orkshops 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 ragged patched pieces of clothing hanging on the lines. Each house is about ten feet square and has one window, a dirt floor and a roof that is now beginning to leak.”
The village took its name Κουντουριώτικα from that of Admiral Pavlos Koundouriotis, the President of Greece who had granted public land behind the soccer stadium on Alexandras boulevard for the settlement. (See also http://www.mixanitouxronou.gr/pia-ine-afti-i-prosfigiki-gitonia-pou-sinedese-to-onoma-tis-me-ena-thriliko-gipedo-podosferou/)
From Thompson’s account we also learn about the workshop there. She writes:
Won’t you look into the workshop with me? The room, about twenty feet square, has no furnishing except benches. Forty women and girls are there, from eleven years up to any age where the woman has eyes to see. They are embroidering little Greek bags with designs taken from the old pottery of Rhodes, and in another room the cloth is woven by weavers who, in more happy days, wove their own material but never worked for others. Some are weaving beautiful natural silk into just the right width for scarfs, while others are weaving cotton into material for bags and dresses.
The raw silk and natural dies were brought from Kalamata and the silk dyed in Athens to match the colors of Rhodian pots and antique scarves. Lucy Shoe Meritt, who shared an apartment with Priscilla in 1928, reminisced in the obituary she wrote at the time of Priscilla’s death in 1985: “At the time she was running a shop for the Near East Relief… [the] motifs copied from pieces that Priscilla had found in the Greek Islands… Fortunate are those of us who have reproductions of some of these from her shop which was always popular with tourists” (ASCSA Newsletter, Spring 1986, p. 13).
In a second refugee village, another 100 women were working in Pangrati to produce handkerchiefs and “luncheon sets.” 250 women in Lesbos, 100 in Chios, 100 in Samos, 100 in Crete, and 300 in Thessaloniki also filled orders from the AFG.
Efforts by the AFG were soon absorbed by Near East Industries, whi