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Drawn in An Aremenian Refugee Camp
A remarkable survivor of early Western Armenian diaspora culture, this large-format hand-drawn wall map was produced in 1922 within the Armenian refugee camp at Nahr Omar, near Basra, Iraq. Executed in ink and watercolor on cloth, the map visually defines an aspirational Armenian homeland and surrounding regions as remembered and taught by displaced survivors of the genocide.
The title block links it to a Sanasarian School alumnus, Andreas Aleksanyan, identified as a villager from Kharakonis, near Van. Unfortunately, we are unable to confirm that this is the author of the map or anything about this individual.
Its production context is unmistakable. Following the collapse of the Armenian presence in Van (1918) and Cilicia (1921), tens of thousands of Western-Armenians were evacuated south by British forces and concentrated in refugee camps at Baqubah and Nahr Omar. At its height, Nahr Omar housed more than 40,000 Armenians. Within this camp network, educated survivors (especially graduates of the now-defunct Sanasarian School at Erzurum) established schools, libraries, and print workshops to preserve cultural knowledge. The scale and material of the map reflect its intended use for classroom cultural instruction.
Geographically, the map spans Asia Minor, the Caucasus, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. It uses Armenian toponyms alongside stylized features such as a panorama of Etchmiadzin and a portrait frieze of ancient Armenian kings.
This map belongs to the same small corpus of refugee-era classroom maps produced by the Van-born teacher-cartographer Mardiros Kheranian. His best-known work, a five-by-eight-foot linen map of “Historic Armenia” now preserved in the Hairenik building in Watertown, Massachusetts, was likewise drafted in 1922, displays an almost identical palette of hand-applied washes, and carries the same Western Armenian script style. Contemporary testimony and later family research record at least three further examples in the Kheranian oeuvre: a large cloth map delineating President Wilson’s proposed Armenian frontier, a diagram of the 1915 defense of Van held by the National Museum of Armenia, and a 1926 update prepared after Kheranian’s move to Tabriz. The consistent materials, calligraphy, and emphasis on pre-genocide place-names link the present Basra map to those productions, situating it within the same movement.
Rarity
As a record of Armenian intellectual life in displacement, this map is exceptionally rare. It visualizes not only an erased homeland but also the efforts of a stateless community to pass on historical and geographical knowledge while in transit. It stands among the earliest surviving large-scale Armenian maps executed entirely in exile and offers a rare window into the pedagogical and cultural resilience of a people remaking itself beyond the borders of empire.
