In 1921 and 1922 the executive board of Anatolia College was facing a crucial decision. Should the school continue its activities in Turkey, or should they move the school to another country to take up its educational mission? The dilemma was clear: Anatolia College had a history of more than 50 years as a missionary and educational institution since it began its work in 1866 in the town of Merzifon near the Black Sea coast. Anatolia College's history was one of success. It was founded by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the largest and most important of its kind in the US, and it had been able to attract students from among the Armenian and Orthodox population from all over the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, the careers of many of its alumni demonstrated that it offered an education that could lead to top positions. We just need to mention two names. Athanasios Aghnides had a long international career, first in the League of Nations and later in the UN. He also briefly worked in the service of the Greek government. Charilaos Lagoudakis worked both in Greece and the US. Just before the Second World War, he entered government service in the US and worked as an expert on Greek affairs at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) in the State Department. Today, his papers held at the University of Boston are a treasure trove for anyone working on the 1967 military coup d’état in Greece. Other students went on to become prominent business men, educators or professionals in such different places as New York, Beirut, Cairo, London and elsewhere in Europe.
However, the arguments against remaining in Turkey were substantial. During the war, the Young Turks had made the Christian population the target of systematic deportations, and physical annihilation culminating in the Armenian genocide. In 1921 during the Turkish nationalists’ unofficial war against the Greek Orthodox civilian population along the Black Sea coast – the Pontian Greeks – the band of the notorious Topal Osman had made an incursion into Merzifon and killed and violated local Christians in great numbers. Insecurity was not restricted to the local Christians. It was also of the greatest relevance for the educators at Anatolia College. Traditionally, foreign nationals in the Ottoman Empire had been protected by the so-called capitulations which made them immune to Ottoman law, but the abolition of these in September 1914 left foreign nationals, including resident Americans, unprotected.
After the agreement of compulsory population exchangess between Greece and Turkey in 1923 at the Lausanne Conference, there were few Eastern Christians left to educate and convert. In was against this backdrop and with the perspective that the new Turkish national government had no intention of granting foreigners extra-territoriality that it was finally decided to leave Turkey. The choice of relocation fell on Thessaloniki. In the first place because the town and its hinterland had received an enormous number of refugees from Asia Minor, but also because the Near East Relief had moved its headquarters to that city after closing its doors in Turkey. The Near East Relief was created out of the Armenian Relief Committee in 1919 by Congressional Charter, and played a central role in assisting refugees, orphans and other destitute people in the wake of the war and the exchange of populations – work it sometimes undertook in cooperation with Anatolia College.
Writing the history of institutions has much in common with the genre of biography. The biographer's approach to a certain period of history takes as its point of departure the individual and traces the subject's path through the decades. Even when the main focus is on how a personality is formed through various encounters with life, we will often learn about the specific periods and places that moulded the subject's life. At the same time, the biography offers an approach to general history that creates coherence from a series of events that often defy conventional periodization. The same its true for the history of institutions, the main difference being that their life span is often much longer than that of a person. Educating across Cultures follows the history of Anatolia College from its very beginnings through its many transitions. It provides an in-depth view of its development from a missionary institution to an educational foundation; and we learn about the interactions between the American Board and the efforts of the missionaries and educators in the field.
But the account also makes it possible to use the college as a tracer to follow the world of the Ottoman Armenians and Greeks, and how the conditions that shaped their lives changed over the last 50 years or so of the Late Ottoman Empire; or, to follow the controversies that affected Greek politics and society from 1924 to the fall of the Junta in 1974, seen through the prism of Anatolia College. Among the many things we learn is that the missionaries found it more difficult to enrol Ottoman Greeks than Armenians and that some of the missionaries believed it to be possible to convert Muslims through a step-by-step strategy, of which the first step was to reach out to the Christians; and that this was based on a rationale underlying evangelical endeavours in the Ottoman Empire that ‘the indigenous Christian communities should serve’, in the words of Rev. James L. Barton, the foreign secretary of the American Board ‘to bridge the abyss separating Protestant evangelists from their primary target, the vast hordes of nonbelievers’.
This book is a must for anyone interested in Anatolia College and American missionary activities in the Ottoman Empire. But it also has a wider reach, offering often intriguing reflections on the Ottoman Greek and Armenian communities while the insistence of the school on continuing its existence in Greece provides us with encounters with Greek politics and society we would not have met elsewhere.
