The American College of Merzifon was one of the largest institutions that American missionaries founded in the Anatolian interior. Officially known as Anatolia College, and in American sources as Anatolia College of Marsovan, it opened in 1886 as a four-year college and soon grew into a campus of nearly forty buildings that included a theological seminary, a girls' school, a hospital, a library and a museum. Most of its students came from the Greek and Armenian communities, and its faculty included members of those two communities alongside the Americans. The college's life in Merzifon ended in 1921; its name lived on in the school reopened in Thessaloniki in 1924, and part of its buildings still stand in Merzifon today. The British occupation of the War of Independence years and the search and closure of the college have been told in detail in another article, so they are mentioned only briefly here; the main subject is the institution's founding, its educational order, its staff, its buildings and its later legacy.

The Missionaries in Merzifon and the Origins of the School

The story of the college begins not in Merzifon but in Istanbul. The Boston-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) was a Protestant mission organization founded in 1810 that had begun working in Ottoman lands in 1820. It chose Istanbul as a station in the 1830s, and Cyrus Hamlin opened a school at Bebek in 1840. In time that school turned toward general education and formed the nucleus of the institution later known as Robert College. As the number of young people wanting to learn English grew, theological training receded at Bebek, and the mission decided to move the school that would train pastors elsewhere. The place chosen was Merzifon, about eighty miles inland from Samsun on the Black Sea coast, a town at the crossing of caravan roads with a dense Armenian and Greek population.

Missionaries had been passing through Merzifon from the 1830s and settled in the town permanently around 1850; the station was founded in 1851 or 1852. The sources differ by small margins here. Some accounts date the move of the seminary from Bebek to Merzifon to 1864 and the start of teaching to 1865, while others say the school was founded directly in 1864. In the same years the girls' school in Istanbul was also brought to Merzifon. The school's initial purpose was to train preachers and pastors from among the Greek and Armenian youth of Anatolia, and a Sunday school opened in 1860 belonged to the same circle of religious education. The founding aims stated that students would not be restricted according to religious preference, and this principle laid the ground for the later widening of the student body.

Founding of the College (1883-1899)

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the level of instruction at Merzifon's girls' school and seminary had risen markedly, and a need arose for a college to teach their graduates. In 1883, under the presidency of Charles Chapin Tracy, George F. Herrick, John F. Smith and Edward Riggs, all members of the seminary faculty, opened the Harbinger High School with four male students. This small school formed the core of Anatolia College. The students and the instruction there laid the foundation for the opening of Anatolia College on 8 September 1886, when it still had no building, campus or equipment of its own. The school is commonly dated from that day; extending the seminary to include a four-year secular college program was the answer to a growing number of young people asking for a general education. Tracy served as the first president until 1912 or 1913; the sources disagree on the year of his retirement.

The legal standing of the institution remained uncertain for a long time. The charter was approved by the state of Massachusetts on 14 March 1894, while the Ottoman government recognized the school as an American school only by an imperial decree on 14 April 1899. The thirteen years in between were a period in which the school worked in practice but its place in Ottoman legislation was disputed. In the middle of this process, in 1893, disturbances broke out in the town after Armenian committee proclamations were found on the college walls; troops arrested many Armenians and some college buildings were damaged. According to American sources the damage was later repaired with compensation paid by the Ottoman government.

The Educational Program

The college offered a four-year program of higher education, with preparatory and high-school-level classes beneath it and the theological seminary above it. The program's initial aim was to prepare graduates for further study, preferably at the seminary in Merzifon. In time student demand changed the program, and the curriculum settled into three areas: foreign languages, the basic sciences and letters taught in American colleges, and subjects oriented to commerce and public administration as practiced in Turkey. By 1911 six languages were regularly taught and used at the school. The college's seal showed the sun rising over Akdağ at the eastern end of the Merzifon Plain, and its motto was "The Morning Cometh"; the phrase alluded to the derivation of the name Anatolia from the Greek word for sunrise and also summed up the role the school assigned itself.

Education was not confined to lessons, as the college's publishing activity shows. After 1908 the two small towers of the old main building were specially fitted out for printing; a group of Greek students, with the help and supervision of their teachers, began to write, print and distribute the first newspaper printed in Merzifon, and a magazine called Pontus was published in the same period. Armenian students worked in the other tower in a similar way and produced a monthly family magazine, one copy of each issue of which was archived by government officials. The school's clubs, sports fields, musical groups and the gatherings held on winter nights filled the students' life outside class. Local Greek and Armenian families could also attend these gatherings, which continued the house-to-house visits the missionaries made during the holidays.

Medical activity appears in the documents mostly around the hospital. Some accounts say that the college opened a medical department teaching in English in 1887; no source has been found that confirms this date or the formal status of such a department. What is established is that from 1889 the missionaries gave weight to health work in Merzifon, that the hospital trained health personnel as well as caring for patients, and that it drew patients from surrounding towns such as Sivas, Amasya and Samsun. The school's records name Nureddin Pehlivanzade, who entered in 1909 and graduated in 1914, as the only Turkish student to graduate.

Students and Faculty

The college's student body changed markedly over the years. The school had been opened to serve Armenians, and in the early years most students were Armenian: in 1898, 55 Greek and 191 Armenian students enrolled. At the beginning of the twentieth century the balance turned in favor of the Greeks. In 1911 a total of 282 students came to the school from sixteen provinces of Anatolia as well as from Greece, Crete, Cyprus, Egypt and Russia. In the 1913-1914 school year, about 300 of 425 students were boarders, and of these 200 were Greek, 160 Armenian, 40 Russian and 25 Turkish. Because most students came from outside Merzifon, the college had the character of a boarding school; student tallies list Sivas, Ankara and Trabzon as the largest sources, and a few students from Istanbul, Aydın, Konya and Diyarbakır also appear in the records. At the girls' school, by contrast, more than half the students were day pupils from Merzifon, which is given as the reason why the Armenian share there was higher than the Greek share.

The faculty was also multinational. In 1913-1914 it numbered thirty-two names: eleven Armenians, ten Americans, nine Greeks, one Russian and one Swiss. Although the Americans were a minority on the staff, it was the local teachers who had a voice in directing the academic program. Among the American administrators, George E. White arrived in Merzifon with his wife in November 1890 and for thirty years the campus was their home; all their children were born there. When he first arrived the college had about 200 students. In his memoirs he describes learning Turkish and Arabic well enough to converse with the local people and the mufti. White became president of the college in 1913 after Tracy's retirement, and the post lasted until the early 1920s. J. J. Manissadjian, of half-German descent, represented the scientific side of the school as professor of botany.

The Campus and Its Buildings

At the end of the nineteenth century the core of the campus was a small group of buildings. When White and his wife arrived in 1890, there stood at the highest point of the grounds a square-plan seminary with a small two-story bell tower built in 1871, lower down the girls' school, three American houses reserved for the missionaries, a bakery famous for its bread and a small workshop. As the school grew, new buildings were added to this core: dormitories, a hospital, an orphanage, a library, sports facilities and houses where teachers lived with their families. By the early twentieth century the campus was a New England-style complex of nearly forty buildings; the students' needs for education, health, sport and lodging were met within this single walled area. This self-contained arrangement made the campus an inward-looking settlement with little need of the rest of the town.

The years between 1911 and 1915 were the busiest period of construction. In these years North College (1912), the Alumni Library-Museum (1914), and the Kennedy Home and the president's house (1915) were built. A deep well and water distribution system, a bathhouse used by hundreds of people each week, a large flour mill and granaries, along with residences, were also complete by 1915. The foundations of Union Hall and George Hills White Hall were laid, but the buildings were never finished. Function rather than ornament dominates the buildings: plastered white facades, gray cut-stone lintels, arches and string courses, rectangular windows. The surviving structures are examples of this plain style.

The library was housed in the Alumni Library building, put up in 1914 through the cooperation of students and graduates. The number of books, about 2,000 in the year White arrived in 1890, had reached 10,000 volumes catalogued by the Dewey system by 1914, together with about forty periodicals. The botanical and zoological museum founded by Prof. Manissadjian contained more than seven thousand species. The museum closed in 1939, and 130 plants from Manissadjian's collection were sent to the herbarium of the Faculty of Science at Ankara University. The school had also become the center of the American mission's press and publishing activity in the region.

The Girls' School

The girls' school was one of the oldest parts of the college. Sources state that it was opened in 1865 under the leadership of a missionary named Eliza Fitcher; American sources say that it grew into an institution living on its own and was organized in 1893 as a separate girls' school within the college. Anatolia Girls School stood on its own grounds of more than four and a half acres in the southern part of the compound, with its classrooms, dormitory, gymnasium, teachers' quarters, athletic courts and gardens, and it was a self-contained unit. The school aimed to offer girls an education that until then had been reserved for men, and to develop in them self-respect and strong character. The curriculum included sewing, lace-making, history and mathematics; Bible classes, however, were compulsory regardless of the student's faith.

The building now known as the Girls' School is a four-story, rectangular, seven-entrance masonry structure with a usable floor in the attic. It had no bell tower when first built; it appears without one in a photograph of 1912 and with one in a photograph of 1930. During restoration, apse niches were found in some rooms, which has been read as a trace showing how the importance given to religious education was reflected in the architecture. When the school reopened in 1924 as the American Girls' Life School, it taught child and patient care, sewing, embroidery, typing and English, and it closed in 1938 because of financial difficulties. The clock tower in front of the building is recorded as an element of the same complex added to the roof in 1919.

The Hospital, Library and Teachers' Houses

The hospital building is one of the most striking structures on the campus. The sources give two different dates for it, 1889 and 1912; the first can be understood as the date the missionaries began their health work, the second as the date the present building opened. The T-plan, five-story building (counting the attic) has a taller central block with a timber upper section. Movement between floors was by three staircases and an elevator. The hospital is cited as the second building in Anatolia, after the İshak Pasha Palace, to be heated by central heating, and traces of the heating ducts are still preserved. In its garden a photograph of 1911 shows a tennis court, and the same spot was later laid out again as a tennis court. Tunnels running from the hospital to other buildings are also known. Local people believe that these tunnels were used by the Pontus Society; this belief, not supported by documents, is the reflection in popular memory of the political dispute surrounding the college.

Four structures survive today: the Girls' School, the hospital, the library and the teachers' houses; the rest of the forty-building campus has been demolished over time or replaced by new buildings. The two-story, rectangular library building is used as the administrative building of Merzifon Vocational School. The hospital building continues to house education as Merzifon Science High School. The cultural inventory also lists a structure called the "American College Building"; this rectangular masonry building originally had a bakery on its basement floor, and on its east facade stands a small wooden, square-plan clock tower with a conical roof. Registered as cultural property, this building today lies within a military area.

The Clubs and the Dispute over the College

The history of the college is also bound up with a political dispute that revolves around its student clubs. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Greek students, with the missionaries' support, founded the Pontus Club in 1904, the Greek-Hellenic Athletic Club in the same year and the Greek Educational Club in 1907. According to research based on Turkish archival documents, the Pontus Club emerged as an association that, to unite students with members of the Maarif Club, also took in a music club called Orfeas, and after 1908 it expanded with branches stretching from Samsun to Batum and İnebolu. The same documents claim that a letter sent by the club's president in 1908 to a society in Samsun ended with the words "long live Greece, long live salvation," and that the clubs harbored the dream of a Pontus Republic covering Amasya, Çorum, Samsun, Trabzon and other sanjaks. A plot of land had also been given to the clubs by the college as a donation, and in 1909 fundraising began to put up a new headquarters for the clubs on it.

The college's administrators offer a different reading. According to the reports White wrote to the headquarters in Boston, the clubs were literary societies founded so that students of different nationalities could learn their mother tongues; the name "Pontus" came from the ancient name of the region, and the map bearing the word Pontus that was found in the search was an ordinary map printed some time earlier in Chicago to show the provinces of the ancient Roman Empire. White also wrote that the Greeks sympathized with the Greek kingdom but that he did not believe they would attempt a rebellion. In a dispute in which both sides rest on their own documents and testimony, there is still no common view on the true nature of the clubs. Studies based on Turkish archival documents maintain that the clubs formed the core of the Pontus Society; the reports of the American officials reject this.

The War Years and 1915

The First World War changed the life of the college radically. In 1915 the Armenian community of Merzifon was sent away, and some of the college's employees were caught up in this process. The testimony of American officials is the principal Western source for these events: after returning to America, White related them in accounts that reached the press in 1917, and the 1915 diary of the music teacher Bertha Morley is another source for the same period. Turkish researchers, for their part, regard White's speeches as propaganda material feeding anti-Turkish feeling in American public opinion. For this reason what happened in Merzifon is still referred to today by the differing terminologies of two separate historiographies. During this period the college also functioned as an institution sheltering orphaned children; American sources speak of as many as two thousand children in the orphanage at one point.

With the Russian advance on the Eastern Front the region was declared a war zone, and on 5 May 1916 a letter sent to several provinces asked that institutions such as schools and hospitals be used for military purposes. On 10 May 1916 it was announced that the college and hospital buildings would be requisitioned for use as military billets and a hospital; the American personnel took some of their belongings with them, left others under the protection of the Ottoman government in the college museum, and were sent to Istanbul on 16 May. President White went to America and worked for about three years in Minnesota as director of the Near East Relief. After the Armistice of Mudros, Mr. and Mrs. Getchell, who had remained at the college, and a few American women missionaries tried to put the buildings back into operation.

1919-1921: A Brief Summary

On 14 March 1919 the members of the Near East Relief assigned to Merzifon settled in the college buildings; on 30 March 1919 a British detachment arrived from Samsun and entered the town, staying until 28 September 1919. In the meantime the school resumed teaching on 6 September 1919 with the diploma ceremony of one of the students conscripted in 1916; 166 students, most of them Greek and six of them in the preschool, were enrolled. In reports to the War Ministry in the summer of 1919, Mustafa Kemal Pasha expressed concern at the close contact between British officers gathered at the college, American officials and the Greeks. With the permission given to the Central Army by the Ankara government, the college and hospital were searched on 16 February 1921; no weapons or ammunition were found, but documents belonging to the Pontus Club were seized. The college was closed, three Americans stayed to guard the buildings, and the remaining twenty-nine people left Merzifon on 22 March 1921. The club's leaders were tried in Amasya; according to Alan, on 12 September 1921 the Independence Tribunal passed death sentences on the club's president and five of its members. American sources write that three former teachers of the college were also among those tried. The details of these events and what followed are covered in another article.

Continuity in Thessaloniki

After the closure in Merzifon, the name and institutional identity of Anatolia College lived on in Greece. After the population exchange of 1923, with the help of Eleftherios Venizelos, the school reopened in 1924 in Thessaloniki in rented buildings at Harilaou with thirteen students, most of them refugees. Enrollment soon rose to 157, and in 1927 the Mission School for Girls in Thessaloniki merged with the college. In 1934 the school moved to a newly built campus near the village of Pylaia on the lower slopes of Mount Hortiatis; its main classroom building became Macedonia Hall. During the Second World War the campus was used as a military hospital and then as headquarters of the German forces; in 1944-1945 the British army stayed there. In 1981 higher education was restarted, and today's American College of Thessaloniki (ACT) grew out of that initiative. Anatolia College today is a private, non-profit institution in the Pylaia district of Thessaloniki, with divisions from elementary school to university, and it dates its founding to 1886 in Merzifon.

Among the fullest records of the Merzifon college in American literature are George E. White's memoir Adventuring With Anatolia College (1940) and the study Educating across Cultures (2015) by William McGrew, the college's ninth president. White's memoir was published in Turkish in 1995, in Cem Tarık Yüksel's translation, as Bir Amerikan Misyonerinin Merzifon Amerikan Koleji Hatıraları.

The Buildings in the Republican Period

In the Republican period the college's buildings in Merzifon took on one function after another. The girls' school was reopened after 1919 to give girls an education at primary level and closed again in 1923-1924. Reopened in 1924 as the American Girls' Life School, it began giving education at a level equivalent to high school in 1936-1937 and closed in 1938 for financial reasons. Between 1941 and 1962 the buildings housed the Merzifon IV Non-Commissioned Officer Preparatory School. After this twenty-one years of military education the buildings were transferred to the municipality, and for a time they were also used as a tobacco warehouse. Thus premises built for civilian education came to serve first military education and then storage.

The Girls' School stood idle for many years, and a restoration was begun with plans to open it to the public as a museum, children's and adult libraries and a tourism information office. The Central Black Sea Development Agency met part of the project budget and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism the rest; arranging the building as the Kara Mustafa Pasha Museum was also part of this plan. The hospital and library buildings continue an educational function in another form.

Chronology

1851-1852: The ABCFM founded a mission station in Merzifon.

1864-1865: The seminary moved from Bebek to Merzifon and began teaching; the girls' school was opened in Merzifon at about the same time.

1871: The bell tower of the seminary was built.

1883: The Harbinger High School opened with four students under Charles C. Tracy.

8 September 1886: Anatolia College began teaching.

1889: The missionaries' health work in Merzifon gained weight.

1890: George E. White arrived in Merzifon.

1893: College buildings were damaged during the disturbances in the town; in the same year the girls' school was organized as a separate unit.

14 March 1894: The charter was approved by the state of Massachusetts.

14 April 1899: The Ottoman government recognized the school as an American school by imperial decree.

1904-1907: The Pontus Club, the Greek-Hellenic Athletic Club and the Greek Educational Club were founded.

1912-1915: North College, the Alumni Library-Museum, the Kennedy Home and the president's house were built.

1913: Tracy retired and George E. White became president; enrollment reached 425.

10-16 May 1916: The college and hospital buildings were requisitioned for military purposes and the American personnel were sent to Istanbul.

30 March-28 September 1919: The British detachment was in Merzifon; the school resumed teaching on 6 September 1919.

16 February 1921: The college and hospital were searched; on 22 March 1921 most of the American personnel left the town.

12 September 1921: A verdict was given on the club leaders tried in Amasya.

1924: Anatolia College reopened in Thessaloniki.

1941-1962: The Merzifon IV Non-Commissioned Officer Preparatory School operated in the buildings.

Sources

Primary sources

  • George E. White, Adventuring With Anatolia College, Grinnell, Iowa, 1940; Turkish translation: Bir Amerikan Misyonerinin Merzifon Amerikan Koleji Hatıraları, trans. Cem Tarık Yüksel, Istanbul, Enderun Kitabevi, 1995.

Academic studies

  • Gülbadi Alan, "Protestan Amerikan Misyonerleri, Anadolu'daki Rumlar ve Pontus Meselesi", Erciyes Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi, no. 10, 2001.
  • Cemal Güven, "Amerika'daki Ermeni Propagandasına Bir Örnek: Merzifon Amerikan Koleji Başkanı George E. White (1916-1919)", Türkiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi.
  • "Merzifon", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi (islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/merzifon).

Official sources

Other sources

  • Neslihan Erdoğan, Arife Deniz Oktaç Beycan, "Anadolu'da Yabancı Okullar Meselesine Mimari Bir Bakış: Merzifon Amerikan Koleji", no. 21, 2024, pp. 82-105.
  • "Merzifon Amerikan Koleji", Vikipedi and Kültür Envanteri (kulturenvanteri.com); "Anatolia College in Merzifon" and "Anatolia College", Wikipedia. tr.wikipedia.org

Online sources