Serie

Maria Småberg, Svante Lundgren
Three Scandinavian missionary women and the Armenian Genocide
Lund University Press
2026 | 320 s. | engelska,

ISBN: 9789198994162, 9789198994179

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of Scandinavian women enrolled as missionaries to spread the Christian message and work in healthcare and education. This undertaking often became a lifelong commitment under harsh circumstances. Bodil Biørn (1871–1960) from Norway, Alma Johansson (1881–1974) from Sweden and Maria Jacobsen (1882–1960) from Denmark witnessed the 1915 Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire. At this time, they were working as nurses and in Armenian orphanages in the eastern part of Anatolia (today’s Turkey), the area most drastically affected by the violence and persecutions against the Christian minorities. Like many foreign missionaries and diplomats, Johansson, Biørn and Jacobsen were caught in the middle of the violence and were then compelled to evolve different skills and take on wider tasks than those for which they had been trained. In so doing, they became part of a transnational humanitarian network that worked with Armenian refugees in the Middle East. The relief work among these Armenians has been called the first humanitarian intervention in modern times.