In addition to the institutions already mentioned, which have separate buildings, there is a theological school for training native college graduates for direct evangelistic work among their countrymen. This school will soon have a separate building, having hitherto been considered a part of the college to which it was attached. The importance of this work has now reached a stage where it demands a separate home and possibly separate management.
Industrial work is an important adjunct to the college. It was started as a means of self-help, to enable students who could not pay their tuition or board to earn a part of it by manual labour, and American machinery and tools were introduced for cabinet work according to modern methods. This has proved so popular that it was necessary to make a rule that no boy should take the mechanical courses alone, without taking some of the regular courses in the college or the preparatory school. Many fathers were so anxious to have their sons learn to use tools and machinery and to make things, that they brought them to the college and asked that they be admitted simply for mechanical instruction. While the school has not been wholly self-supporting, the students have been able to earn a large part of the cost of their education and have received instruction that could not have been given them in any other way.
This kind of training is especially important in Turkey, where the idea has prevailed, and still prevails to no small extent, that when a man is educated he must not do anything that looks like manual labour. Unfortunately this delusion is not confined to Turkey. The mechanical department is calculated to take that fallacy out of the minds of young men, making them see that manual labour is no disgrace and that even a scholar may do things with his hands. Turkey must come to the idea that a scholar of the highest type may be a civil engineer, who will be required to do outdoor work. The industrial school at Marsovan is but a preparatory step to the larger comprehensions of the dignity of labour, while at the same time, it trains the students who come within its influence in mechanical exactness. There is much of value, missionaries have learned, as well as educators in America, in training a boy to do something that is worth while in a mechanical way.
As a part of the medical work, it has been necessary for the American missionaries to establish dispensaries where cases can be treated temporarily, and especially where medicines can be provided for outside patients. It is so difficult to get pure drugs at regular Turkish drug stores that it has been necessary for all the American hospitals in the country to establish and maintain their own dispensaries. Their supplies, bought at wholesale, are sent out from the mission headquarters in Boston, and, therefore, are reliable in every way. Many native pharmacists are being properly trained. These dispensaries often prove almost as valuable for the lives and health of the people as the hospitals, and are regarded as a necessary adjunct of every hospital.
At Marsovan, to carry on this work in all departments, there are nineteen Americans: four ordained missionaries and their wives, three laymen, two physicians, and six single women, all college graduates, and nearly all having taken from three to five years of post-graduate work. Connected with them, and working with them in every way, are at least twenty-five times this number of trained native Christian leaders, many of whom are graduates of the college or other American institutions. Some have studied in Europe after taking a course in the college at Marsovan. Upon the American staff, with the native associates, also rests the responsibility of supervising native evangelistic work in a wide field. Tours of inspection are taken by the missionaries from time to time, thus keeping them familiar with what is going on, so that they may devote their energies at the centre to the demands of the work outside.
As an illustration of the way in which educational institutions grow, Anatolia College is an admirable example. The germ which produced this great institution, now with more than three hundred students and several departments, was a little school in the corner of a stable in the city of Marsovan in charge of Dr. C. C. Tracy. The stable filled the greater part of the building, and in one of the corners, on a platform of earth raised a foot or so above the common level of the mud floor, and protected by a light rail, was the school. Less than a dozen children there took their first lessons in learning to read. At the start, in common intelligence, they were but little in advance of the animals that occupied the rest of the room. No one could have detected in that humble beginning the germ of an institution that now covers several acres in buildings and campus just outside the large and flourishing city of Marsovan, filled with bright young men from all parts of Anatolia, from along the entire southern shore of the Black Sea, and even from Russia, on the northern coast—studying for academic degrees in preparation for positions of influence and leadership in the new Turkish Empire.
This little stable school became a high school in 1886, and a full-grown college a few years later. It now has a faculty of twenty-three professors, fourteen of whom are natives of the country and eight have taken post-graduate courses to prepare themselves for their work. They have degrees from the New College at Edinburgh, the University of Berlin, the University of Athens, the Imperial Law School at Constantinople, the Royal Conservatory of Music at Stuttgart and the Academy at Paris.
Anatolia College has sent out 224 graduates, of whom 207 are now living. Fifty-two are engaged in teaching, forty-eight are practising medicine, and eighty-six are in business. In addition to these graduates, several thousand other young men have for a time studied in the institution and for various reasons have been compelled to leave without completing the course. These have, however, gone out armed with a new power which this college has given them, and many are doing signal service within and without the Turkish Empire. Not long since, in a mixed gathering of Turks and Christians in Marsovan, profound thanks were expressed by Mohammedan leaders for this institution and what it has done to disseminate ideas of liberty, for the emancipation of women, and for the general welfare.
Among the students in the college, who come from about half of the twenty-nine provinces of the Ottoman Empire, are also found natives of Greece, Albania, Egypt, and, as has already been stated, Russia. The courses of study are similar to the usual college courses in the United States, with the exception that more emphasis is put upon the living languages than upon the dead.
Coasting along the south shore of the Black Sea, we were sailing through a land of fable, and our steamer touched at some scene of Greek mythology two or three times every day. At every port where we stopped to discharge or take on cargo we were surrounded by fleets of queer-looking boats with high-pointed prows and sterns, like the gondolas of Venice and the ancient galleys of the Greeks. There is always an exciting scramble when the gangway is lowered, and the barefooted boatmen climb over each other to get on board to solicit the patronage of the passengers. Their costumes, their cries, their gesticulations, and the confusion they create make it hard to believe that they are the descendants of gods and demi-gods, the heroes of the poems and the fables and legends we read in Greek mythology. The coast is bordered with a continuous range of magnificent mountains, rising gradually from the sea, clothed with forests on the upper heights and usually a strip of cultivated land along the coast. The successive ranges, rising one above the other, culminate in snow-capped peaks in the far background. The lower slopes and the coast line are dotted with villages embowered in oak, chestnut, beech, walnut, and hazel trees and masses of lilac, rhododendrons, azaleas, myrtles, orange groves, and orchards of quince and cherry trees, which are all in blossom in April and May and make a charming picture.