Introduction to “From St. Paul's Home Town”

          Several years ago I was reading an article online when reference was made to a historian in Germany looking about in old Ottoman archives in Istanbul. He had come across a report of some missionaries kidnapping several Turkish girls and wanted to know more about it. I made a desultory effort to track down the historian in order to send to him an eyewitness account of what had happened, but I failed. The missionary in question was Dr. David Metheny, a Covenanter then working in the port city of Mersine on the northwest corner of the Mediterranean Sea opposite Cyprus. His daughter, Evangeline Metheny, wrote this account of what happened.

Before you read her account, a short glossary of place names and words that she uses might be helpful.

Tarsus – second location of Covenanter missionaries in Turkey besides Mersine. Long ago, it was the birthplace of Saul.

Alawites – a minority religious sect in mountainous Syria and nearby Turkey to whom Covenanter missionaries brought the Gospel (officially a Muslim sect, but so odd as to not really be Muslim at all; spelling varies in different sources; the present dictator Bashar al-Assad of Syria is an Alawite.)

Capitulations – treaties extorted from the Ottoman Turkish government in the 1800s by various European countries, some of which provided for better treatment of Turkey’s Christian minorities than was previously the case (greatly resented by Turks, of course) and others gave European nationals special privileges.

Hejaz in Arabia – the Muslim holy cities of Medina and Mecca and the area around them, controlled by the Ottoman Turks for 400 years until 1916.

Rhodes – largest of the Dodecanese islands with a storied history (site of the fabled Colossus statue) off the southwest corner of Turkey; controlled by the Ottomans from 1522 to 1912 when Italy took it over until 1947 when it became part of Greece.

Coming into the roads – old way to say that a ship sailed into a port.

Rode pillion – seated on a pad behind the rider of a horse; often side saddle (not safe and not easy on the rider or the horse).

Roweled – a rowel is the pointed disk on the end of a spur, meant for the horse, but a danger to the legs of someone riding pillion.

Vienna – beautiful capital of Austria today and the Catholic Austrian Empire before that, besieged by the Ottomans in 1529 (thereby allowing the Reformation to get fully established in parts of Germany) and again in 1683 (rescued by Polish cavalry).

The old days are gone – Evangeline’s conclusion, referring to the westernizing reforms of Mustafa Kemal; but current Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is bringing them back.

– Bill Edgar

From St. Paul's Home Town

By Evangeline Metheny

Reprint from the Covenanter Witness, 7/29/1936, pp. 66-68

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          Once upon a time there were three little girls, Flower, Pure, and Snow. They were born and bred in Tarsus, but little they knew of the long history of their city. They only knew that there was mud, mud, mud in winter; dust, mosquitoes, and flies in summer; in their season sugar-cane, cotton, cabbages, monster cabbage roses; and also in their season the fragrant flowers and fruit of orange, lemon and citron trees. Also there were swarms of unwashed children – why attract the attention of evil spirits to your children by keeping them clean? And everywhere, in those good old days, were snarling, yelping, mangy curs; for it is unlucky to kill dogs, so the poor hungry creatures multiplied exceedingly.

These little girls had a fairy-story stepmother. With us the cruel stepmother is as rare as dragons or griffins. But out here she was tragically common. What can one expect when a child of eleven or twelve is haled away from her play and brought to an elderly husband’s house to drudge for three children? One day in a fit of temper this stepmother threw little Snow, who was learning to talk, into water deep enough to drown her. Some one got Snow out, but the shock struck her dumb, for good and all. As time went on things got no better. At last the harassed father brought her to the Mission School in Mersine. So there he placed his children with Miss Sterrett who is now Mrs. Balph. When the dumb child was about six, we were going to America, so my father [Dr. David Metheny] got permission from Snow’s father to take Snow to America to put her in a school for mutes. She learned to read and write and when she was grown up married a man who was deaf or dumb or both, and in America she stayed until her death some years ago.

Flower and Pure stayed on in the Mersine boarding school very happily for some years. Then a sister of their father’s found that she could do herself a good turn by marrying the girls off to men who would reward her. The father did not want this at all. If my memory serves me, the elder girl’s suitor had a wife and the father did not want his daughter to marry a man who already had a wife whom he might prefer to the new wife, once the novelty had worn off. Anyhow, he wanted them to stay on at school, even though according to the customs of his people he would get a big money gift from each son-in-law. He begged Miss Sterrett and my father not to let the girls leave school or go anywhere with their aunt.

This aunt herself was a former mission school pupil, but she was of the Simon-the-Sorcerer sort [see Acts 8:9-25]. She had professed a change of heart and belief and had fooled the missionaries finely in her youth. Indeed after all the events that I am going to tell you of, she fooled a new generation of them just as she had the others. But from the time I was a small child “unto this present,” she had always made my flesh creep. Not being able to persuade her brother to let her marry off his girls, she made a religious matter of it and a political one, too. She brought it about that complaints were laid that my father was forcibly holding the girls and was compelling them to turn Christian. I think I did not say that they belonged to a sect of peculiar beliefs who call themselves Moslems but who hold tenets that are abhorrent to orthodox Moslems [the family are Alawites. -ed.]. Among these is the belief that one may profess whatever religion is most convenient, at the same time continuing to practice his own religion in secret. “Religious profession,” they say, “is a garment. One may change his garments as best suits him, but is not thereby affected inwardly.” Whenever it suited them to call themselves Moslems to get Moslem sympathy, they did so. Thus it was in this case. In spite of the father’s steadfast refusal to have his girls removed from the school, the aunt managed to enlist the sympathies of the government of that time (back in the last century [19th C]), and my father was officially notified to hand them over to their father.

Now in those days the Capitulations were still in force. These were concessions wrested from Turkey in the old, old days when her magnificent and far-reaching power, built up by Sultan Selim the Grim, and his son, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, was waning. I wonder how many of those who read this know the story of this David and Solomon of the Turkish Empire. In 1517 – the same year in which Luther nailed up his famous Theses in German – Selim the Grim took Aleppo and marching south conquered all Syria, Egypt, also the Hejaz in Arabia. His son took Irak [Iraq] in the East, and, in the West, Rhodes, which was held by the knights of St. John; and he all but took Vienna in 1529. The story of their conquests and of the naval actions won by Sulieman’s great admiral, Khayr-ed-Din Barbarossa, is thrilling. I see I have not told about their conquest of Algiers, another jewel in the Ottoman crown. The Turkish Empire was enormous and Europe held the Turkish power in great awe. Then bit by bit, century after century, the powers of Europe gained ground. Little by little they wrested this concession and that from Turkey, and claimed special privileges for their nationals in Turkey. These were the famous Capitulations. They were shamefully abused by many foreigners and it is no wonder that they have been swept away. However, in those days, when Turkey was still an illiterate nation ruled by caprice, the Capitulations could be made to serve the ends of justice by decent foreigners. Americans were classed with Europeans.

One of the privileges of European nationals resident in Turkey was that the Turkish tribunals had no jurisdiction over them. If they were accused of breaking the laws of Turkey, the Turkish government reported the cases to the consul of the accused, and he negotiated the matter through his embassy. The Turkish police could not enter a foreigner’s domicile. As I said, it was a fine state of affairs for foreign rascals, and one that the Turkish Republic now refuses to tolerate. However, such was the law at the time of my story.

The town authorities ordered policemen to enter the school premises, but they were afraid to try it. At last the Governor of the Province came in person from the town where his residence was, to superintend the actual digging of a breach in the wall of the school. The men that he had with him tapped the wall here and tapped it there, listening for a good spot. Some of our family watched all this with deep interest from a balcony. At last the order was given to break through. “And what is the name of this man into whose premises I am to break through?” asked the military officer, who was entrusted with carrying out the governor’s order. They gave him the name. “That name?” said he. “I was sent into exile for years and demoted because I forcibly entered his premises in Latakia. No. Excuse me. You will have to find someone else to carry out that order.”

Of course my father did not know of all this conversation at the time. He was expecting trouble. Already the American representative at Constantinople, for so Istanbul was called in those days, had wired my father an uncoded open telegram. “Deliver up girls and telegraph me particulars.” I shall not give the name of that man. Suffice it to say that it was neither Oscar Strauss nor Henry Morgenthau. To this my father replied by letter, saying, among other things, that the girls in question had been handed over to him voluntarily by their father, who most urgently asked him to keep them. My father said that by all the unwritten laws of the East the girls were his. That if he so chose, he might even take them as brides for his sons. And this was true though Father certainly was not contemplating such a step. One member of the Mission, I remember, wrote out a telegram and tried to get my father to send it to the American Representative in Constantinople, as follows: “Curb your insolence and wait until better informed.” I remember the exact wording. Father thought the telegram suggested not sufficiently diplomatic. So it was not sent.

Just when tension was highest, that day the U.S.S. San Francisco appeared in the offing. At that time our men of war were white and easily distinguished from a distance. And presently the flag was plain to be seen. My father at once dismissed a messenger to inform the governor of our town that an American warship was coming into the roads, and to say that doubtless the governor would wish to make the usual preparations for receiving it. I cannot remember whether it was before or after the message was sent that we made out a Rear Admiral’s flag. Father sent no message to the Governor of the Province, as officially he had no cognizance of his presence in town, though he had unofficially seen him making preparations to break into our premises. Father was always “correct” in such matters. We heard afterwards that the Governor of the Province had betaken himself unceremoniously to the railway station and demanded to be sent to his own city. “But your Excellency will wait till we can get your own special coach ready?” No, he did not wait. The rank of the Governor of our town entitled him to a salute of 13 guns. The Governor of the Province got 19 guns from foreign warships.

The Governor of the town received the officers of the San Francisco with all due formalities, and doubtless returned the call as is the custom. I only suppose that he did, because it is always done. I do not remember hearing anything about it. It was our energetic Consul Gibson, American Consul General in Beyrouth [Beirut], who had seen the thing through and got the warship sent. A servant of Lord Curzon once described him to me as “a very testy gentleman.” At least that much could be said about the admiral who came on that occasion. He had the horse-races in Palermo on his brain, and to be torn away from them by a piece of naval duty went against the grain. And the grain was rough, anyhow. Further, he had a fine confidence in his own thoroughly Anglo-Saxon French and scorned interpreters. He sent for the Governor General of the Province and spoke his mind to him in his own remarkable sort of French; which by all I was told by his own officers was English literally translated into French words pronounced with a fine United States accent, and well interlarded with untranslated English oaths. Of course as a young lady in a drawing room, I never saw this side of the admiral, so I can only go on hearsay.

The upshot was that there was no more question of the premises being entered. On the other hand, so that everything should be fair and square, my father was instructed to take the girls to Tarsus to their own father there to say before witnesses whether they chose to stay with their father or to come back to school. Mrs. Kennedy, then Jennie Dodds (dates these events to c.1894), was in charge of the school with Miss Sterrett, and it fell to her to take the girls home, which she did. They made their open choice to go back to school with her. I rather think they were there until 1897. From time to time they were bothered by the aunt or her emissaries. There was always the danger of her having them kidnapped. Once when it was time to go to the hills to escape the heat of summer Miss Dodds had to take the girls up by night for fear of the aunt’s interference. The younger girl rode pillion behind one of the teachers. She arrived with her legs badly roweled. When I asked her how she had got them cut up like that she said that the stirrups were the old Turkish sort with a square, sharp-cornered piece of metal under the foot. Riders used the sharp corners as spurs. The teacher, urging forward the horse to get the journey safely over, had kicked steadily, supposing the stirrup-corners were spurring the horse’s flanks. But it was the girls’ legs that got them. As I looked at her raw and bleeding calves I asked her in bewilderment, “Why didn’t you tell the teacher he was kicking you?” “It would have been a shame,” answered Pure. I think that my interest in her affairs cooled from that moment. It did seem to my young intolerance that a girl who was so modest that she would let her legs be kicked to ribbons all of an eighteen mile ride was really not worth the rumpus that was being made about her.

In the long run, the girls married men of their own choice, of their father’s faith, and so far as I have ever heard were happy in their choice.

I have written this article, checking it up with Mrs. Kennedy, because my father has already passed into legend. People in these countries tell me the wildest tales of his swift riding, his miraculous cures, his last words. Missionaries who have come to the country since my father’s day have no way of checking up on these tales, unless they pass possibility; for I think no story about my father could be stranger, more out of the ordinary than thing after thing that he really did. Twice recently inaccurate reports of this matter have been given at home, so I give you the story as one who was present and very much alive, indeed, while it was all going on.

It all happened over forty years ago. In the interval the girl’s father and mine, and two of the girls themselves have died – though the wicked aunt lives on. The consul and the admiral have been dead this many a year.

The famous – and sometimes infamous – Capitulations have been swept away with the broom of civilization. Tarsus has a wonderful new park all sweet with roses, and close by the Municipal Cinema. Everywhere are unveiled girls and women rejoicing in a new liberty. The old days are gone.