to a variety of refugee relief efforts such as the ARC, the American Women’s Hospital Organization, Near East Relief, the YMCA, and the Athens American Relief Committee” (Daleziou 2013, p. 58). In addition to relief work, Edward Capps, the Chair of the School’s Managing Committee and a professor of Classics at Princeton University, was asked by Greece’s former prime-minister Eleftherios Venizelos to raise awareness in America of what was happening in Greece. Without wasting time, Capps, who knew Venizelos personally from his days as U.S. Minister to Greece (1920-1921), founded The American Friends of Greece (AFG), the broader mission of which was “to promote friendly relations between Greece and the U.S.” (The AFG later published booklets in support of Greece during World War II and a monthly newsletter, “The Philhellene,” which circulated from 1942-1950.)
Incorporation of the AFG on October 15, 1923 marked the start of Priscilla Capps’s involvement in refugee affairs, a much less well-known story than her father’s. Priscilla Capps (1900-1985), a graduate of Smith College, had assisted her father in Athens during his service as Minister, while she was a student at the ASCSA, as a kind of “first daughter.”
Priscilla’s role in confronting the crisis is documented in the archives of Near East Industries (a subsidiary of Near East Relief). She was associated with Near East Relief from 1923 and became the Overseas Director of Near East Industries in 1925. Near East Industries was represented in America by Rose Ewald, who marketed refugee craft goods from the organization’s flagship store at 151 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. They were sold by other merchants on commission, in Christmas sales, and in summer sales on Cape Cod. Capps made frequent promotional trips to New York, and she and Ewald eventually built a business that, at the dawn of WW II, employed 350 women.
James Barton’s The Story of Near East Relief: 1915-1930 (1930) notes that “the general theory of helping women work evolved into the Near East Industries … Workshops were operated in three refugee centers, Athens, Beirut and Constantinople, under the supervision of Miss Priscilla Capps, Miss Dorothy Francis and Miss Sarah Ravndal.”
In Athens itself products of Near East Industries were first offered to tourists from Priscilla’s shop at 48 Amalias Street across from the Arch of Hadrian, and, after 1931, at 2 Amalias, near Syntagma (Constitution) Square. Independent tourist shops also took goods on commission.
Priscilla built Near East Industries on foundations established by the AFG. And we know how this happened because we have a vivid account of the experimental launch in 1924 of the program of refugee craft production that blossomed in 1925 and became Near Eastern Industries, thanks to Gladys Slade Thompson, wife of W. Stuart Thompson, architect of the Gennadius Library of the ASCSA. Her pamphlet titled Refugee Workshops in Greece: A 1924 Experiment Becomes a 1925 Fact (Washington, D.C.: American Friends of Greece, Inc.) is scarce and deserves to be much better known.
According to Thompson, refugee workshops in two communities of Athens were already producing crafts for the AFG by 1925. She begins:
“When the great invasion of refugees came in 1922, they had no place to go. Some slept in boxes, others on street corners, or the gutter, still others in enormous concentration camps that so reeked with vile smells and fifth that they were dangerous to visit. Today the worst of these pest holes are gone, and some of the refugees who were herded there are now living in the new villages which are growing up around the city of Athens.”
Thompson then turns to the “Kountouriotis Camp” —300 one-room houses in Ambelokipi, built with funds from Greeks in America. She describes conditions:
“About thirty of these houses run along in a row with one roof. They look like little bathing houses with all the bareness of the seashore but none of the beauty of the sea. Short clothes-lines run crosswise down the narrow dirt road, and we are oblique to duck our heads to avoid the many ragge