"The Messenger for Children"

Beginning in the 1820s, when its first personnel arrived in Izmir, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions made publishing a fundamental aim of its work in Turkey. The ABCFM printed a wide range of religious and educational books, tracts, and periodicals in various languages and alphabets: Turkish, Armenian, Greek, Arabic, and others. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the American Board’s presses served as a conduit through which new types of publications (both in content and style) were introduced into Turkey from North America and Europe.

This is evident especially in publications for youth, including serials. The ABCFM’s monthly children’s periodical in Turkish, “The Messenger for Children”—printed in Armenian script as Avedaper Çocuklar İçin and in Greek letters as Angeliaphoros Çocuklar İçin—commenced in 1872, at the outset of serials publishing for children in Turkey. 1 (An Armenian-language edition of the journal was issued simultaneously.)

“The Messenger for Children” in Armeno- and Greco-Turkish remained in print until 1897, and the Armenian-language edition continued up to 1915. Richly illustrated, and with a mix of content (though primarily focused on religious topics and moral lessons), the twin Turkish serials stand out uniquely among their mostly image-free, graphically austere contemporary Ottoman Turkish counterparts. Undoubtedly, the visual appeal of the former publications contributed to their longevity. Their emergence at the inception of periodicals for youth in Turkey, as well as their steady output for over 20 years, deserves note in the early history of Turkish children’s publishing.

The ARIT Istanbul (ARIT-I) Library contains nearly complete runs of the Armeno-Turkish and Armenian editions of “The Messenger for Children,” in addition to a partial set of the Greco-Turkish version, Angeliaphoros Çocuklar İçin. This latter collection has been captured digitally and placed on the web. It is accessible on Internet Archive, at the following link: http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=angeliaphoros%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts.

“The Messenger” (for Adults)

The American Board also issued weekly editions of “The Messenger” for adult readers. The Armenian-language version of Avedaper commenced in 1855, and it was supplemented by an Armeno-Turkish edition five years later (1860). A Greco-Turkish version, Angeliaphoros, appeared in 1872. All three newspapers remained in print up to the second decade of the twentieth century. Roughly two-thirds of the content was the same in each edition. Besides religious articles, there were sections for political news and educational and general subjects, as well as correspondence and commentary by readers; the text was printed without leading, to fill each page with as much reading matter as possible. The American Board distributed the “The Messenger” throughout Turkey, and in a time when few newspapers circulated in the region, the journal was an important channel through which contemporary local and international news reached remote areas of Anatolia.2

The ARIT Istanbul Library contains extensive holdings of the three separate editions of “The Messenger.” Currently, the newspapers are only accessible on site, at the Istanbul Center; however, ARIT plans to eventually scan this significant historical periodical and offer it publicly on the web, via the ARIT Istanbul Digital Library.

1. The first Ottoman Turkish children’s periodical in Arabic script, Mümeyyiz, was launched in 1869 but ceased publication the following year. The second, Hazine-i Atfal, appeared in 1873, as a single issue. Sixteen more children’s journals were produced over the next two decades, but all were short-lived (most surviving less than a year). Çocuklara Mahsus Gazete, published between 1896 and 1908, was the first truly enduring Turkish children’s serial in Arabic script.
For information on the origins and development of Ottoman Turkish children’s periodicals in Arabic letters, see İsmet Kür, Türkiye’de Süreli Çocuk Yayınları, Ankara 1991 and Cüneyd Okay, Eski Harfli Çocuk Dergileri, Istanbul 1999.

2. For further details about the weekly editions of Avedaper and Angeliaphoros, see “Missionary Periodicals at Constantinople,” The Missionary Herald 70 (1874), 298-302; Joseph K. Greene, Leavening the Levant, Boston 1916, 140-2.

Bulletin of the Near East Society

The Near East Society (NES) was formed in 1948 by the Near East College Association (NECA), on the initiative of Bayard Dodge (1888–1972), an Islamic scholar and then-retired president of the American University of Beirut. Based in New York, the organization had the stated aim of “building mutual understanding between the peoples of America and the Near East.”

The College Association had been founded after WWI and incorporated in 1928, to raise funds for its member institutions (several regional American schools, including AUB and Istanbul’s Robert College and American College for Girls), as well as to promote their interests in the United States. NECA created an endowment of approximately fifteen million dollars for the affiliated institutions within its first decade of operation.

The Near East Society was established as a non-political, non-partisan, and non-sectarian agency to provide the American public with information about the Middle East. Besides a monograph series that included such works as A History of the Arabs, Islamic Sects, and The Significance of the Suez Canal in Current International Affairs, NES issued a periodical, the “American Near East Society Bulletin,” which began publication in May 1948. In September 1949, the serial changed its name to “Bulletin of the Near East Society.” After appearing in eight volumes, it was superseded in January 1956 by “Lands East: The Near and Middle East Magazine,” published by the Middle East Institute, in Washington DC.

The Near East Society’s bulletin was aimed at a general audience, offering a mix of articles on culture, history, and contemporary affairs, richly illustrated with black-and-white photos. The popular appeal is evident in the travel piece “Twenty-four Hours to Istanbul” published in the October 1949 issue. Describing the Turkish liquor industry, the author mentions that Americans often like to sample local products and for “for cocktails or after dinner consumption, some travelers enjoy the ‘screwdriver’ (reputedly a G.I. concoction from the Persian Gulf Command days made of equal parts of vodka and orange juice).”

This excerpt calls into question the common belief that the earliest written reference to the screwdriver appeared in the 24 October 1949 issue of Time, in a piece titled “Turkey: Wild West of the Middle East,” where the author wrote: “In the dimly lighted bar of the sleek Park Hotel, Turkish intelligence agents mingle with American engineers and Balkan refugees, drinking the latest Yankee concoction of vodka and orange juice, called a 'screwdriver'.” Moreover, it challenges the familiar notion that the drink derived its name from American petroleum engineers in the Middle East who secretly added vodka to cans of orange juice and stirred the mixture with their screwdrivers.

The ARIT Istanbul (ARIT-I) Library contains various issues of volumes 2, 3, 4, and 5 of the “Bulletin of the Near East Society,” which offer a fascinating glimpse into mid-twentieth-century American observations of the Middle East. Digital copies are available via the links below.

Links

1. June 1949-Vol.2 No.6
2. Oct. 1949-Vol.2 No.8
3. Nov. 1949-Vol.2 No.9
4. Feb. 1950-Vol.3 No.2
5. Apr. 1950-Vol.3 No.4
6. June 1950-Vol.3 No.6
7. Feb. 1951-Vol.4 No.2
8. Nov. 1951-Vol.4 No.9
9. Jan. 1952-Vol.5 No.1
10. Apr. 1952-Vol.5 No.4
11. May 1952-Vol.5 No.5
12. Apr. 1952-Vol.5 No.6
13. Sept. 1952-Vol.5 No.7
14. Dec. 1952-Vol.5 No.10

Samokov News: Newspaper of the American Board’s Principal Schools in Bulgaria

The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions’ work among Bulgarians can be traced to 1840, when the ABCFM’s press at Izmir issued a New Testament in the Bulgarian language. Despite excellent sales (including more than two thousand in less than a week at a single event in 1841), as well as Bulgaria’s favorable prospects for religious labor, the Board did not establish permanent stations there for almost two decades. In 1858, the ABCFM appointed Charles F. Morse as its first missionary to the Bulgarians, and he took up residence in Edirne. More personnel were dispatched to the region the following year, and they opened stations at Stara Zagora (Eski Zagra) and Plovdiv (Philippopolis).

By the mid-1860s, Board missionaries had launched schools in the latter cities: a boys’ school at Plovdiv and a school for girls in Stara Zagora. Both institutions were transferred to Samokov in the 1870s, where they prospered for the next half century.1As part of a general downsizing of its work in the Near East and Balkans after WWI, the ABCFM decided to close the Samokov schools in the mid 1920s; however, objections from alumni and other supporters in Bulgaria prompted the Board to turn them over to a new non-profit corporation, Sofia American Schools (SAS), to reconstitute them as the American College of Sofia (ACS), which opened to its first students in 1928.

ACS was forced to close during WWII, and in 1947, the Bulgarian government seized its campus and properties. The political changes of 1989 created an opportunity to reopen the college, and in 1992, after a hiatus of 50 years, ACS resumed operations.

The Samokov News commenced publication in 1922, as a joint publication of the American Board’s boys’ and girls’ schools in Samokov. Edited and published entirely by students, to serve as an internal news bulletin, it was nevertheless distributed in outside circles. In 1926, when the schools were transferred to SAS, to become the American College of Sophia, the paper was renamed Sophia News. The ARIT Istanbul (ARIT-I) Library contains the first volume and one issue of volume 2 of this rare periodical, which offers a glimpse into the ABCFM’s two most important educational institutions in Bulgaria, the predecessors of today’s American College of Sophia. Digital copies are available via the links below.

Links

v. 1 : no. 1 (Nov. 1922)
v. 1 : no. 2 (Jan. 1923)
v. 1 : no. 3 (Mar. 1923)
v. 1 : no. 4 (May 1923)
v. 2 : no. 1 (Nov. 1923)

1. For more information on the ABCFM’s mission to Bulgaria and its educational institutions in this era, see William Webster Hall, Puritans in the Balkans, Sofia, 1938.