Graybill of Azianlu
Ebook
In the nineteenth century, Mary Lyon at Mount Holyoke College developed a progressive ideal of useful womanhood: serious, educated, devoted to service, skilled in domestic arts, and ready for leadership. Her disciple Fidelia Fiske took up the unlikely challenge of applying the Mount Holyoke approach to the education of young women and girls in a remote corner of northwestern Persia.
In 1906, Nan Graybill joins the Presbyterian Mission in Persia as principal of the Fiske Seminary for Girls near Urmia. It's her job to pursue the task of training her students in these feminine virtues, now modified and updated for the twentieth century. She considers herself a "modern missionary," aiming for social gospel objectives. But in 1914, the outbreak of war between Ottoman Turkey and Tsarist Russia threatens to trample the Urmia province into dust. The Syriac-speaking Christian community there--Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant--becomes one of the most tragic casualties of the Great War.
Nan Graybill and her Assyrian colleagues must lead the school community through this crisis with their own creativity, dedication, tenacity, competence, and courage. Together, they find new ways to endure and to prevail.
“This is a very readable and lively fictional but fact-based story of an enterprising American teacher stationed in an obscure part of the Middle East—the Persian town of Urmia. She finds herself embroiled in all sorts of religious and cultural conflicts, culminating in genocide of Assyrian Christians during World War I. The book is well-informed and gives many insights into the daily life of Assyrians and American missionaries in the Turkish-Persian borderlands.”
—David Gaunt, professor of history, Södertörn University
“A riveting account of life as a missionary in Persia, the story of Nan Graybill is a tale of friendship, intrigue, murder, tragedy, resilience, and love. Historical fiction at its finest, Graybill of Azianlu invites its readers into the complex negotiations required of Christian missionaries teaching and living amidst Syriac-speaking Christians, Shi‘i and Sunni Muslims, and British bureaucrats on the eve of and during World War I.”
—Christine Luckritz Marquis, associate professor of church history, Union Presbyterian Seminary
Paula Skreslet’s Graybill of Azianlu is a work of historical fiction that captures the perspective of American missionaries – particularly a single American missionary woman – on the border of the Ottoman Empire and Persia in the years leading up to the First World War. Based on
meticulous historical research, this engaging novel tells the overlooked story of displaced and massacred Assyrian and Armenian Christians. It exposes the multiple political powers that instigated, condoned, or failed to respond to these atrocities, while also shining light on the human capacity for love and endurance.
—Deanna Ferree Womack, Candler School of Theology at Emory University
- Title: Graybill of Azianlu
- Author: E. M. Clifford
- Publisher: Resource Publications
- Print Publication Date: 2023
- Logos Release Date: 2023
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781666756555, 9781666756531, 1666756539, 9781666756548, 1666756547, 1666756555
- Resource ID: LLS:9781666756555
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-01-26T22:15:24Z
E. M. Clifford served as reference and archives librarian at the William Smith Morton Library of Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond (1999–2020) and, for ten years, as instructor and academic librarian at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo. Clifford is the author of The Literature of Islam: A Guide to the Primary Sources in English Translation (2006), Northern Africa: A Guide to the Reference and Information Sources (2000), and the novel Galloway of Buraan (2022).