Karen Jeppe, “Mother of the Armenians”

The Dane Karen Jeppe, called “the Mother of the Armenians”, devoted 30 years to saving Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. She was born in 1876 in Gylling and was a teacher. In 1902 a lecture on the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896 changed her life. In 1903 she went to Edessa (Urfa), to the orphanage founded by Johannes Lepsius, where she took 350 Armenian orphans into her care.

In 1915 she hid Armenians in her house; 50 of them were taken out of the city disguised in Kurdish clothing. In 1921 she went to Aleppo, where the League of Nations appointed her Commissioner for the Protection of Women and Girls in the Near East, and she freed Armenian women and children from captivity. In 1927 the King of Denmark awarded her a gold medal. She died in 1935, aged 59, and is buried in the Armenian cemetery of Aleppo.

In the portrait she wears a dark dress with floral embroidery on the chest.