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Feriköy Protestant Cemetery Initiative2020

A BRIEF GUIDE TO

ISTANBUL’S FERIKÖY PROTESTANT CEMETERY

EVANGELICORUM COMMUNE COEMETERIUM

Death’s-head on an eighteenth-century tombstone in “Monument Row,” a memento mori, signifying human mortality

EVANGELICORUM

COMMUNE

COEMETERIUM

A BRIEF GUIDE TO

ISTANBUL’S FERIKÖY PROTESTANT CEMETERY

Feriköy Protestant Cemetery Initiative2020

Prepared byBrian Johnson and Richard Wittmann

“Graveyard of the Franks,” c. 1835, overlooking Dolmabahçe and the Bosphorus

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Cadastral map of Feriköy, c. 1925, showing the Protestant cemetery and adjacent Catholic burial ground

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EVANGELICORUM COMMUNE COEMETERIUM

ISTANBUL’S FERIKÖY

PROTESTANT CEMETERY

The origins of Istanbul’s main Protestant cemetery date back to 1853, when the Ottoman government allocated land in Feriköy as a burial ground for the city’s foreign Protestant and Catholic communities to replace an earlier cemetery

near today’s Taksim square. In use since the sixteenth century, the old site, the so-called “Graveyard of the Franks,” had become a hinderance to urban expansion. The creation of the new cemetery, on what was then the city’s outskirts, not only provided more space for interments but also matched contemporary efforts in Europe to close inner-city graveyards and replace them with more salubrious burial grounds distant from settled areas.

By 1857, however, the land allotted four years earlier was considered insufficient to meet the needs of both Protestants and Catholics, and a separate site nearby for Protestants alone was granted to the embassies of several contemporary leading Protestant nations: Great Britain, Prussia, the United States of America, the Netherlands, Denmark, the United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway, and the Federated Cities of the Hanseatic League. After negotiations and the approval of their governments, these embassies drafted operating statutes and agreed to share the duty and cost of managing the cemetery.

The new burial ground opened officially in February 1859, and since then it has served as the chief cemetery for Istanbul’s foreign Protestant (and otherwise non-Catholic or Orthodox) dead. Divided into national sections, the site occupies 1.26 hectares, or 3.1 acres (1.42 hectares, or 3.5 acres, including the adjacent “Armenian” burial ground). Close to 5,000 interments have been recorded in Feriköy’s

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registry, and about 1,000 gravesites are marked with monuments. Moreover, in the early 1860s, both human remains and grave markers were moved to Feriköy from the old Frankish graveyard at Taksim. The ancient gravestones physically link the current site to the earlier burial ground and, along with the cemetery’s own post-1859 monuments, make it the bearer of a legacy of almost five centuries.

The Feriköy cemetery is managed today by a governing board comprised of the consuls general of Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden, Hungary, Switzerland, and the USA. Furthermore, the Feriköy Protestant Cemetery Initiative (composed of scholars affiliated with six Turkey-based research centers) was formed in 2018 to study, document, and preserve the cemetery in all its aspects. Besides an active burial ground, the cemetery is a historic landmark. It is also one of the last green spots in the city’s center, a sanctuary of local native plant and animal life and a haven for migratory birds on their journey between Europe and Africa.

People from all walks of life are buried in Feriköy, many of whom spent most of their lives in Istanbul and left their mark on its history. There are also those who died anonymous, destitute, or with little or no connection to the city where they now rest: sailors, for instance, who died at sea and were buried at the cemetery when their ships put into port, or travellers whose sojourns in Istanbul ended in tragedy. Distinguished or nameless, most share the common trait of foreign nationality either by birth or naturalization. Except for the separate section in the southwest corner for Armenian and other local Protestants, the cemetery is under international administration.

Passing through the cemetery’s gate, one enters a place of solitude and calm, removed from the urban intensity outside. It is a site remote, both in time and space. Within its bounds, one might stop to reflect on the lines of verse that preface the account of Istanbul’s burial grounds in Julia Pardoe’s Beauties of the Bosphorus (1839).

Come, wander with me in the place of graves—

The tall trees wave a welcome, and the wind

Sighs like the soft music through the clustered tombs.

Come, wander with me there, where thousands rest;

We shall not waken them—theirs is the sleep

Which, dreamless, knows no waking.

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Nature and history intertwine in today’s Feriköy Protestant Cemetery

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Alexander Thomson’s gravestone

“Monument Row”

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THE CEMETERY’S NOTABLE RESIDENTS,

MONUMENTS, AND LANDMARKS

Alexander Thomson, 1820-99(book publisher, missionary)

Sent by the Free Church of Scotland to Istanbul as a missionary to the Jews in 1846, Thomson became the British and Foreign Bible Society’s chief representative in the Ottoman Empire in 1860. Based in the capital and responsible for publishing and distributing the Scriptures throughout the realm, he travelled widely. After a visit to Albania, which he thought resembled his native Scotland, he devoted the rest of his life to supporting the translation and publication of the Bible and other reading material into the native tongue of its inhabitants. His contributions extended to educational works, including a grammar, and his efforts were instrumental in the development of the modern Albanian language and its literature.

“Monument Row” Dating from the 1600s to the mid-1800s, the tombstones propped up against the cemetery’s east wall are among its oldest, moved here from the Graveyard of the Franks in in the early 1860s. Ledgers or sarcophagus covers mostly, they are technically not gravestones anymore, but memorial stones, since they no longer mark specific burials. Many are decorated with family crests, indicating the high status of those for whom they were commissioned, including several diplomats and merchants. Some also display memento mori (“reminders that we must die”), such as death’s-heads and winged hourglasses, grim symbols that appear frequently in Western funerary art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Similar monuments from the old Frankish burial ground are lined up on the cemetery’s south wall, or lie scattered in its national sections where they still mark the graves of their original owners whose remains were transferred from Taksim.

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Dutch Memorial

Wilhelm Berggren’s grave marker

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Dutch Memorial Dominating the cemetery’s section for the Netherlands, this monolith topped with a globe records the removal of remains (at the order of the Dutch government) from the Taksim graveyard to Feriköy in August 1864 and is inscribed with the names of the prominent people transferred, chiefly diplomats and merchants. Topping the list is Andre Suyderhoef (d. 1617), who came to Istanbul as secretary for the Netherlands’ first ambassador to the Ottoman Porte, Cornelis Haga. Included, too, are ambassadors Justinus Colyer (d. 1682) and Willem Gerrit Dedel (G[uillau]me Gerard Dedelii, d. 1776). Several family names are also displayed more than once, such as de Brosses, Colyer, and Diepenbroek, with death dates spanning the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, attesting to the existence of Dutch merchant dynasties in Istanbul over generations. Despite misspellings and other inaccuracies, this imposing monument is a historic testament to the presence of the Netherlands in the Ottoman Empire.

Wilhelm [Guillaume] Berggren1835-1920 (photographer)

The work of this renowned Swede, who arrived in Istanbul in the 1860s, opened a photography studio, and began to visually document local life and culture, was so admired by the Swedish king Oscar II during his visit to the Ottoman capital in 1885 that he gave Berggren the title “royal photographer of Sweden.” But Berggren’s fortune ran out in World War I when his photography business, which catered to the rich tourist trade, declined because of the lack of visitors to Istanbul. To survive he had to sell some of his glass negatives, many of which came to serve as windowpanes for greenhouses. Besides his remains, Berggren’s grave apparently contains some of his photography equipment.

Max Fruchtermann, 1852-1918(postcard publisher)

Born to German parents in Austria-Hungary, Fruchtermann came to Istanbul in 1867. He soon built a thriving business producing postcards for the tourist market, the first of its kind locally. Besides famous sites and monuments in the Ottoman capital, his cards displayed cities, landscapes, and daily life throughout the Empire, from Bosnia to the Yemen. During the First World War, Fruchtermann lost not only customers but much of his wealth. He fell into depression and drink and died in 1918. His son, Paul, buried in

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the same family plot, carried on the postcard business until 1966, when the remaining inventory was finally sold off.

Dániel Szilágyi, 1831-85 (scholar, book seller)

and the Hungarian Memorial A Hungarian revolutionary who fled to Istanbul after the failed revolt of 1848-9 against Habsburg rule, Szilágyi learned excellent Turkish and became a translator. He also opened a bookshop in Pera (today’s Beyoğlu), which, more than a commercial enterprise, served his passion for collecting Turkish, Arabic, and Persian manuscripts. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest acquired most of these after his death, and they now form the core of its library’s Oriental collection. Szilágyi and other revolutionary émigrés of 1848-9 buried at Feriköy are honored collectively in a memorial directly behind Szilágyi’s tomb, on the cemetery’s north wall. The memorial’s commemorative plaque was erected by the Hungarian-Turkish Friendship Association in 1990, and a Zsolnay pyrogranite (ceramic) of the coat of arms of the revolution’s leader, Lajos Kossuth (1802-94), was added in 2001. Two other plaques are also affixed to the wall: one honoring those who participated in the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and later found refuge in Turkey and the other dedicated to the memory of Turkologist and Hungarian-Turkish Friendship Association member Tímea Gál, who died in 2011, at the young age of forty-nine.

Max Fruchtermann

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Imre Cseh, 1805-52(soldier)

Cseh came to the Ottoman Empire well before the 1848-9Hungarian Revolution, where he joined the sultan’s army and served as an officer in Syria for sixteen years. He then returned to Transylvania to manage his family estate, and after the outbreak of the revolt in 1848, he received a command in the Hungarian army. Pressed by Russian forces, Cseh and his troops retreated into Wallachia and, on 20 July 1849, surrendered their arms to the Ottomans. He also served as Turkish language teacher and interpreter for Lajos Kossuth during the latter’s exile in the Ottoman Empire from 1849 to 1851. Cseh’s remains and tombstone were transferred to Feriköy from the old cemetery at Taksim in January 1862, and he is listed in the burial registry as “rajah” (reaya), an “Ottoman subject.”

J. B. Crighton Ginsburg, c.1826-98(missionary) Born in Russia into the Jewish faith, as “Baruch” Ginsburg, a rabbi’s son, he was converted to Protestant Christianity by so-called Hebrew Christians in 1847 and adopted the name “James.” (“Crighton,” his second wife’s maiden name, was a later addition.) The London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews sent Ginsburg to North Africa in 1857, where he proselytized in Jewish

A Fruchtermann postcard, with a photo by Wilhelm Berggren of Beyazıt Square and the Ottoman Ministry of War (today’s Istanbul University)

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Memorial to the Hungarian revolutionaries of 1848-9, with Dániel Szilágyi’s tombstone on the left

J. B. Crighton Ginsburg’sgravestone

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communities across the region. He settled in Algiers in 1864 and established the first Anglican church in North Africa there in 1870. When his activities among the Jews of Mogador (today’s Essaouira, Morocco) sparked rioting in 1879, he escaped to England, and from there went to Marseilles, where he acquired French citizenship and another name, “Jacques.” After returning to North Africa, he was finally sent to Constantinople in 1886, where he devoted the remainder of his days to the evangelization of the Jews of Ortaköy. Over the years he must have often pronounced the lines of Hebrew on his tomb—“Stand at the roads and look; ask for the ancient paths, which is the best way” (from Jeremiah 6:16)—a fitting epitaph to his life’s journey and a final word of guidance for others to find, like him, rest for the soul.

Rampacher Tomb This impressive monument, one of Feriköy’s grandest, was erected for the Belgian merchant Henri Maurice Rampacher (1816-66) by his wife a year after his death. Born in Antwerp, Rampacher established a prosperous import business in Constantinople and was awarded a knighthood of the Order of Leopold in 1858 for promoting Belgian-Ottoman trade. He also received the Order of the Medjidie, an imperial honor given to foreigners for service to the Ottoman state. But more than commemorating its owner, the tomb is also a tribute to its sculptor, the Neapolitan artist Ernesto Cali (b. 1821), whose name is engraved on the lower front panel. A nineteenth-century Italian biographical dictionary that includes Cali lists the Rampacher monument among his notable works. The tomb’s composite parts were likely fashioned abroad, shipped to Constantinople, and assembled on-site by a civil engineer, Edward Jacob, identified in an inscription near the base (on the right). Perhaps Jacob even designed the tomb, for which Cali carved the sculptural elements. Many other finely wrought monuments in the cemetery from the same era and later were also imported, especially those with granite. Adorned with diverse motifs, symbolizing the brevity of time (winged hourglass), life cut short (broken chain), and eternal life after death (inverted torch with flame), the Rampacher tomb exhibits an exceptional mix of funerary iconography.

Franz Carl Bomonti, 1857-1903(brewer)

Born on the British-occupied Ionian island of Zakynthos (Zante), Bomonti moved with his family in 1872 to Philippopolis (Plovdiv, Bulgaria), in Ottoman territory. There, his Swiss-German father, Christian August (d. 1902), opened an artisanal brewery,

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which was soon supplying Eastern Rumelia’s many consumers of alcohol with beer. When the family launched a second brewery in Constantinople in 1880, Franz Carl began managing operations in Philippopolis. The Bomontis expanded the Constantinople venture into an industrial brewery in 1890, and before the end of the decade their annual beer production exceeded five million liters and they had built a network of sales points across the Ottoman realm, not the least of which were their own beer gardens. In 1902, they opened a major new facility a stone’s throw away from the Feriköy Protestant Cemetery. Franz Carl died a year later, at age forty-six, and though the family stopped running the company in the 1930s, “Bomonti” survives both as a name for the area of Istanbul where their last brewery was located and on the label of several specialty beers produced by Anadolu Efes, Turkey’s largest brewer today.

Ernest Mamboury, 1878-1953 (scholar, author) A native of Signy-Avenex, Switzerland, Mamboury took up a post at Constantinople’s Galatasaray High School in 1909, where he spent most of his career teaching mathematics, technical drawing, and French language and literature. He also devoted himself to studying local Byzantine art and architecture, and besides authoring works on Istanbul’s Byzantine monuments, he published in 1925 the first modern, comprehensive guidebook to the city, Constantinople: Guide Touristique. It was later translated into several languages, went through several editions, and remained Istanbul’s leading guide for close to half a century. His efforts contributed not only to furthering knowledge and understanding of Istanbul’s cultural wealth but also to boosting the city’s tourism potential in the early years of the Turkish Republic.

Ossuary Marked with a simple cross, this often-overlooked spot is the single plot of ground in the cemetery that contains the most human remains. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cemetery tariffs specified a minimum payment for an adult burial for five years: six Turkish Lira in 1902. A concession to permanently occupy a plot and the right to erect a tomb required a further sum. If a permanent concession were not purchased, the deceased could be disinterred and the plot reused, after which the first resident’s bones were placed in the ossuary along with countless others.

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Rampacher Tomb

Ernest Mamboury

The Feriköy Protestant Cemetery and its main national sections

No. 5 Abide-i Hürriyet Avenue

Şişli 34380

Istanbul, Turkey

Notable Gravesites, Monuments,

and other Landmarks

1. Alexander Thomson 2. “Monument Row” 3. Dutch Memorial 4. Wilhelm [Guillaume] Berggren 5. Max Fruchtermann 6. Dániel Szilágyi and the Hungarian Memorial 7. Imre Cseh 8. J. B. Crighton Ginsburg 9. Rampacher Tomb 10. Franz Carl Bomonti 11. Ernest Mamboury 12. Ossuary 13. Traugott Fuchs 14. Josephine Powell 15. Nakamura Tomb 16. John Freely 17. Robert College Memorial 18. Mary Kinney 19. John Kingsley Birge 20. Elias Riggs and his daughter Elizabeth 21. Constantine Washington Goodell 22. Heinrich August Meissner 23. Wilhelm von Pressel 24. Johann Meyer 25. Chapel 26. William Churchill and his son Alfred 27. Norman Stone 28. “Armenian” Burial Ground 29. Visitors’ Lodge

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Traugott Fuchs, 1906-97(scholar, artist)

Born in the Alsatian village of Lohr, Fuchs developed an early love for the French language spoken in nearby areas, and even after his family moved to Germany when borders shifted post-World War I, French remained a chief interest and became a focus of his higher studies together with German. In 1934, he travelled to Istanbul to join his academic mentor, Louis Spitzer, who had fled there to escape Nazi persecution. Fuchs first taught French but later turned to German and founded Istanbul University’s German department, where he served

for almost fifty years. In 1943, he also began teaching at Robert College, today’s Bosphorus University. When Turkey joined the war against Germany in 1944, he was interned along with all other German nationals in the country. Confined in the Anatolian town of Çorum for thirteen months, he devoted himself to painting, and his “Çorum images” are regarded as important contemporary visual records of central Anatolia’s landscape and inhabitants. After returning to Istanbul in 1945, Fuchs resumed his teaching career. Following a strokeat age eighty-five, he spent his last five years in Galata’s Austrian St. George’s Hospital, where he passed away on 21 July 1997.

Josephine Powell

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Josephine Powell, 1919-2007 (photographer, ethnographer) A New York City native, Powell received a master’s degree in social work from Columbia University in 1945, joined the International Refugee Organization, and worked first in Tanganyika (Tanzania) and later in Germany. After purchasing a camera and training herself in its use, she pursued a photography career. Based in Rome in the 1950s and ‘60s as an architectural photographer, she also travelled in Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan, often in the remotest areas on horseback, to visually record important monuments as well as nomadic

life. Besides taking photographs, she collected ethnographic objects, later donated to various international museums. Powell moved to Istanbul in 1974 and spent most of the next two decades visiting and photographing Anatolia’s nomads and villagers. She also accumulated handicrafts, especially kilims and other textiles. She contributed to the ethnographic section of Istanbul’s Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art and helped establish the DOBAG Carpet Initiative, which promotes traditional carpet weaving among villagers in western Turkey. After she died, her Anatolian collections were given to Istanbul’s Koç Foundation. The bust of a horse on her grave, perhaps an antiquity, is a fitting memorial to the ventures of this remarkable woman among the nomads of Asia.

Powell’s grave marker Nakamura Tombstone

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John Freely

The “bible of guidebooks” to Istanbul

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Nakamura Tombstone Located in the cemetery’s international section, this unique monument inscribed with Japanese characters attests to the burial ground’s diversity. It marks the grave of the family of Eiichi Nakamura, who, in 1906, began managing Istanbul’s first Japanese import store, Nakamura Shoten, which had been operating in Pera since 1893. Specializing in silk, tea, porcelain, and lacquerware, the shop also catered to visitors from Japan seeking local information, tours, or introductions. During the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5), it became the hub of an intelligence-gathering network set up by Japan’s foreign ministry to monitor Russia’s Black Sea fleet. When Eiichi losthis wife and eldest son to typhus in 1909, he buried them at the Feriköy cemetery, which, besides Protestants, accepted foreign nationals of other faiths (or of none at all). Before he closed the store and left for Japan at the outbreak of World War I, Eiichi supposedly visited Feriköy every Sunday with his one remaining son, to tend the grave and mourn those it contained.

John Freely, 1926-2017(author, teacher) Born in Brooklyn, New York, Freely spent much of his childhood in his mother’s native Ireland as well as the United States. After joining the US Navy at the end of World War II and serving inthe Far East, he took advantage of the GI Bill to earn a doctorate in physics. Offered a post teaching science at Robert College, he moved to Istanbul in 1960, where he became absorbed in the city’s history and culture. Though he taught for most of his life, Freely is better known for his writing, chiefly popular works on history and travel. When his most celebrated book, Strolling through Istanbul (co-authored with art historian Hilary Sumner-Boyd who is buried nearby) was published in 1973, it soon replaced Ernest Mamboury’s earlier work as the “bible of guidebooks” to Istanbul. Although he was Catholic by birth, his ashes (brought from England where he spent his last two years) lie in the Protestant cemetery on account of his American citizenship and desire to remain among many Robert College friends also resting there. The inscription on the Freely memorial fountain a short distance away alludes to his last book, Stamboul Ghosts, published posthumously, which describes many of the charismatic figures he met during his years in the city, all, like him, now deceased.

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Robert College Memorial This plaque on the cemetery’s west wall lists the names of former teachers and administrators of Istanbul’s Robert College recorded in the burial registry. Primarily meant to commemorate school staff members who lie in unmarked graves, it was erected circa 2003 through the efforts of John Chalfant, the college’s headmaster from 1971 to 1977.

Mary Kinney, 1874-1930 (teacher, missionary)

Born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, Kinney was sent to Turkey in 1899 by Woman’s Board of Missions (the women’s auxiliary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions) to teach at a Protestant Armenian girls’ school in Adapazarı, where she became director in 1910. When World War I broke out while she was on furlough in the United States in 1914, which prevented travel to Turkey, she went to Port Said, Egypt, to work in a Red Cross camp for Armenian refugees. After the 1918 armistice, Kinney returned to Adapazarı and reopened the school, which doubled as an orphanage. Fighting nearby during the Turkish War of Independence forced her to flee to Istanbul with her orphans in 1921. She housed them on the old campus of the American College for Girls at Üsküdar, which the school had vacated eight years earlier to move to Arnavutköy. In September 1921, Kinney reopened the Adapazarı school in this new location under the name “American School for Girls,” today’s Üsküdar American Academy, where she served as

Mary Kinney’s gravestone

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principal for the next decade. She died in February 1930, and a contemporary account relates that despite the cold and rain several hundred people gathered for her funeral in Feriköy. Bedecked with flowers and greens, the chapel was filled to overflowing, and Kinney’s casket was draped in violets, placed there by the girls of her beloved school. Besides prayers, hymns, and Scripture readings in the Protestant tradition, part of the burial service of the Gregorian Church was also recited, to honor a woman who had devoted so much of her life to educating and caring for the Armenian people.

John Kingsley Birge, 1888-1952 (scholar, missionary)

Born in Bristol, Connecticut, Birge received his higher education at Yale University and the Hartford Theological Seminary before going to Turkey in 1913 to teach at Izmir’s International College (now located in Beirut, Lebanon). He began to serve on the publication committee of the Near East Mission of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission in 1919 and became head of the publication department (located in Istanbul) in 1932. During his tenure as press director, he led the editorial team that updated James Redhouse’s English-Turkish lexicon from Ottoman to modern Turkish. The project lasted twelve years and culminated in the publication of The Revised Redhouse Dictionary, English-Turkish in 1950. Birge simultaneously pursued his own study of Turkish history and Islam. While on furlough in the United States in the early 1940s, he taught Turkish language and area studies at Princeton University. He also authored books and articles in these fields, including The Bektashi

John Kingsley Birge (third from left) and the Revised Redhouse Dictionary editorial team (including renowned Turcologist Andreas Tietze, fourth from left) in 1950

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Order of Dervishes (1937), his best-known work, which still remains the definitive scholarly study of the beliefs, practices, and history of the Bektashis.

Elias Riggs, 1810-1901 (translator, missionary)

and his daughter Elizabeth 1839-58(the cemetery’s first resident)

Born in New Providence, New Jersey, Riggs demonstrated a gift for languages at a young age. He learned to read when he was four, started Greek at nine, and took up Hebrew at thirteen. After joining the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1832, he spent most of his sixty-year career in Istanbul translating the Scriptures and hundreds of hymns and religious tracts into Armenian, Bulgarian, Turkish, and Greek. His accomplishments are reflected in the epitaph on his tomb, translated into these languages. Like many other granite monuments at the cemetery, the gravestone was produced abroad (in Aberdeen, Scotland, the “Granite City”) and imported to Turkey. Many of Riggs’ descendants also served as missionaries, both in Turkey and elsewhere. Testifying to the family’s exceptional role, a biographical dictionary of Christian missions states that the Riggs and his descendants “accounted for more than a thousand years of missionary service through five generations.” One of his offspring whose life was cut short before she could begin her career was his eldest daughter, Elizabeth. At the end of 1858, fresh back from two years of schooling in the United States, she was about to start teaching at a mission girls’ school in Istanbul when scarlet fever cut her down at the age of twenty. She died on 29 November 1858 and was laid to rest in Feriköy the next day, roughly three months before the cemetery opened officially in February 1859. She was the first person entered into the cemetery’s registry and buried in its grounds.

Constantine Washington Goodell1831-41 (Istanbul’s first American child) The son of Reverend William Goodell (d. 1867), who established the American Board’s Constantinople station in June 1831, Constantine Washington was the first American born in Istanbul, on 30 August 1831. Named in honor of the founder of the city of his birth as well as the founder of the capital of the United States, he was baptized on 25 September 1831 at the residence of the head of the American legation, Commodore David Porter, twelve days after the US and the Ottoman Empire established diplomatic relations. He died of gastric typhoid fever in 1841 and was buried in the Graveyard of the

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The grave markers of Elias Riggs (back row, center), Elizabeth Riggs (back row, left), and Constantine Washington Goodell (front row, far right, below the tree)

Riggs’ burial permit

Elias Riggs

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Franks at Taksim. His remains and tombstone, along with those of several other Americans buried nearby, were transferred to Feriköy in July 1863.

Heinrich August Meissner 1862-1940 (railway engineer)

Born in Leipzig, in the German state of Saxony, Meissner spent most of his youth in Dresden, where he later studied civil engineering with a focus on railway construction (1881-5). He moved to Turkey in 1887 and built railroads in various parts of Anatolia and the Balkans. In 1900, he was appointed senior engineer for the Hijaz Railway project designed to connect Damascus with the holy cities of Medina and Mecca, and after the opening of the line’s Damascus-Amman-Maan section in 1904, he received the title “Pasha” for his achievements. Meissner joined the Société Impériale Ottomane du Chemin de Fer de Baghdad in 1910, which had been incorporated by Deutsche Bank in 1903 to complete a railway across Anatolia into Mesopotamia and link Istanbul with Baghdad. By the end of World War I, more than a thousand kilometers of track had been laid for the Baghdad line. During the war, Meissner also built a military railroad in Palestine to support a planned Turkish invasion of the British protectorate of Egypt. He was forced to leave the Ottoman Empire

Meissner Pasha

Opening of the Hijaz Railway

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in 1918 but returned to Turkey at the request of the new republican government in 1924 to serve as a railway consultant. Besides rebuilding rail lines damaged in years of conflict, he continued work on the Baghdad route. After he retired as a railway builder, Meissner taught railroad construction at Istanbul Technical University. He died just a few months before the first train travelled on the newly completed Baghdad Railway in 1940.

Wilhelm von Pressel, 1821-1902(railway engineer)

Born in Stuttgart, in the kingdom of Württemberg, Pressel was trained as a stonemason but later turned to railroad construction under the influence of the railway engineer and architect Carl von Etzel (d. 1865). He gained his first experience building a

Railway station in İzmit

Wilhelm von Pressel

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Meyer family tomb

Istanbul’s Dolmabahçe Palace clock tower, with a Jean-Paul Garnier timepiece installed by Johann Meyer

Johann Meyer

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line in the Swabian Alps between 1844 and 1850, and for the next two decades he worked on rail projects in Switzerland and Austria, including the construction of the Brenner Railway. In 1869, he became chief engineer for the Compagnie des Chemins de Fer Orientaux, set up to link Constantinople with Western Europe by rail. Work began at multiple places in 1870, including Alexandropolis, Thessaloniki, and Dobrjlin (on the Austrian frontier), and roughly five hundred kilometers of track were operational by 1872, when the first train entered Constantinople. This venture earned Pressel an invitation from Sultan Abdülaziz to draft plans for an extensive rail network across Anatolia. The first link was completed in two years and connected Haydarpaşa (in Kadiköy) to İzmit, but political opposition and financial difficulties hindered the project, and it was aborted in 1875. Though Pressel later advocated vigorously for building a railway from Istanbul to Baghdad, which earned him the moniker “Father of the Baghdad Railway,” he never saw his vision realized. Construction on this famous line only commenced in 1903, a year after his death.

Johann Meyer, 1844-1920(clockmaker) Born and raised in Athens, Greece, Meyer also spent part of his youth in Constantinople before going to Berlin to learn the clock-making trade. He worked for a while in Athens and then moved to the Ottoman capital in 1874 to take up the post of clock master to Sultan Abdülhamid II. After losing imperial favor and his appointment four years later, Meyer opened his own business in 1878. One of his most celebrated inventions was a pocket watch that not only displayed but also automatically synchronized alafranga (“European”) mean solar time and alaturka (“Ottoman”) local time, which calculated days from sunset to sunset in correspondence with the Islamic lunar calendar. This fully mechanical timepiece, named Hamidiye in the sultan’s honor, was inspired by similar watches produced in Europe for the Ottoman market that had to be manually adjusted every day at sunset. Though German citizens were deported from Turkey after WWI, Meyer was exempted from the order and lived out his days in Istanbul. His son Emil (d. 1954) and grandson Wolfgang (d. 1981) also pursued careers as clockmakers in Istanbul, and all now lie together in timeless sleep in the family tomb in Feriköy.

Chapel This neo-Gothic structure was built within a decade of the cemetery’s opening in 1859, in the same era that saw the planning and construction of Beyoğlu’s Crimean Memorial Church (1858-

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Inside the chapel

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68), which the chapel resembles. If the architecture has an English Anglican aspect, the statue of Christ above the altar inside—a copy of Christus Consolator sculpted in 1838 by the Dane Bertel Thorvaldsen (d. 1844)—is distinctly Lutheran. The massive original, in Copenhagen’s Lutheran cathedral, has been described as the most perfect sculpture of Christ ever made, and smaller replicas can be found in Lutheran churches worldwide, beckoning all, with a promise of eternal life, to “come unto me.”

William Churchill, 1796-1846(correspondent, newspaper publisher)

and his son Alfred, 1825-1870(newspaper publisher)

Born in London, William Nosworthy Churchill came to Smyrna (today’s Izmir) in the late 1810s, apparently to report for the English newspaper The Morning Herald. After marrying the daughter of a French merchant in 1824, he moved to Constantinople, where, besides journalism, he engaged in trade and served as a consular official in the American legation. He was removed from his post in 1834, after a dispute with Chargé d’Affaires David Porter, and two years later, while hunting near Üsküdar, he accidentally shot and wounded a Turkish boy, for which he was arrested, beaten, and jailed. Known as the “Churchill Affair,” this incident caused a brief rift in British-

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William and Alfred Churchills’ chest tomb (foreground)

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Ottoman relations that was only healed after Churchill’s release and receipt of compensation. In 1840, Churchill established a newspaper in Constantinople, Ceride-i Havadis (“Journal of News”), the Ottoman Empire’s first privately owned gazette, especially noted for its coverage of foreign affairs and politics. When Churchill passed away in 1846, his son Alfred took over as owner and editor and continued to publish the paper until his own death in 1870. At the end of 1863, William Churchill’s remains were moved from the old Taksim burial ground to Feriköy, where they seem to have been re-interred in the cemetery’s American section, perhaps by his daughter, Juliette, who had acquired US citizenship through marriage. When Juliette died in 1870, she was laid to rest in the same section, probably beside her father. Nonetheless, as evidenced by a note in the cemetery’s registry, William’s remains were eventually transferred to the plot where Alfred was buried. Today, father and son lie in the same grave, under a chest tomb inscribed with both their names, in the cemetery’s British section.

Norman Stone, 1941-2019(historian) Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Stone entered Cambridge University in 1959, where he studied history and later lectured. He published the first of many books in 1975, The Eastern Front 1914-1917, a groundbreaking account of World War I’s Eastern Theater.

First issue of Ceride-i Havadis, 31 July 1840

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In the 1980s, he received a professorship at Oxford University and also served as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s chief advisor on European affairs. Noted for his linguistic abilities, he spoke close to ten languages. With his knowledge of old German gothic handwriting and research about Adolf Hitler (he published a biography in 1980), he was one of the first historians to denounce the “Hitler Diaries” as forgeries when they were publicized in 1983. Stone retired from Oxford in 1997 and moved to Turkey, which he came to regard as his second homeland. Besides Ankara’s Bilkent University, he also taught at Istanbul’s Koç University. In 2007, he published Turkey: A Short History, which aroused international controversy for its treatment of the Armenian question of 1915. Stone died in Budapest, his place of residence since 2016, but his remains were returned to Turkey to fulfill his wish to rest eternally in his adopted land.

“Armenian” Burial Ground When Feriköy opened in 1859, the Ottoman Empire’s local, chiefly Armenian, Protestant community was only about a decade old. The state had recognized its Protestant subjects as a millet, or official self-governing religious community, in 1847 and further defined its rights and privileges in 1850. Besides places of worship, local Protestants needed burial places for their dead, and shortly after the Ottoman government granted the land for the Feriköy cemetery in 1857, the representatives of the Protestant powers discussed giving them a portion. Feriköy’s “Armenian” section was probably created in the 1860s, soon after the cemetery opened. Though its graves mostly belong to Armenians, its name is misleading since Greeks and Assyrians are also buried here. More precisely, this area is for Turkish citizens, and it is administered separately from the larger cemetery for foreigners outside its walls.

Visitors’ Lodge Designed to provide reception space for funerals, the lodge was built in 2000 with funds from a bequest left to the Feriköy Protestant Cemetery by Emma “Charlie” Ehrmann (1921-95), an American expat who spent considerable time in Istanbul and was fond of the place. The work was planned by Alan McCain, general secretary of the Amerikan Bord Heyeti (the United Church of Christ’s local mission program, which traced its origins to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions). He also refurbished the chapel, restored tombs, widened the access road, and supported an early effort to document the cemetery and its history. Fittingly,

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Norman Stone (at his home in Oxford, 2010)

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Visitors’ Lodge

Gravestones in the cemetery’s “Armenian” section

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when he passed away in 2017, he was laid to rest in Feriköy, near the grave of Elias Riggs (see top photo on page 26).

Besides its practical function, and in fulfillment of Ehrmann’s wish, the lodge also serves as a memorial to the cemetery’s thousands buried in unmarked graves. Their numbers include many prominent individuals whose records of achievement alone preserve their memory, such as Andreas David Mordtmann (1811-79), an eminent German scholar of the Near East, who also served as diplomatic representative to the Ottoman Porte for the Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck and the grand duchy of Oldenburg in the 1850s, and German composer Paul Lange (1857-1919), who taught music at Istanbul’s German High School and Robert College, became an orchestra conductor for the Ottoman navy in 1905, and reached the pinnacle of his career with an appointment as Ottoman court musician in 1908. For the countless others who rest in total anonymity at the cemetery, a plaque engraved with lines from Ecclesiasticus 44 on the far-left wall inside the visitor’ lodge offers the sole remembrance of their lives.

Some there are who have no Memorial;

Who are perished as though they had never lived.

Their bodies are buried here in peace,

and their hope is in the mercy of God.

Visitors to the Feriköy Protestant Cemetery a century ago

For today’s visitors, we hope this guide highlights the cemetery’s importance as a historic landmark, vital to preserve for generations to come. We also dedicate it to the memory of those whose lives—mentioned in these pages or not—are forever linked to these grounds.

The Feriköy Protestant CemeteryInitiative

“The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long”

Horace

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate:I think they have no portion in us after We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses: Out of a misty dreamOur path emerges for a while, then closes Within a dream.

Ernest Dowson, Vitae Summa Brevis, 1896

“The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long”

Horace

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate:I think they have no portion in us after We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses: Out of a misty dreamOur path emerges for a while, then closes Within a dream.

Ernest Dowson, Vitae Summa Brevis, 1896

First published in 2020 by The Feriköy Protestant Cemetery Initiative

Text copyright © 2020 Brian Johnson and Richard Wittmann

Design: Murat Celep, Deney Design Ltd., IstanbulMap: Fokke Gerritsen

All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the written permissionof The Feriköy Protestant Cemetery Initiative.

Outside front cover: aerial view of the Feriköy Protestant Cemetery; inside front cover: detail from a tombstone on the cemetery’s east wall; outside back cover: sculpture from a gravestone in the cemetery’s German section; inside back cover: sculptural detail from a grave marker.

Illustration credits

PhotographersAndrew Crowley: p. 37.Deniz Gönel: pp. 8 (top), 10, 14 (bottom), 21, 24, 27 (top), 30 (top), 32-3, 38 (bottom).Donald R. Johnson: p. 7, back cover (outside).Dick Osseman: pp. 8 (bottom), 17 (top), 38 (top), 42-3, back cover (inside).István Pi Tóth: front cover (outside), p. 14 (top).https://www.goodfreephotos.com: p. 30 (bottom right).

CollectionsAmerican Board Collection, American Research Institute in Turkey, Istanbul: pp. 25, 27 (middle), 40-1.Feriköy Protestant Cemetery Archive, Netherlands Consulate-General, Istanbul: p. 27 (bottom).Brian Johnson: front cover (inside), pp. 2-3, 4, 17 (bottom), 22 (bottom), 34.Josephine Powell Collection, Vehbi Koç Foundation, Istanbul: p. 20. Richard Wittmann: pp. 12, 13, 28, 29, 30 (bottom left).Bosphorus University Communications Office, Istanbul: p. 22 (top).Milli Kütüphane, Ankara: p. 35.

AcknowledgementsSpecial thanks to Feriköy Protestant Cemetery Initiative members Gábor Fodor and Fokke Gerritsen for providing information about the cemetery’s Hungarian and Dutch sections, respectively, and to Olof Heilo, Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal, and Zeynep Simavi for their help and support in bringing this work to publication.

For further information, please visit our website: http://www.ferikoycemetery.org/

The Feriköy Protestant Cemetery Initiative

AMERICAN RESEARCHINSTITUTE IN TURKEY ORIENT-INSTITUT

ISTANBUL

Winged cherub on a nineteenth-century funerary monument, a more hopeful motif than the memento mori of earlier times, symbolizing the soul’s rebirth in heaven

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