User:Yohannan123/Fiske Seminary

Fiske (Fisk) Seminary is one of a string of colleges created in the 19th century for women by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). Most of these schools whether in Istanbul or Harput or Aintab, had students that belonged to the Christian minorities. Fiske Seminary students were mainly Assyrian girls, from the eastern most remaining indigenous Christians of the Middle East. The educational efforts fostered by the American missionaries led to one of the highest rates of literacy among Assyrians in all of Iran in the period prior to World War I. Fidelia Fiske (1816-1864), an early graduate of Mount Holyoke College (1838), headed the girls school in Urmiah and helped to place its curriculum and its schedules on a regular basis. The school was named after her when she returned to Massachusetts where she died. From about 1904 to 1918 the principal of the school was Mary Lewis and one of the teachers was Mary Fleming. After the death of his wife from typhoid during the siege of the Urmiah American and French missionary compounds in 1915, Dr. William Shedd married Mary Lewis. They both accompanied the fleeing Christians in 1918 and he died of cholera, as did many of the refugees. Her tribute to him and her witness to the destruction of the Urmiah Assyrians is The measure of a man; the life of William Ambrose Shedd, missionary to Persia, (New York, George H. Doran Company, 1922) After 1918, when two thirds of the world Assyrian population perished due to the ravages of Kurds, the Ottoman army and local Turks in Azarbaijan, it was Assyrian women graduates of Fiske Seminary who helped establish makeshift schools in the refugee camps of Iraq (Baquba and Mandan) and later in Baghdad. During the period when Assyrians were stranded as refugees while the Iranian army pacified east Azarbaijan of Kurdish tribal disturbances, and while Tehran deliberated whether to allow the surviving Assyrians to return to their homes, Fiske Seminary operated in Tabriz. But the classes were only a quarter the size of those prior to the war. In 1925 four women graduated. Among these were several, including Lillie Yohannan and Bertha Amrikhas who went on to teach at Fiske Seminary when it finally relocated back to Urmiah in 1927. By 1934 the Iranian government ordered all foreign missionaries out of Urmiah. All the schools were closed. Assyrian education in Iran has never recovered.