Anatolia College and the Missionary Movement in the Ottoman Empire: at the Crossroads of Family and Institutional Memory. 

Armen T. Marsoobian will discuss how the American Protestant missionary movement played an important educational role among the Armenians and Greeks of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Anatolia College in Merzifon (in present-day Turkey) was an English-language school founded by missionary-educators at the urging of Armenians who wanted access to Western education. Marsoobian’s family benefited from these endeavors by studying and working there. Tsolag Dildilian, his grandfather, worked as the college photographer from 1895 to 1919.The college was tragically impacted by the murder of faculty and students during the Armenian and Greek Genocides. It was closed by Turkish nationalist authorities during the Greco-Turkish War. Anatolia College relocated to Thessaloniki, Greece in 1923 and continues to flourish today.

BIO: Armen T. Marsoobian is Professor of Philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University, Affiliated Faculty at the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute of the University of Connecticut, and a Visiting Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University. He edits the journal Metaphilosophy. He held the position of the Ordjanian Visiting Professor at Columbia University 2013, 2020, and 2022 and was Vice President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars from 2019-2023. 

Sponsors / Partners:The lecture is made possible with support of Lest We Forget, the Fred & Elizabeth Boyajian Lecture Series at The First Church of Christ in Hartford/Center Church and The Teacher's Library at Center Church, in coordination with the 1636 Heritage Partnership. The 1636 HP is a secular non-profit organization that works to preserve and educate the public on Center Church’s historic buildings.