Armenpress – Many Armenians managed to survive the Genocide due to the selfless performance of foreign missionaries from different countries. Learning about the atrocities committed against the Armenian people, they jeopardized their lives to save Armenians.
Karen Jeppe helped the Armenian nation to recuperate during the Hamidian massacres of 1895 and the period following it. She was born in 1876 in Denmark and was studying medicine during the Hamidian massacres. Learning about the slaughter, she abandoned her education and decided to partake in American and European missionary work. She started a correspondence with Johannes Lepsius and Miss Shatik from the U.S. Karen reached Urfa in 1903 and was 27 years old when she was entrusted with 300 orphans’ care and upbringing.
Jeppe learned Armenian shortly afterwards and won everyone’s love and respect. People started to call her “Miss Eppe mother.”
In 1915 she was in Urfa and did her best to help the Armenian refugees. In 1917 she was obliged to go back to Denmark due to severe illness, but started to deliver lectures and articles on the Armenian Genocide after recovering. Spending three years in Denmark, Jeppe decided to return to Syria to help Armenians there. She was appointed Aleppo director of the Commission for the Protection of Women and Children in the Near East, under the auspices of the League of Nations and was engaged in accommodating the refugees.
Jeppe died in 1934. Being of Danish descent, she lived her whole life and died as an Armenian Christian. The funeral and burial ceremony took place in the Armenian church. Her tomb is at Aleppo Armenian National Cemetery.
The first-established Armenian higher educational college in Aleppo (opened in 1946) is named after Karen Jeppe.
Estonian Anna Hedvig Buhl was among the missionaries helping Armenians during the Genocide. She was born in 1887 in Haapsalu, Estonia. Being from a well-off family, she received good education and spoke Estonian, Russian, French, English, German, and learnt Turkish and Armenian during her missionary work in Cilicia.
Bull arrived to Cilicia in 1911 and started to work in Beitel orphanage as a teacher. After working here for 4 years, she witnessed massacres of Armenians committed by the Young Turks.
In 1918 she managed to save the orphans from exile, but had to depart for Estonia in 1919, but not permanently.
In 1921, Bühl was sent by the newly founded Action Chrétienne en Orient to Aleppo, Syria, where she established a refugee camp for the survivors of the Armenian Genocide. She also founded weaving and handicraft workshops, with 500 Armenian women and girls working there.
Bull was dearly loved by Aleppo Armenian community. She dedicated 40 years of her life to the salvation of Armenians and left Aleppo aged 64, without having built her own family. In 1965 Bull attended the 50th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in Aleppo and Beirut. Mother Buhl, as she was known among her Armenian orphans, died on October 3, 1981, aged 94.
