The Lasting Influence of American Schools Abroad

Few Bostonians recognize the significance of the American Congregational missionary movement that was based on Beacon Hill in the 19th century. Dating from 1853, the Congregational Archive and Library remains open to the public today at 14 Beacon Street in Boston. Congregational House was the meeting site of the trustees of American schools founded by missionaries in the 19th century throughout the Mediterranean basin from Morocco to Rome. More than thirty of those schools continue to exist and thrive today based on the American educational model of shared governance and educational innovation.

The Christian missionary movement began at Williams College in 1806, where five students, Congregationalists by background, took shelter from a thunderstorm under a haystack while discussing the theology of missionary service. That meeting, named the Haystack Conference, has been credited with leading to the formation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which gave students an opportunity to go abroad and spread the teachings of Christianity. Among the first missionaries to be sent out were graduates of Middlebury and Dartmouth Colleges. Most were from small towns and farm villages of New England. The American Board saw to it that schools, hospitals, and orphanages were established in the areas and countries of its missionary focus, primarily in the Near East. In its first 50 years, the American Board sent out over 1,250 missionaries, most trained in New England colleges where they were schooled in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.

Today, their legacy lives on through secular American schools in numerous countries in the Mediterranean basin, Asia Minor, and beyond. Some of the institutions have dealt with unimaginable hardships, including two world wars and political and economic instability, which continue to characterize much of the region today. The persistence of the missionaries and their 21st-century successors is a success story that all Americans can be proud of, as American educational values have enhanced the lives of hundreds of thousands of students from Southern Europe to the subcontinent.

My own school, Anatolia College, has roots that began as a seminary outside of Constantinople founded in the 1840s by Dr. Cyrus Hamlin, a Bowdoin College-educated Christian missionary. Bebek Seminary became Robert College in 1863, named for American industrialist and benefactor Christopher Robert. Robert College is the oldest continuously operating American school outside of the U.S. Hamlin would return to the U.S. and eventually become president of Bowdoin and Middlebury Colleges.

A young Williams College graduate, Charles Tracy, moved east from Constantinople, now Istanbul, to the town of Merzifon, in Anatolia Province, Asia Minor, now Turkey, to found a college in 1886 to educate young Christian women. Established as a Massachusetts not-for-profit corporation in 1894, Anatolia was granted degree-granting authority by the Massachusetts legislature comparable to that of Harvard and MIT. By 1900, Anatolia College counted 2,000 graduates and also operated a hospital and orphanage. The aftermath of World War I and the Armenian genocides led to the closing of the school in Asia Minor and its subsequent reopening in Thessaloniki, Greece, in 1924. At the conclusion of the Greek-Turkish War in 1922, Greece and Turkey agreed to a population exchange of one million Christians stranded in Turkey and one million Muslims residing in Northern Greece and neighboring Balkan countries. Humanitarian conditions in Northern Greece were desperate; disease and starvation were rampant. 300,000 refugees were living in unspeakable conditions along the shores of the Thermaic Gulf near Thessaloniki. In the midst of that humanitarian crisis, the missionaries who had fled Asia Minor persuaded the Boston-based trustees to reopen Anatolia with 13 male students.

In 2024, we celebrated our centennial anniversary of reopening in Greece. The president of the new Greek Republic, Eleftherios Venizelos, granted the school 35 acres on the slope of Mt. Hortiatis to build a campus. From our humble beginnings, today Anatolia is an American educational institution of 4,000 students ranging from an elementary division, a high school, an international school, and a higher education division, Anatolia American University. Anatolia was the first international educational entity to be granted a university license in 2025 by the Greek state.

Our school closed during World War II and served as the headquarters of the German Army during the occupation of Greece from 1941–1945. Suffering through a civil war and numerous hardships common to the region, Anatolia has emerged today as a beacon of educational excellence in Northern Greece. While the author is neither Greek nor Congregationalist, my long association with the Board of Trustees and fifteen-year service as chairman makes me proud of the perseverance of our predecessors and the commitment of our American and Greek trustees, staff, and faculty for their resilience and determination to provide the best educational experience available to young people in Northern Greece and the region. Our success is the success of American educational values and the dedication of American missionaries and their Greek and American successors who believe now and then in the transformative power of education to change lives and to improve the path forward of humanity. In spite of occasional missteps abroad, Americans can be proud of the contribution of our international schools to our nation’s reputation in many nations where our educational values have helped to improve the lives of countless numbers of their citizens.

Albert “Chip” Elfner
Boston, MA