by a century-old genocide. The Armenian Church was suing for the return of eight pages from the Zeytun Gospels, a manuscript illuminated by the greatest medieval Armenian artist, Toros Roslin. Protected for centuries in a remote church, the holy manuscript had followed the waves of displaced people exterminated during the Armenian genocide. Passed from hand to hand, caught in the confusion and brutality of the First World War, it was cleaved in two. Decades later, the manuscript found its way to the Republic of Armenia, while its missing eight pages came to the Getty. This is the biography of a manuscript that is at once art, sacred object, and cultural heritage. Its tale mirrors the story of its scattered community as Armenians have struggled to redefine themselves after genocide and in the absence of a homeland. Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh follows in the manuscript’s footsteps through seven centuries, from medieval Armenia to the killing fields of 1915 Anatolia, the refugee camps of Aleppo, Ellis Island, and Soviet Armenia, and ultimately to a Los Angeles courtroom. Reconstructing the path of the pages, Watenpaugh uncovers the rich tapestry of an extraordinary artwork and the people touched by it. At once a story of genocide and survival, of unimaginable loss and resilience, The Missing Pages captures the human costs of war and persuasively makes the case for a human right to art. “A well-told tale of the history of the Armenian people [and] a wondrous and terrifically engrossing journey of this sacred religious object and priceless work of art.”—Michael Bazyler, author of Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America’s Courts

Lion images are everywhere. In literature, in religion, in statues, emblems and heraldry. Symbols of them are found in all larger European cities -- particularly London. Many are also in Vancouver, British Columbia. A lion image is visually stimulating and should become part of our life.

Bread from Stones, a highly anticipated book from historian Keith David Watenpaugh, breaks new ground in analyzing the theory and practice of modern humanitarianism. Genocide and mass violence, human trafficking, and the forced displacement of millions in the early twentieth century Eastern Mediterranean form the background for this exploration of humanitarianism’s role in the history of human rights. Watenpaugh’s unique and provocative examination of humanitarian thought and action from a non-Western perspective goes beyond canonical descriptions of relief work and development projects. Employing a wide range of source materials—literary and artistic responses to violence, memoirs, and first-person accounts from victims, perpetrators, relief workers, and diplomats—Watenpaugh argues that the international answer to the inhumanity of World War I in the Middle East laid the foundation for modern humanitarianism and the specific ways humanitarian groups and international organizations help victims of war, care for trafficked children, and aid refugees. Bread from Stones is required reading for those interested in humanitarianism and its ideological, institutional, and legal origins, as well as the evolution of the movement following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the advent of late colonialism in the Middle East.

From 1894 to 1924 three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities. Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi’s impeccably researched account is the first to show that the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population and create a pure Muslim nation.

Drawing on previously untapped sources, Robert Shenk offers a revealing portrait of America’s small Black Sea fleet in the years following World War I. In a high-tempo series of operations throughout the Black and Aegean Seas and the eastern Mediterranean, this small force of destroyers and other naval vessels responded ably to several major international crises. Home-ported in Constantinople, U.S. Navy ships helped evacuate some 150,000 White Russians during the last days of the Russian Revolution; coordinated the visits of the Hoover grain ships to ports in southern Russia where millions were suffering a horrendous famine; reported on the terrible death marches endured by the Greeks of the Pontus region of Turkey; and conducted the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Greek and Armenian refugees from burning Smyrna, the cataclysmic conclusion of the Turkish Nationalist Revolution. After Smyrna, the destroyers escorted Greek steamers in their rescue of ethnic Christian civilians being expelled from all the ports of Anatolian Turkey. Shenk’s incisive depiction of Adm. Mark Bristol as both head of U.S. naval forces and America’s chief diplomat in the region helps to make this book the first-ever comprehensive account of a vital but little-known naval undertaking.

For almost nine decades, since their mass-resettlement to the Levant in the wake of the Genocide and First World War, the Armenian communities of Lebanon and Syria appear to have successfully maintained a distinct identity as an ethno-culturally diverse group, in spite of representing a small non-Arab and Christian minority within a very different, mostly Arab and Muslim environment. The author shows that, while in Lebanon the state has facilitated the development of an extensive and effective system of Armenian ethno-cultural preservation, in Syria the emergence of centralizing, authoritarian regimes in the 1950s and 1960s has severely damaged the autonomy and cultural diversity of the Armenian community. Since 1970, the coming to power of the Asad family has contributed to a partial recovery of Armenian ethno-cultural diversity, as the community seems to have developed some form of tacit arrangement with the regime. In Lebanon, on the other hand, the Armenian community suffered the consequences of the recurrent breakdown of the consociational arrangement that regulates public life. In both cases the survival of Armenian cultural distinctiveness seems to be connected, rather incidentally, with the continuing ‘search for legitimacy’ of the state.

Following the devastation resulting from the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire beginning in 1915, the survivors of the massacres were dispersed across the Middle East, Europe and North and South America. Not content with watching World War I silently from the sidelines, a large number of Armenian volunteers joined the Legion d'Orient. They were trained in Cyprus and fought courageously in Palestine and Cilicia alongside Allied commander General Allenby, eventually playing a crucial role in defeating German and Ottoman forces in Palestine at the Battle of Arara in September 1918. The Armenian Legionnaires signed up on the understanding that they would be fighting in Syria and Turkey, and, should the Allies be successful, they would be part of an occupying army in their old homelands, laying the foundation for a self-governing Armenian state. Susan Paul Pattie describes the motivations and dreams of the Armenian Legionnaires and their ultimate betrayal as the French and the British shifted priorities, leaving their ancestral Armenian homelands to the emerging Republic of Turkey. Complete with eyewitness accounts, letters and photographs, this book provides an insight into relations between the Great Powers through the lens of a small, vulnerable people caught in a war that was not their own, but which had already destroyed their known world.