ANATOLIA
COLLEGE CELEBRATES
100 YEARS
IN THESSALONIKI

Reverend Elias Riggs was a prominent figure among the expatriate scholars, missionary emissaries of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions based in Boston. His affinity for languages led him to learn most of the local languages he encountered during his sixty years in the East. His missionary work began in 1833 from Greece, as head of the translation and publishing work of the mission in Constantinople. Of his 14 children and grandchildren, 13 followed him in his missionary vocation in the Near East. One of his sons, Edward, helped found Anatolia College in 1886, and his grandson, Ernest, was to become the fourth President of Anatolia College.

Lillian Cole arrived in Thessaloniki in 1927 to take charge of the health and wellbeing of the students in the boarding house. Trained as a nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, she was a member of the mission from Asia Minor. She had married Armenian Levon H. Sewny, a 1901 Anatolia graduate who had studied medicine at the American University of Beirut and had died of typhus during World War I. Lillian Cole took over the management of the small infirmary for a decade as well as duties related to housing and boarding. Ruth Compton commented that “she ruled with an iron fist and a heart of gold”. Her rule? Anyone who said they were sick would be forced to stay in bed and treated with castor oil. This way, no student ever made the mistake of pretending to be sick.

Curtis Lamb, a Grinnell graduate, prewar teacher at Anatolia contributed generously to the school after becoming a trustee, eliciting support from former student Dr. Alexander Matthews, entrepreneur John Pappajohn, and others.
Anatolia’s young teachers seemed to thrive on their experience and several developed lifelong ties with the school, following Lamb’s example. He sat on the Board for several years, while John F. Chapman and Everett W. Stephens served as successive Board chairmen for nearly two decades.

At a time when women’s status was undervalued and their education unthinkable, Eliza Fritcher, a former teacher at Mount Holyoke Divinity School, traveled to Merzifon to take on the task of introducing women to education. Given the gender-segregation, reaching the female population was only possible by women missionaries. It was in 1865, under adverse conditions and with her facing chronic health problems, that Fritcher founded the Girls’ School, which started out with only eight female students in a cramped rented space. During the Fritcher years, the Girls’ School flourished, with Frances Gage succeeding her as principal in 1893. That same year, however, the Girls’ School was destroyed in a fire. With the compensation paid by the Ottoman state, the Girls’ School was rebuilt, becoming one of the finest buildings among the mission facilities of Merzifon, and was named Fritcher Building in honour of its founder.

Symeon A. Ananiades, a 19-year-old student from Samsun, was a top athlete who aspired to become a doctor. In his speech as the top of his class, he urged his classmates: “Keep going, keep at it, until you are 24. It’s not enough to make it halfway, the best is ahead of us.” In February 1921, he and six other students were brought before the Turkish military court for running the Greek literary club, “Pontos”, at Anatolia, which the court ruled was a subversive organization aiming to annex the Pontos region to Greece. They did not have the privilege of counsel, the right to appeal or any outside intervention in their favour. A few weeks later, in March 1921, Anatolia was forced to close, the Pontos club was dissolved and its students were arrested. Symeon Ananiades was hanged in June 1921 in Amasya, along with another student (Pavlidis), Georgios D. Lambrinos, who helped teach Greek while still a student, and teachers Dimitrios Theocharidis and Charalambos I. Efstathiadis, while Grigori Chekalov was spared, as a Russian citizen. Three months later, his father, Antonios Ananiades, follows him to the gallows. With him, a hundred more from Samsun, among other Greeks from Trebizond and the surrounding areas.

In 1915, Miss Frances Gage, a teacher at the Girls’ School, insisted on accompanying the girls alongside Charlotte Willard, when Turkish soldiers came for the Armenian girl students and forced them into carts to take them into the countryside. The two women stayed with their students for weeks under terrible conditions until finally the government sent an order to return them to the school. The bravery they displayed saved the girls. Miss Gage died two years later, on July 15th, 1917 and was buried near the Girls’ School in the mission compound at Marsovan.

Myra Tracy, a teacher from the same county as Charles Tracy, went to Merzifon in 1865 following her husband to begin a long tenure that would prove pivotal to the development of Anatolia College.
In the missionary community, the wives, in addition to running the household and raising the child, also undertook community service. Myra Tracy was able to become a leading figure in the community, often spearheading major initiatives.
In 1894 when a cholera pandemic broke out in the area, she was the one who coordinated the distribution of medicine, saving many lives.
In the fall of 1896, when the attacks against the Armenians intensified and the number of orphaned children increased, Myra Tracy took the initiative to rent quarters within walking distance of the school facilities to accommodate nearly sixty orphaned boys, while the number of orphaned girls housed at the Girls’ School reached fifty.
Leaving Merzifon for good in 1913, she and her husband left behind an educational hub that could hardly have been imagined. From a makeshift building with a handful of students they found when they first arrived, an entire school complex had now emerged, with hundreds of enrolled students.

A graduate of Mount Holyoke College (1885-1891), Mary P. Wright went to Merzifon to staff the Girls’ School.
Missions to other parts of Asia Minor at that time required caution as conditions were dangerous and the passages were difficult to traverse.
Mary Wright herself was attacked by bandits in 1885 while returning from Tokat with missionary John Smith and his wife.
Despite the many dangers, these journeys gave the missionaries great pleasure as they contributed both morally and financially to the improvement of the local community, giving the children the opportunity to study in Merzifon.
When in 1896 the Merzifon group realized that many children had been orphaned by the massacres, they provided them with shelter and education, with the help of fellow Armenians. Fifty girls were housed in the school facilities, while nearby quarters were rented for nearly sixty boys, under the supervision of Myra Tracy and the assistance of Mary Wright. These orphanages were originally intended to be temporary facilities, but they actually operated for a decade until families could be found for the children or they could be educated to stand firmly on their own two feet.

Raphael S. (1891-1968) graduated from Anatolia in 1910, winning both the grand school prize and the prize for the best thesis. After working for two years at Anatolia as an assistant librarian, he won a scholarship to study philosophy at Harvard University, where he completed his doctorate in 1916.
After additional studies in England and France, he became emeritus professor at Harvard where he held the Alford Chair teaching Moral Philosophy and Civics.
He returned again to the Anatolia he loved so much as a member of the Trustees, devoting time and energy to support the College in every way possible.

Elias (Elie) Prodromou Aghnides was a Greek engineer with vision and an inventive spirit. Born in Constantinople in 1901, Elie studied in England, later earning a degree in engineering from the University of Belgium.
His boundless creativity led him to invent the faucet aerator in 1943, a patent inspired by a waterfall that has subsequently become a key part of almost every faucet. Other patents followed that resulted from his original invention.
Although he never attended Anatolia College, he recognized the value of education, leaving most of his inheritance to the school, a donation of over two million dollars.