Istanbul (Turkey) -- Description and travel; Istanbul (Turkey) -- Social life and customs
We descend from the terrace and we are taken to the principal buildings
of the college through its splendid grounds. The park is beautiful and
well kept and is crowned with an enormous terrace, facing East, from
where we have another view totally different but fully as gorgeous
as the one we had from the Hospital Building. That is the beauty of
the Bosphorus: its aspect changes from any spot that you stand on,
its every hill, its every house, its every nook and every corner
has a different outlook, each one more beautiful than the other. It
completely does away with the monotony that any panorama, no matter how
beautiful, generally has.
Right behind the terrace are the playgrounds of the college, large
lawns with special accommodations for all kinds of games: football,
tennis, croquet, and of course basket-ball and baseball. Around these
grounds and facing the Bosphorus in a semi-circle are the principal
buildings of the College where the class-rooms, the dormitories, the
dining-rooms, laboratories, gymnasiums, etc. are located. We go through
some of them. They are all spacious, well-ventilated and bright rooms,
and each is equipped according to the latest dictates of hygiene and
science. It really is perfect in every detail and no modern college in
the United States can muster any better accommodation
Our host is justly proud when we compliment him on the College. As
they are taking us back to our motor he walks with me and expresses his
personal disappointment in not having a larger number of Turkish pupils.
“We have pupils from all the nations of the Near East,” he says, “but
the largest quota is provided by the Armenians. We have, however, quite
a few Greeks, we have even Bulgarians and Roumanians who come here from
their distant countries, we have Caucasians and Russians, but barely a
few Turks. I do not understand why more Turkish families do not send
their children to be educated and brought up by us. The Turks desire
to acquire modern education, they are unquestionably good workers and
progressive. Ours is, I believe, the best College in the Near East, we
have excellent teachers and our courses are as complete as any of the
American Colleges back home. Still the Turks don't seem to care to send
us their children. They seem to admire the Americans, they desire to
know us better, to make themselves better known to us. They seem to be
sincere in their wish to understand us better and to have themselves
better understood in America. Still only a very few of them send their
sons to the only American College here and they prefer to send them
to Galata Serai which is a college run by the French and where French
education is imparted.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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