At Marsovan, to carry on this work in all departments, there are nineteen Americans; four ordained missionaries and their wives, three laymen, two physicians, and six single women, all college graduates, and nearly all having taken from three to five years of post-graduate work. Connected with them, and working with them in every way, are at least twenty-five times this number of trained native Christian leaders, many of whom are graduates of the college or other American institutions. Some have studied in Europe after taking a course in the college at Marsovan. Upon the American staff, with the native associates, also rests the responsibility of supervising native evangelistic work in a wide field. Tours of inspection are taken by the missionaries from time to time, thus keeping them familiar with what is going on, so that they may devote their energies at the centre to the demands of the work outside.
As an illustration of the way in which educational institutions grow, Anatolia College is an admirable example. The germ which produced this great institution, now with more than three hundred students and several departments, was a little school in the corner of a stable in the city of Marsovan in charge of Dr. C. C. Tracy. The stable filled the greater part of the building, and in one of the corners, on a platform of earth raised a foot or so above the common level of the mud floor, and protected by a light rail, was the school. Less than a dozen children there took their first lessons in learning to read. At the start, in common intelligence, they were but little in advance of the animals that occupied the rest of the room. No one could have detected in that humble beginning the germ of an institution that now covers several acres in buildings and campus just outside the large and flourishing city of Marsovan, filled with bright young men from all parts of Anatolia, from along the entire southern shore of the Black Sea, and even from Russia, on the northern coast — studying for academic degrees in preparation for positions of influence and leadership in the new Turkish Empire.
This little stable school became a high school in 1886, and a full-grown college a few years later. It now has a faculty of twenty-three professors, fourteen of whom are natives of the country and eight have taken post-graduate courses to prepare themselves for their work. They have degrees from the New College at Edinburgh, the University of Berlin, the University of Athens, the Imperial Law School at Constantinople, the Royal Conservatory of Music at Stuttgart and the Academy at Paris.. ^,, ^..
Anatolia College has sent out 224 graduates, of whom 207 are now living. Fifty-two are engaged in teaching, forty-eight are practising medicine, and eighty-six are in business. In addition to these graduates, several thousand other young men have for a time studied in the institution and for various reasons have been compelled to leave without completing the course. These have, however, gone out armed with a new power which this college has given them, and many are doing signal service within and without the Turkish Empire. Not long since, in a mixed gathering of Turks and Christians in Marsovan, profound thanks were expressed by Mohammedan leaders for this institution and what it has done to disseminate ideas of liberty, for the emancipation of women, and for the general welfare.
Among the students in the college, who come from about half of the twenty-nine provinces of the Ottoman Empire, are also found natives of Greece, Albania, Egypt, and, as has already been stated, Russia. The courses of study are similar to the usual college courses in the United States, with the exception that more emphasis is put upon the living languages than upon the dead.