Danish Missionaries in Kharpert Province: A Brief Introduction

Matthias Bjørnlund, October 2015

In 1900, the Danish Evangelical organization, Women Missionary Workers (Kvindelige Missions Arbejdere, henceforth KMA), was founded in Copenhagen under the motto “Women Working for Women”.

The organization was mainly inspired by the founding of the Swedish KMA (1894), by modern Danish revivalist movements such as Inner Mission (Indre Mission) and by the so-called Protestant International – a millenialist movement that aspired to bring the Gospel and enlightenment to the world. They were also very much affected by the news of the 1890’s Abdülhamid II massacres in the Ottoman Empire, which had a profound impact on significant sections of the Danish public – in fact, the massacres served as the main impetus that transformed the Danish KMA from a Bible study group to an effective missionary NGO with worldwide ambitions within a few years. Thus, while the Danish KMA would also send missionaries to India, North Africa, the Danish West Indies (from 1917: the Virgin Islands) and China for example, Armenia was the first mission field, and Armenians would remain the most important focus of the organization until it was dissolved in 1981.

In the beginning, the Danish KMA mainly concentrated on raising awareness of the plight of the Ottoman Armenians in the wake of the massacres, while also sponsoring orphaned Armenian children in American and German care, in places like Bitlis, Van, Mush, Kharpert (Harput) and Constantinople (Istanbul).

Soon, however, the women of the organization decided that they wanted missionaries and an orphanage of their own. In November 1902, the KMA therefore established the orphanage Emaus in Mezreh/Mezire/Mamouret-ul-Aziz (present-day Elazig), in the Kharpert/Mamouret-ul-Aziz province, where they already had good connections with German and American colleagues, and where safety and infrastructure were deemed to be relatively sufficient. Emaus was mainly a Danish-run institution, but, initially at least, it was sometimes referred to as “the Scandinavian orphanage,” since it received financial support from Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish KMA’s, and one of the early key staff members was the Swedish missionary Alma Johansson.

The first Danish KMA missionary in the Kharpert province was Christa Hammer, who was a trained head nurse. She arrived in the late summer of 1901, at first to assist the German missionary organization Deutsche Hülfsbund (DH) and to learn the necessary languages. But her main task became establishing Emaus with Alma Johansson and the Danish missionary Christiane Black. They initially started the orphanage with 15 orphaned Armenian children. This was a troublesome task at times. In November 1902, for instance, few days after the official opening of Emaus, Christa Hammer received death threats from local Turks. At the same time, the vali (governor general) of the province, who at first had been rather cooperative, all of a sudden proclaimed that he wanted to remove the Armenian children from the home, as they were considered Ottoman property.

After some intense lobbying and with a little help from local German missionaries and diplomats, this first major crisis was averted, but soon things were about to get worse. Hammer died of typhoid fever in Mezreh after two years and lies buried somewhere in or around modern-day Elazig, while Johansson and Black both got seriously ill and had to return home, but the Danish KMA and the organization’s Armenia Committee were not discouraged. They kept sending new field workers to the province and beyond, all of whom were graduates from the KMA mission school in Copenhagen, established in 1902.

Among the Danish KMA missionaries to follow were Wilhelmine Grünhagen and her daughter Sigrid. They went to work at Emaus, until Sigrid got married to a German colleague named Storck in 1910 and settled in Marash, while Wilhelmine returned to Denmark around the same time. When Wilhelmine was almost 60 years old, she returned to the Ottoman Empire to continue working among surviving Armenians after the genocide and the armistice, first at an orphanage in Scutari (Üsküdar), close to Constantinople, and later in Greece. In the Mamouret-ul-Aziz province, there were also Danish KMA field workers before the genocide, including Hansine Marcher, who became leader of the DH girl school in Mezreh; Jenny Jensen, who became leader of the DH orphanage Elim right next to Emaus after arriving in the Kharpert province in 1905 with the Norwegian KMA missionary Bodil Biørn; Maria Jacobsen, who mainly worked as a head nurse for American Board (ABCFM) in Mezreh and Kharpert from 1907; Karen Marie Petersen, who arrived in 1909 and ended up replacing Wilhelmine Grünhagen as the leader of Emaus; and Jensine Ørtz (Jensine Oerts Peters), who worked with the German missionary organization Christoffel Blindenmission in Malatya after a brief stint in Mezreh.

Several of these Danish missionaries – Maria Jacobsen, Karen Marie Petersen, Hansine Marcher, and Jenny Jensen – witnessed the 1915 Armenian genocide, recorded important testimonies about the atrocities and saved literally thousands of lives – especially Petersen at Emaus and Jacobsen at the American Board facilities. Most of these missionaries continued working for the KMA, or for other organizations like the Danish Friends of Armenians (Danske Armeniervenner, DA – the Danish relief worker and teacher Karen Jeppe’s organization) and the Industrial Mission (Industrimissionen, IM); they continued working among genocide survivors in Syria, Lebanon, and Greece.

In 1917, Karen Marie Petersen, Danish KMA-missionary, teacher, and director of the Danish orphanage Emaus, painted this panoramic view of Mezreh, the Golden Plains of Kharpert, Lake Dzovk (Hazar Gölü/Gölcük, a major massacre site in 1915) in the background, etc. This was a time when she was basically under siege at Emaus, where she sheltered 121 survivors, some of them illegally. At the time she also worked with several local Kurds to smuggle Armenians to relative safety in Dersim and sometimes beyond.

In her diaries Petersen writes about the massive stress from the beginning of the genocide in 1915 to early 1919, when she and Maria Jacobsen were finally relieved by American colleagues and friends. The stress and fear at Emaus was about as bad as it could be here in 1917, when the Americans left the Ottoman Empire, leaving Petersen and Jacobsen pretty much alone with the heavy responsibility of caring for Armenian survivors in Mezreh and Kharpert.

There were many other severe causes for stress at Emaus and beyond: the neighboring German Elim orphanage, led by Danish KMA's Jenny Jensen, had been emptied and the c. 200 children had been murdered; there was death and mourning everywhere - Petersen was one of the Westerners who tried in vain to get permission to leave on the death marches with her people in 1915, she desribes that very vividly in her diaries, including how she lost the will to live for a while; every time Petersen went to the market to buy supplies, she received threats that Emaus would be next; she had little care packages with food and blankets ready for the Armenian women and children at the orphanage if (or, as she often had reason to believe: when) deportation orders arrived or if the gendarmes would simply empty the place without warning; etc.

One can speculate that painting this picture in 1917 during an ongoing genocide was therapeutic for Karen Marie Petersen at Emaus, a way of keeping sane, as well as a tribute to the beautiful landscape that she loved and, perhaps most of all, to all that now was dead or dying: The mighty work of the missionaries, indeed, but more importantly the Armenians, including the famous Fabricatorian brothers and their houses marked on the painting, and with them most traces of an Armenian presence on ancient Armenian lands.

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