About
Brief History of the Papadopoulos Family and the Papadopoulos Archive
Adapted from Dr. Constance Cryer Ecklund’s writings
Christo Theologos Papadopoulos was born in 1864 in Smyrna, Asia Minor—now Izmir, Turkey. His father was a fairly successful wheat merchant. He was orphaned by the age of 11 and came to the attention of a prominent American evangelical, Dr. Riggs (father of Ernest Riggs, 4th president of Anatolia College) of the Congregational Board of Missions, who ensured the boy obtained considerable academic training for the time period. Christo studied English and French at Robert College in the suburb of Bebek of Constantinople (Istanbul), an institution sponsored by the Boston-based Commissioners for Foreign Missions. This Protestant seminary in Bebek had, by the year of Christo’s birth, become a liberal arts college and was soon to give rise to an offshoot which evolved into the major 4-year liberal arts Anatolia College, set up in September 1886 in the region of Marsovan—now Merzifon, Turkey. Christo graduated from Anatolia College with the class of 1893, having studied both the liberal arts curriculum and taken extra courses on religion.
His decision to become an Evangelical missionary was finalized when he began serious work for the American Board of Foreign Missions, traveling across Turkey from place to place to establish a church, or rebuild an old parish and sometimes establish a school. One of the aims of Anatolia College was to train “native laborers,” that is, non-American evangelical ministers, who would preach the gospel and establish schools in cities and towns throughout Asia Minor, ministering chiefly to the Armenian and Greek Christian populations. After ordination, Rev. Papadopoulos and his wife were sent to Akhisar (biblical Thyatira) in what is now Western Turkey. Contemporary accounts mention the “fresh impulse” and “large inspiration” of the work that was carried out there. His tolerant outlook and his ability to easily form connections with Turks and Armenians outside of his Greek milieu led to his marriage with an Armenian woman, who bore him a daughter on Easter Sunday. When both young mother and baby died—perhaps in childbirth?—the loss left an indelible impression on the young divinity student.
Soon, however, he had met the lovely daughter of a silk merchant from Demirdesh (Demirtas), Erasmia. Erasmia’s family was Protestant and her father a lay leader of the local Protestant church. They all spoke English, influenced by the American mission connections in the area. Christo and Erasmia had 6 children, 5 girls, Edith, Helen, Sophia, Electra and Ariadne, and one boy, Moody.
But the storm clouds that had been gathering over the Armenian population of Asia Minor broke out in massacres in Samsun, in 1894, and Constantinople, on September 30, 1895. 3 days later, on October 3, the Sultan’s troops rode into Akhisar and began murdering people in the town’s marketplace. Turkish friends of Rev. Papadopoulos had warned him of their coming. He summoned his parishioners and hid them in his school. He asked Erasmia and her two sisters to sew an American flag out of any red, white, and blue cloth available. Christo and the 3 women worked all night. By daybreak, they had sewn 14 stars on a blue background attached to 6 white and 7 red strips of light woolen cloth and attached a short, sturdy rope to one end of the flag.
When the Turkish troops arrived, the flag was flying on the school’s flagpole. On being demanded to open the doors of the school, Rev. Papadopoulos refused, saying “This building and this village are under the special protection of the United States of America. Can’t you see that from the flag hanging up there?” The commander looked up, hesitated, and whirled away with his troops. Later, the Armenians escaped to the countryside. The wave of massacres would reach Merzifon on November 15.
Christo Theologos Papdopoulos was a very energetic man, intense, highly-strung, dedicated and committed to God. He preached—in Turkish, as required by law—and lived a Pauline faith of brotherly love and a commitment to social improvement. Galatians 6.2, “Bear ye one another’s burdens,” became his guiding philosophy, printed on all his stationery. He lived each day for the redressing of wrongs and the amelioration of human suffering. It is little wonder that, looking across the world to the newly erected Statue of Liberty, he saw America as the appropriate home for educating his children and escaping the repression which was now endemic in Asia Minor. After also serving the Christian communities in Fatsa, Ordu, and Samsun on the coast of the Black Sea, Rev. Papadopoulos and his family immigrated to America in 1906-07, settling in Chicago, where he ministered to the city’s immigrants.
In America, Christo first attended the 5th United Presbyterian Church and then joined the Chicago Tract Society, an association of minority churches. He worked tirelessly in downtown Chicago with the Jane Addams Hull House Social Settlement ministry and held church services in the living room of the family’s house on Paulina Street on Sundays. Almost every week some immigrant or family of immigrants would come to his door, either with a piece of paper pinned to their clothing or with a note: “Rev. Papadopoulos, Chicago.” Finally, he bought a building on State Street for his very own Commons Hall church. His health, already weakened by the l918 flu, worsened with pneumonia and he died on January 22 l922.
Christo left no child that was either devout or a church-goer, and the family’s house was suddenly now going to open its doors to very different visitors from those he was accustomed to receiving. The girls had studied at Northwestern. Moody had, after receiving his baccalaureate from Northwestern, gone on to start his doctorate in English literature as the protégé of renowned Professor Robert Crane of the University of Chicago. With Moody turning into a fast-rising, young, tenured faculty member of the department of English of Northwestern, Electra having chosen to study at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Edith and Helen now successful librarians (the first working for the Art Institute and the second for Northwestern), there was a steady stream of fascinating people visiting the house on Paulina Street.
One of them was Virgil Thomson, who played on the living room piano snatches of what would become his Four Saints in Three Acts. The piano spent years on the 1st floor of the Papadopoulos house in Chicago and was moved upstairs when the 2nd floor was divided between the 2 unmarried sisters, Helen and Sophia, and Ariadne and her husband were living downstairs. Remarkably, the piano was constructed in 1896, the year of the creation of the flag of Thyatira in a tiny room in Akhisar.
The flag was brought to the US, where it was often taken out and displayed in family gatherings. It was passed down to one of the daughters and gradually forgotten as the family began to lose touch with its history. At one point it was thought to have been discarded, only to be discovered in an attic some years later and given to one of Christo’s granddaughters, Dr. Constance Cryer Ecklund, professor of French at Southern Connecticut State University, who was trying to recover her family heritage. She wanted to find a safe place for the flag, and a place where it would be valued. She chose the school that had given her grandfather his vocation and, on June 7 2007, she presented the flag to the president of Anatolia College, Richard Jackson, in the presence of US Consul Elaine Paplos. The Karabet Kalfayan family of Thessaloniki and Athens arranged for the flag to be professionally preserved and framed. A full-size photographic reproduction is also on permanent display in the lobby of Macedonia Hall of Anatolia College. In 2017, Dr. Ecklund donated to Anatolia College Archives the Papadopoulos Archive, comprising the possessions, her copyrighted explanations and descriptions of events, people, realia and writings, both professional and personal, of the Papadopoulos and Derebey families (Derebey was Erasmia’s maiden name).