The Seljuk Han of Anatolia
The Shutterbug Priest
The following chapter is from the book of essays by Katharine Branning
on the history and culture of Tokat, Turkey, entitled
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Pontic men and children: photo by Guillaume de Jerphanion (Archives of the Pontifico Istituto Orientale)
Of the many foreign travelers who came to Tokat in the past, one stands out from all the rest. This one is distinctive, because he left us more than written descriptions in a travel journal: he has told his story in physical images. His photographs and detailed maps allow us to create a visual understanding of the Tokat world of his time. I call him the Shutterbug Priest, but his real name was Père Guillaume de Jerphanion.
Guillaume de Jerphanion (1877-1948) was a French Jesuit priest. He was more than a priest, however, for in good Jesuit tradition, he was superbly educated and multifaceted: a man of the cloth, certainly, but also an epigraphist, geographer, photographer, cartographer, linguist, archaeologist and Byzantine scholar. He was the first person to undertake a systematic exploration and study of the cave churches in Cappadocia, about which he published several works. Above all, he was a ground-breaking shutterbug in a time when photography was still new, and a pioneering cartographer in an age when few people had any idea where Anatolia, much less Tokat, was situated on the world map. He put a human face on the Turkish people, pinpointed geographical references, and captured images of the yet-undiscovered monuments of Anatolia for the entire world.
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Son of a venerable noble Provençal family, Père de Jerphanion was born in the scenic Var region of southern France in 1877. The young Guillaume initially wished to embark on a career in the Navy, but at the age of 16, he heard the words attributed to St. Ignatius, founder in the 16th century of the Catholic Order of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuit Order), and took them into his heart: “Ad majorem Dei gloriam”: for the greater glory of God and the salvation of man.
Cappadocia may have constituted his life’s work and made him famous, but it was in Tokat that Jerphanion first discovered Turkey. Jesuits had been present in Anatolia since the 16th century, but it was only in the 1880s that their influence became firmly reinforced. They were sent by the Pope to the Pontic region to encourage the “return” of the Gregorian Armenians into the embrace of the Catholic Church, and to counterattack the increasing influence of the American Protestant missionaries who had established themselves in Anatolia.
The Jesuit “Mission of Lesser Cilicia” founded schools in the cities of Merzifon, Amasya, Tokat, Sivas, Kayseri and Adana, and which operated from 1881 to 1924. The Jesuits found their place in this religiously and ethnically complex area, and, by the time the young Guillaume de Jerphanion arrived in Tokat in 1903, there were 36 Jesuit priests and 12 brothers working in Anatolia.
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The Jesuit order, dedicated to education, mandates that all novitiates teach abroad as one of the steps required to become an ordained priest. Jerphanion was sent to Tokat in 1903 to teach math and physics in the school that had been established there by the Jesuits in 1881. He was also charged with the subtext of convincing the young Armenian students in the school to embrace Catholicism, rather than the Protestantism of the Americans. He learned to speak both Turkish and Armenian quite quickly, two of the ten languages he mastered, and in later years he stated that he felt he expressed himself best in Turkish, even before his native French.
When he arrived in Tokat, there was a Jesuit primary school and a high school for boys, each with a courtyard and a garden. The Jesuits were not alone, for a Catholic primary school and a high school for girls had already been founded by an order of nuns from Nîmes, the Oblates de l’Assomption, with whom Jerphanion must have shared the same lilting singsong accent of southern France.
In all, there were 184 students in the Jesuit school, far more than Van Lennep ever had in his Protestant mission, which had been founded in 1854. As was the case for the Americans, all did not always run smoothly for the Jesuits: there was the lack of adequate infrastructure, materials and men, as well as inevitable clashes with authorities and hostility from local groups, yet the Jesuits did not waver. They persevered and cleverly positioned themselves in the community which allowed them to spread their influence outside the classroom walls – even onto the hilly terraces where they taught locals the fine points of French viticulture.
The Jesuit schools proved more effective than the American ones in Turkey for several reasons. They offered both daytime and evening classes. Although the day classes were tuition-based and filled with students from well-affluent Catholic and Orthodox Armenian and Greek families, the free classes in the evenings attracted the Muslims, and many Turks sent their children to them. Turks were attracted to Western ways, as strongly then as they are today.
The Jesuits also organized a wide range of extracurricular activities, such as music lessons, drama clubs and choral groups, which proved wildly popular with the students. Their theatrical performances became the subject of many of the photographs taken by Père de Jerphanion. The nuns also organized workshops on carpet weaving to teach young women a profession.
An additional, but subtle, reason for the success of the Jesuit venture was la belle langue française: it must be remembered that these were the days when French reigned as the lingua franca of the upper classes and in the commercial world, and the Jesuits were able to use this card to advance the influence of their schools.
Above all, it was the medical assistance provided by the Jesuits that earned their respect among the local population. An important activity of the Jesuits consisted in the opening of free clinics, which offered precious assistance to those who had no money for basic health services, especially during the outbreaks of cholera which were all too frequent during these times in Tokat, notably in the summer of 1894. They rode from village to village and were well-received, and one Jesuit relates in a letter that a villager once confessed to him: “You are different; you are like the tin-plated bowls that one puts on public fountains: you are of service to the poor. May Allah put you in Paradise second after Muhammad!”, a poignant remark in view of the fact that one Jesuit priest did die in Tokat due to his ministrations to cholera victims. It was probably here on the village back roads of Tokat that Père de Jerphanion learned the true humility of Jesus, by serving all, sick and in good health, rich and poor, Muslim or Christian.
Père de Jerphanion must have been busy those first years, discovering the region and its people, writing lesson plans, wrestling with student projects, and learning languages. Yet nothing daunts a Jesuit, and he sought to fill his eager mind with all it could absorb. It was in Tokat that he began his first research missions in archaeology and geography, using photography for scientific documentation. From Tokat, he took side trips to Niksar, Turhal, Amasya, and Sivas. These journeys allowed him to become acquainted with the people and the region in greater detail and provided him with much stimulation and material for his budding parallel career as photographer, cartographer and archaeologist.
This region was not often visited by Western travelers, and his reports to the review Orientalia Christiana in Rome provided noteworthy information. The young priest got his Turkish architectural bearings by first looking at the Seljuk monuments which amply fill the streets of Tokat, Amasya and Sivas. Here he was a true groundbreaker, for the seminal works by later Western scholars on Islamic art had yet to be published.
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It was during his time in Tokat that Père opened his mental lens angle even wider and took on another impressive activity: cartography.
During his stay in Tokat, Père de Jerphanion produced, with the support of the French Society of Geographers, the first large scale map ever to be drawn of the Pontic region. He returned to Tokat after his ordainment for additional research and produced his famous maps of the middle basin of the Yeşilırmak River, which were published by Henry Barrère in Paris in 1913, and are now held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.
The maps were on a scale of 1/200,000 and comprised four sheets: one each for Amasya, Niksar, Sivas, and Zile. Get out a magnifying glass and look closely at these sheets, and you will see a little letter in parentheses next to each village, denoting the nationality of the citizens living there: T=Turkish, A=Armenian. G=Greek, C=Circassian, K=Kurdish and QB=Kızılbaş Alevi Turkmen. The As are the most frequent letter seen on the maps.
In addition, he noted on each map the vestiges of the monuments of antiquity and of the Seljuk era. These maps are dead-on accurate, and beautiful to behold. This was a labor of love and a symbol of the immense respect Père de Jerphanion held for the region of Tokat.
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In 1907, as his missionary period in Tokat was nearing its end, little did Père de Jerphanion know that his deepest involvement with Turkey was on the verge of being fixed on his soul as clearly as the images on his silver glass photography plates.
Before returning to Europe for his final theological studies and ordination, Guillaume de Jerphanion made an excursion to Cappadocia with a fellow Jesuit, Père Joannes Gransault, whose duties called him to travel there. Père de Jerphanion did not choose to come to Turkey; it was decided for him by his superiors, but the wide-angle lens of life works in strange ways – call it ordained destiny, if you wish – for it was on this trip that he discovered what was to become his life’s work.