Rare Publications of the Istanbul Office of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in ARIT’s Istanbul Library
American Board Rare Publications Collection, ARIT Istanbul Library
The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), or simply “the Board,” was a Boston-based Protestant agency founded in 1810. In 1812, it was registered as a company in the state of Massachusetts to collect and disburse funds primarily to spread Protestant teachings, but also to pursue humanitarian work in health and education. Board members first arrived in the Ottoman Empire in 1820, and for roughly the next two centuries, they operated schools, hospitals and clinics, and printing presses across Anatolia and the Balkans. At its high watermark, in 1914, the American Board had twenty-four stations in the region, and more than 200 of its personnel were overseeing 450 schools. They were also running nineteen medical facilities and four printing presses, the largest of which was located in Istanbul.
Avedaper’s Editorial Team (Charles C. Tracy, The Development of the American Board’s Work in Asiatic Turkey, 1904)
Between 1857 and 1933, the Board’s Istanbul-based publishing department produced a wide variety of publications. Much of this material is held in the American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT)’s American Board Library in Istanbul, in its “Rare Publications” collection, which includes Armenian and Armeno-Turkish editions of the newspaper Avedaper (“the Messenger”), as well as Armenian, Armeno-Turkish, Ottoman Turkish, Greek, and Greco-Turkish books, booklets, and pamphlets. These works comprise one of the most complete, extant collections of the publishing department’s output and provide insight into the Board’s religious, educational and cultural aims. They are also an especially important record of Anatolia’s Protestant populations in the late Ottoman era, about which few written traces remain.
Avedaper is a singular historical resource for the Ottoman Empire’s final decades. Besides religious content, it includes political news, educational topics, and readers’ correspondence. Distributed in Anatolia when few newspapers circulated there, it was a conduit for transmitting news throughout the region. Besides Turkey’s Armenian population, the paper’s Armeno-Turkish edition undoubtedly reached the Empire’s majority Turkish populace, attesting to a significant, often overlooked cultural symbiosis in the late Ottoman era. The other works, too, have extraordinary cultural and academic value, from which historians, linguists, religious scholars, and others can benefit.
Funeral procession of King Edward VII
(Avedaper, vol. 53, no. 28, 1910)
The first threshing machine made in Türkiye
(Avedaper, volume 53, no. 34, 1910)
From 2021 to 2023, ARIT catalogued and digitized its “Rare Publications” collection with support from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, as part of the British Library’s “Endangered Archives Programme” (EAP). The project produced approximately 65,000 images, which is now freely available on the Library’s EAP website: https://eap.bl.uk/project/EAP1355
They have already been incorporated into the website of ARIT’s project archival partner, Salt Research, in the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) Archive in its City, Society, and Economy Archive, where they can also be accessed freely: https://archives.saltresearch.org/handle/123456789/224889?locale=en
Education and Training and the Public, 1928 (Top left: Playground entertainment; Bottom left: A public playground)
Letters for Parents, 1875 (Greco-Turkish)
Zoology in Brief, 1898
Included in the online material are 50 volumes of the Armenian edition of Avedaper; 43 volumes of Avedaper’s Armeno-Turkish edition; Ottoman Turkish editions of 38 books, 18 booklets and 25 pamphlets; Armenian editions of 144 books; Armeno-Turkish editions of 41 books; Greek editions of 2 books, 5 booklets, and 15 pamphlets; Greco-Turkish editions of 12 books; and 2 volumes of the Armenian periodical Hay Badani.
Dr. Brian Johnson, ARIT Istanbul
