At the Crossroads of Der Zor
Death, Survival, and Humanitarian Resistance in Aleppo, 1915-1917

The humanitarian assistance of foreigners saved tens of thousands of Armenians from death in the Armenian Genocide of 1915. These efforts have been well documented. But the role of the Armenians themselves in the relief work has received scant attention. This study argues that Armenians initiated and organized relief efforts as an active form of resistance against the Genocide. It focuses on one crucial location, Aleppo, where caravans of survivors converged, and on one extraordinary individual, the Reverend Hovhannes Eskijian. Reverend Eskijian identified the survival of Armenian orphans—along with the few remaining teachers, physicians, and other intellectuals—as the only way to enable the reemergence of an Armenian community after the Genocide. Thus, the fight for the survival of orphaned children became a main axiom of combating the Ottoman government’s genocidal logic. The success of the ""humanitarian resistance"" depended not on the total number of survivors, but on the number of young Armenians who could avoid death or forced assimilation and form new Armenian families. At the Crossroads of Der Zor is based on a solid array of English, German, Armenian, and Turkish sources.