Good afternoon. My name is David Staniunas. I'm Records Archivist at the Presbyterian Historical Society. And this is an oral history interview with Dr. Eden Naby Frye, who grew up in Urmia in and around the Presbyterian Mission Schools in the region. Dr. Frye, thanks for being with us.

I usually use my maiden name, so.

I apologize.

That's okay.

Dr. Naby. So I hope I hope that we can start by getting you to talk about your parents and growing up in in Urmiah in the turn of the century pre 1918.

I don't remember much about before 1918.

Well, no, I mean. But you remember your parents.

I remember my parents, yes. Yes. My parents were both graduates of the Presbyterian Mission Schools. My mother was a graduate of Fiske Seminary and my father a graduate of the boys seminary, the male seminary. He graduated in Urmiah in 1918 before the war ended. And so he had a pretty tough time during the war. There were only four in his graduating class. There should have been probably around 12, which was not the norm before the war. And in my mother's class, too, there were only four. She graduated in 24, I think, and her graduation was in Tabriz, not an army, because the the missionaries had been kicked out of Urmiah in 1918. And so they never really resettled in Urmiah. The properties were purchased by the Iranian government. Eventually they moved the school to Tabriz and there the surviving women who had been students numbering only four, graduated. It was later when they. I'm sorry I made it. I made a mistake there. And the school did come back to Urumiah. And the graduation classes were quite large, I'd say about 12 to 18. But then in 1934, when the missions was ready to celebrate its 100th anniversary, that's when the government put a stop to it and they put a stop to it, not for religious reasons, but for political reasons. They simply did not want the missionary presence in West Azerbaijan because they felt that it had been disruptive politically. And also Reza Shah was bent on really raising Iran's education.

He wanted to be sure that the school systems were uniformly national all over the country, except for a few private schools. And so he instituted public schools, which usually did not reach down to the village level until much, much later. But his village schools in about 19 I mean, public schools in about 1928. And so the missionary schools in Urmiah were a redundancy. And so the missionaries graduated, I think, the last class of 33, but I'm not sure. And then the following year, they were they had gone the government the royal government at the time since Reza Shah had crowned himself king purchased the properties from the mission, and they were reused quite substantially. None of them were wrecked or anything. So particularly Westminster Hospital, which had been set up by Doctor Cochrane, was was in use. The head of that hospital was an Assyrian, a distant relative of mine by marriage, who had been trained as a physician at the medical school in Urmiah and had graduated, I think, in 1912. So the content, the work of the mission, whether it was in education or in the hospital and so on, continued by the Iranian government at the time. And by 19, the early 1950s, they had set up a lot of village schools, but not a whole lot of they were not very closely supervised. So the school in the village where I was born in Golpashan was conducted first through sixth grade, I think was conducted by a woman an Assyrian woman who had been a graduate of Fiske Seminary herself. And she continued to conduct it in Assyrian rather than in Persian, even though all the public schools were supposed to be in Persian. Part of the reason why they wanted to institute the schools in Persian was to eliminate the the the dissident movement among the Kurds and among the Turkic speaking people. And so Persian was to be the national language. And all the others in terms of public schools were eliminated. So there was no public school teaching of Assyrian or Armenian or Hebrew or any of those sorts of things. They were all supposed to be in Persian. And so it was under these circumstances that my mother, who was a very hardworking and clever woman and had been very well trained and really had enjoyed her association with the American missionaries as she. Seeing that she would if she wanted to continue teaching, which is what she was doing at Fiske Seminary for a while. And if she wanted to continue teaching, then she had better learn Persian, which was almost a totally new language for her because her first language was Assyrian, her second language was Turkish and then third was English. So she had to learn Persian. And she did this after teaching. And she she had a private tutor which prepared her to enter into the faculty of the girls high school, which she did. And there she taught both English and she taught home economics, which for which she was very well well-known because she had she had not written a cookbook, but she had copied a lot of the recipes that she had learned. And she she had her own little cookbook. And she therefore, was able to teach all kinds of things, both local Assyrian foods, but also especially baking Western style confections. And she really enjoyed that.

With just a pause, was there, do you think, a relationship or a through line between preserving the Syrian language and preserving the sort of the cooking styles and culinary folkways?

I'm not particularly. She wrote her cookbook and our language she wrote in an Assyrian. So it wasn't as if she had. She had. She was using English for any of the words flour, sugar, whatever. But she had clearly been heavily influenced by Western baking. And so she now cookies and cakes and that sort of thing where her thing. But the fact that she was able to write an entire cookbook and our own language using local words, many of them new probably and Assyrian ized English words in some cases she. I don't think we have a word for cookies, for example, in Assyrian. There is a word in Persian, but there isn't one in Assyrian. So she would have she would have said cookize.

So just to clarify for me. So your mother. Lily. Lillieh

Lillie.

Lillie would have been. This is after the period of exile in Tabriz. This would have been back in or me?

Yes, but my mother was born in 1906. So when the Assyrians had to flee Urmiah because of the coming of the Ottoman Army and the departure of the Russian army. Even more serious an issue because of the Russian Revolution. At that time, she was 11 years old. So during that summer, when they fled, she with her family, her aunt and her mother and her uncle and some children. During that time, she, of course, didn't have school, so they fled not to not to Tabriz, because that would have been also a dangerous place, because the Ottomans could have moved and did move there for a while. But they moved south toward the British forces, so they moved toward to Hamadan. And from Hamadan, the Assyrians who had survived that long trek, were being loaded onto trucks and taking taken into the into the British mandate in Iraq. But and the camps where they where this was occurring were run by British officers. My uncle, my mother's uncle, who had been at Columbia University for many years and spoke English quite well and had become a mason. So when he shook hands with a British officer, whatever the Masons have as a secret handshake, they recognized each other as fellow Masons, and therefore the family was not loaded on to trucks and taken out of Iran, but were allowed to remain in Hamadan. And my and so they lived in Hamadan for about two, two years. And then they moved to Tabriz after the war ended. And the Ottoman armies were now no longer a danger. And living in Tabriz was not easy for them. They had been relatively well-to-do and they were confined to one room, as refugees often are, and they still had their sense of humor. There's a very interesting story about fleas that.

I'll go for, if.

You want to hear roughly. Well, not mice, but fleas. So fleas were are a serious problem in situations where you can launder your clothes and wash yourself well or your bedding. So my uncle was this bachelor who was quite a quite a quite a playboy. And his in his Columbia days, he apparently saw a flea and was trying to kill it, of course, but he couldn't find it. So the word for a flea in our language is persona, which is a very ottoman episodic word. So the that I kept jumping around and then my uncle, my mother's uncle finally found it in the cuff of his pants and everybody let out a cheer and it killed it. Have you ever killed a flea? Have you ever seen a play?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Frantic.

Yeah. We see them play live. Manimal? Yes. Yeah.

Wonderful.

My father was taken was was recruited into the Syrian army that was trying to fight the the Ottomans. And he was. He was taken as a prisoner of war.

Can you tell us about that? What do you know?

I know a lot about it because my father wrote a great deal about it. He wrote about it, however, in poetry in those days. Far. More people, especially men, but some women, to aspire to being poets if they wanted to be writers. They didn't aspire to writing short stories and novels. That's a relatively new 19th century thing. But so my father wrote his memoirs as poetry, and so he would be recite and read his poetry to us about. About that period. But of course, poetry is written and expressed in symbols rather than hard facts. And so what I understood was that was that he had he and several of his friends had been captured by the Ottoman Army and made prisoners of war and were being held, I don't know exactly where, but they were starving. So they were either going to die of hunger or they were going to. Get favored. So they fled. But four of them fled and were on the road to Tabriz. But again, they were starving. They had no food, they had no water. And so one of them started eating and digested grain from the offal of animals. And he either died because it was undigested grain and pierced his intestines or sepsis or something like that. So eventually they they got to Tabriz and they were taken care of by they by the American missionaries. And my father survived. One of them died. Four of them had escaped. Three of them survived.

Yeah. And. You mentioned the retreat of the Russian army and kind of the end of the Romanovs and the October revolution kind of shaping dynamics in the region. Was your was your father or mother? Influenced by the political dynamics of the time.

Neither of them were particularly political, but they were caught up in what was happening. My mother's my mother was too young to be political. My father was old enough, but he wasn't really interested in those kinds of questions. He was more interested in the philosophical side of things. But he wasn't particularly pro-Russian, although he because the Russian presence in army was so strong and so heavy from 1911 on, he had learned some Russian. My mother disdained Russian. She she wasn't very much of an America-phile for them as Presbyterians. The presence of the Russians was only a political presence, not a cultural presence. So they were not affected by the almost mass forced conversion to Russian orthodoxy that was taking place, and particularly affecting the the members of the Church of the East, the Nestorian church, the so-called Nestorian Church. So they as Presbyterians, they weren't affected by that. They didn't become they didn't convert. They didn't they didn't see any need for that. They had already gone beyond wanting to change in any way. They were quite happy being Presbyterians. My mother played the organ and she conducted the choir at the at the Presbyterian Church, and she also had a pleasant enough singing voice and she was quite happy. And in her in that situation, as she she the only religious arguments she got into were with her father, who had gone to come to the United States about three times as a migrant laborer and eventually bought a house in Gary, Indiana, and wanted her family, his family to come. And they wouldn't come. But he became a Pentecostal. And so when he returned to Urmiah finally after the war here, he was very much influenced by the Pentecostals around him, which had come into the Urmiah area. And about 1910, again through the United States, through Assyrians who had come to the States become Pentecostals and returned to Urmiah and started gathering groups around them. Interestingly enough, one of the most influential Pentecostal families in the United States was an Assyrian one by the name of Urshan, because when they came back here, then they became leaders in the Pentecostal church, and the Pentecostal church apparently splintered into several parts. So I don't know that they are involved in any more, but and any case, my mother's complaint about her father was that he had come back with a proverbial basket of gold and had given it away to the Pentecostals.

You're your father, Michael.

Michael.

Michael. He. He was ordained and served as a as a minister in the Presbyterian Church. Is that correct?

Yes. Yes, there were quite a number. Quite a number of Assyrian men who trained as pastors and were ordained. The numbers are really amazing. Amazing when one thinks of the total education that was available to them. To the Assyrians, you have graduating classes of seminarians in the year ten, graduating in such a small area. So what were they going to do? Some of them became pastors in some of the larger villages. Some of them went into teaching. But that wasn't as they wanted to emulate the missionaries. So they really wanted to be pastors and so they wanted to be missionaries as well. And the exhibit that I just say that's ongoing now in in Sunnyvale, California, is about a family where they are father at a rather older age, went to the seminary, got his was ordained and went off and became a Presbyterian missionary in Georgia, Tblisi Georgia, which was not did not make the local authorities very happy because that's an Orthodox area. But he had something of a clandestine Protestant church which eventually helped to save his life and his family's life because they fled to Georgia. And that's a different story. But so they wanted to be missionaries, too. I have a relative on my mother's side, the Doomans who came to the U.S., I can't remember now where. And the man studied, studied to be a missionary and eventually. Went to Japan.

And.

Became a missionary in Japan. A Presbyterian missionary in Japan. His son became his son's name was Eugene Dooman, who had grown up in Japan, spoke Japan, Japanese fluently, and eventually became the chargé at the American Embassy in Tokyo. Because his Japanese was excellent and he knew the culture very well and was quite important in the eventual reestablishment of relations between the United States and Japan after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So, yes, some of them did become missionaries. That's the one that I know best. But I think a lot of them did go off to Russia and become missionaries.

And so when. When was your father ordained and what was his ministry like?

I don't know when he was ordained. I imagine that he because he graduated high school in 1918, he would have. Gone through that period of being a prisoner and then being a teacher both in Hamadan and in Tabriz. He was a math teacher. And then he came back to Urmiah. And there was a for a short period, a revival of the theology school in Urmiah by the American missionaries. I think Mrs. Cochrane was involved, but I'm not certain, although I have a poster for that and for the of the graduating class classes. So he would have become a pastor sometime then and probably ordained in the thirties. Yeah. But I'm not absolutely sure of that. But prior to becoming ordained, he became a a firebrand of a Marxist, which was not uncommon for Assyrians who looked to Marxism as a way of equalizing their position in society. Because otherwise, without without the presence of the Westerners, whether it was missionaries, Russians, French, whatever Germans, the Assyrians simply could not survive on their own in that society. Yeah.

Well, what were kind of the hallmarks of your father's Marxism? What did that amount to for him?

Yes. I think for him. It meant equality of people. But it also meant a. Not being. Becoming an atheist. But I think that's the that's was the part that didn't sit well with him. So eventually he dropped that. Now, I'm not quite sure why he dropped it because as I say in his poetry, he refers to a figure called Grace, which was not necessarily a woman that grace that led him out of his the error of his ways. And he didn't go much more into that. But Marxism and communism were extremely appealing to minorities, as they still are.

Of course I was. I mean, I'm kind of interested in that period because the kind of I'm I guess I'm fully ignorant of the kind of political parties and formations. Inside and around Iran. West hasn't budged on the caucuses and in the twenties kind of prior to the. Prior to 25, prior to the fifties.

Prior to 25 or fifties, because prior to 25 was was very confusing by the fifties and was more or less settled.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean prior to 25.

That, prior to.

25.

One of the things in the exhibit that really opened my eyes to how confusing this is, is that the family that I was working on had had kept a wallet full of paper money. Ten different kinds of paper money that that were issued in the caucuses between 1918 and 1923. Some of those governments lasted for months and put they had to issue paper. I mean, this was civil war and it was just a terrible, terrible time of confusion. But it's it's a wonder that people people survived it.

Yeah. And so. You yourself? Were you born in Urmiah?

No. I was born in the summer. And during the summer my parents would go to the village where we had vineyards. And so I was born in the village. My father's village, where my father had grown up. And the reason why we have we had vineyards was not because my but my father was born rich. He wasn't. But he came from a very wealthy family, which had a lot of vineyards. Some of them had emigrated to to the United States, mainly to Chicago. And after the war did not return. And so his. He became the sole survivor of a very large and prosperous family, even though he came from the poor end of it, and eventually, with the help of missionaries who contacted his relatives in the United States and all of that. And this happened. It wasn't just my father's case. Other cases like this occurred, too, where the relatives would not return but had bought or had owned property, and that property then passed on legally to whoever had remained in the country. And so my father, who had grown up quite poor. Became a landholder. Vineyards. And so during the summers, we would go to his village and take care of the vineyards. And that's where I was born.

Yeah. A reminder. The name of the villages Golpashan.

Golpashan. Yeah. G. O l. Passage and go. Golpashan.

Thank you. What was it like growing up there?

Well, I grew up mainly in the city but. But yes summers in Golpashan were extremely important people still of my generation from Golpashan. I remember my birthday parties because my mother, as I say, was was one of these very, very dedicated housewives. And so my birthday party had to be very special. So she didn't have time to bake in the village and she didn't have the facilities to bake there because they were too busy with other things making molasses and so on. But she, my father, would ride his bicycle into town and go to the confectionery shop and bring back cookies and such. And we would she would then have an amazing array of party party games for the children. And so, I mean, she would invite all of all the Village Girls, and of course, their younger brothers would come, too, and then we would have go out. And after having played those games, like dunking apples and so on, we would go out and play in the and the rubble of the ruins of the village, which were right next door to us. Yes.

Eventually, I think, from sources that you've written that are online. Eventually your mother emigrates to Philadelphia does your father come as well.

Oh, yes, yes, yes. Well, during the Second World War, and I'm not sure if I remember this or whether it's just been told to me so many times. But during the Second World War, there was another spasm of communism taking hold in West Azerbaijan and East Azerbaijan. And at that point, which. Which was a Turkic. A Turkic independence movement, which was a rebellion against the Persianness that had been imposed. And so. The. There were a lot of local people that then adopted a Russian Marxist line, Russian communist line formed that formed together with with Assyrians, joined with Turkic people, the Turkish Azeris in the area to form the local Communist Party, which was based in Tabriz. And during that time, my father had was already established as a Presbyterian pastor and, as I say, a landowner. And so he became a target. And there is one day and I can't as I say, I don't know if I remember it or not, but I can I can see it in my mind when they came to the house. My brother was about six months old, and so I must've been about three. And they threatened to kill him if he did not produce the arms that he was hoarding. And despite my mother and he's saying that they absolutely had no arms at all, there were two men who had come one, one, one was a Turk and the other was a was an Assyrian, both from the local Communist Party. And they insisted that he hand them over or they would kill him. So they held a rifle to his head. My mother held up her, her infant son saying, you know, shoot him, but don't make me a widow. And in the meantime, she sent the maid to bring an officer from the Army. The army was still sort of neutral at that point and remained neutral, but confined to barracks. And an officer came and said, you know, this man doesn't have arms. He's not involved in any kind of mutiny or anything. So eventually talk them into leaving after they took his hunting rifle and rolled up several of our carpets and took them with him. So that put a frightening to my father. This is the second time he'd been confronted in a war with with enemies that were going to eliminate him. And by that point, he was worried enough to consider leaving. And in the meantime, my mother's to survive. And siblings, two sisters, gradually made their way to Tehran and then eventually to the United States. And she wasn't going to stay there by herself either. And so between his fear of what could happen to him or to us and my mother's wishing to be with her family, we emigrated to Philadelphia, where my father became the Presbyterian pastor for the Assyrians.

How do you remember the church?

Yes, it was. The church was at 11th. And Lehigh Gaston Presbyterian Church. Yes. And we used to have services and they in the basement after the. So it was kind of lay and I think the services would start at noon.

Yeah. So yeah. Gaston, forgive me if I'm messing this up, but there, I guess from about the turn of the century, maybe 1908 or so, 1898, 1908, Gaston had the Assyrian Presbyterian Mission. For Philadelphia. So there was like a, like an Anglo speaking church that had. English language worship. And then the Assyrian church met in the basement and had worship in Assyrian.

Yes, my father was not the first pastor there. The first pastor actually has a they had the foresight to give the Presbyterian Historical Society some of his archives. So you have a manuscript from that family. That last name is Moorhatch.

Moorhatch?

Yes. Isaac Moorhatch. I think that's yes. So he had gone to seminary somewhere in Ohio or somewhere. I can't remember those details now, but he became pastor sometime in the late 1920s of that church. And the reason for the location, I thought, was that the. The Assyrians lived right in that area. So that was North Philadelphia rowhouses, brick row houses and so on. It was it was it was a, you know, the older families members the older members of the families, when even when we arrived there, 53 still lived there. But eventually that everybody moved out to the suburbs and my father retired and I didn't continue. Yeah.

Yeah.

There's new immigrants. We're not coming to Philadelphia. Yeah. Or going to other places. Yeah.

It's a fascinating little tidbit of Philadelphia's history, because, I mean, West Kensington and the neighborhoods just north and west of there are actually actually have like a whole panoply of a whole panoply of populations know Armenians lived there and Turkish folks lived there. We don't often see it now because successive layers of immigrants and migrants have resettled those portions of the city. But there's still traces of the mahjar here. It's interesting.

Yes. Yes. And surprisingly, in Philadelphia, among the Assyrian Presbyterians that we know and I think Assyrian Presbyterians were the only ones that had the church in Philadelphia. There was a lot of intermarriage with Polish women, Italian women. And I would not as a child, I did not realize, as women were not Assyrian, they spoke Assyrian perfectly. They were blond. But, you know, I had seen a lot of parents before. And at that point, they they really were they cooked Assyrian food. I did not realize that they were not Assyrian. So at a time when women were housewives rather than career oriented or anything like that, they merged into these extended Assyrian families and became an integral part of them with. With perfect accents and. And participation in all kinds of community activities.

It's remarkable. I think this is entirely off topic. But my my my grandmother, who's Irish, learned almost no Lithuanian but learned to cook pyragas. And that was the one thing that she, like, assimilated into both that side of the family. Yes. Which is just a cake for Easter.

Yes. Easter was a very important occasion. Yes. In Urmiah Easter of course being in the spring we were in the city, we were not out in the country and the village at that time. And so there there were three Assyrian churches in Urmiah the Catholic Church, the Church of the East and then the Presbyterian Church, the Presbyterian Church and the and the Church of the East were very closely situated to each other. The Catholic Church was farther out toward the, the Jewish section of town, but all the pastors would get together and decide that which days were visiting days during Easter. So there were three days for Easter to visit families and and celebrate with them. So they would divide the town into three sections and then they would take turns visiting. So in order to prepare for your visiting day, of course, you had to be baking quite a bit and preparing the day, the days before. And that was my mother's great strength. She made all kinds of things. They competed with each other to see who would have the best table. It wasn't a dinner, it was tea. So people would come in and have a cup of tea from the samovar and have, you know, I would be the one to pass around the cookie plates and so on. And so that's how close the community was in terms of being separate churches, but being able to celebrate with each other on these occasions and through cooperation, just as they were, they were they cooperated when it was necessary to distribute alms. In the aftermath of World War Two, when the Kurds especially pillaged a lot of Assyrian villages on their way to fleeing north to to Baku, there was a lot of there was a lot of need in the villages. And one of the beautiful pictures that I have of my father. As he is sitting with the Presbyterian missionary by the name of. Hugo Muller, who I remember very well. This is Muller, not Miller. Miller was from Philadelphia, but this is Muller, Hugo Muller. And he was a very tall, thin, bald man. I remember him as being very tall. He probably wasn't more than five foot eight or nine. But he and my father then were sitting are sitting at a table in this picture. And there is a man with a with a lamb's wool cloak that has come. And they are checking his name on a list of how many people in his family and so on, so that they would they would provide money for them. So this this was a this was something that was occurring through the missionaries because the money was coming from the United States. And so my father was involved in that distribution. Yeah. And it took place in our house. Yeah, because there were no public spaces that would be amenable to that sort of thing. Just as whenever the missionaries came to visit or me from Tabriz or Tehran, we were always their host.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you remember any of the missionaries personally or you too? You're too young for most of this.

Oh, I remember Hugo Muller. And I remember his. His wife. She was also tall and thin. He was an interesting man. He I don't know how old he was, but because he was around, even in World War One. So and he was around in World War Two. So he he spent a good deal of time. I don't know what sorts of children they had or what remains in the family, but I think it should be a very interesting one. He had a good sense of humor, as I recall. But the thing that I learned from him and I try to imitate it as I'm getting older is to always sort of he would balance on his heels and his toes to exercise his knees. And he was always doing that.

So that kind of like a step exercise where you're standing on a curb and.

Well, no, he would stand on flat ground, just rise up on his toes and then go back on his heels and so on. Yeah, that was that was the thing I remember most about him. Oh, of course he spoke Assyrian too

Take me back to Philadelphia about about how long did you live in Philadelphia?

Well, we arrived in 53, and about six or seven months later had bought our own house. And my parents absolutely insisted on having a garden. So we lived almost outside the city limits, but not quite just inside the city limits. North Philadelphia. And it was a decent area, good yard and so forth. And. The church was quite some distance away, of course, Gaston Presbyterian is a long way off. And before the subway came to that part of Philadelphia, it was a very long bus ride. So my brother and I did not go to my father's church. First of all, there were no children. We went to a local Presbyterian church, Oak Lane Presbyterian, where there was a good fellowship hour and youth groups and Sunday school classes and so on. So that's where we went to, to church. Occasionally I would go to my father's church. But our life in Philadelphia was very much around this area and community was very active with lots of picnics, weddings, celebrations and so on. So it was a life built around around the Assyrian community. And of course our family, the extended family. And my mother said my father had no one at the time. My father had no one because either they had lived in Chicago or they had been killed. His father had been taken out to the cemetery, to the cemetery, in Golpashan and shot together with all the other men in the village. And his sister was taken to a rape camp. She was 16 years old. So it was it was a it was a situation that he wanted to leave. But he was very lonely in the States and always thought of going back to Iran. Never sold one last piece of what he had, one last piece of property that he never sold because he was thinking that he would go back. But he died in Philadelphia. I left Philadelphia after I graduate, after I got my M.B.A. at Temple University, and I went into the American Peace Corps and went into Afghanistan, came back from Afghanistan and never lived in Philadelphia again. I moved to New York. Yeah. Yeah. But I've been close to the Assyrian family, Assyrian community in many ways, not always because I was working on Afghanistan for quite a bit, but I've gone back to the Assyrian community and the reason why I'm interested in the Presbyterian Historical Society is because of your archives. So we're in the process of trying to retrieve the Assyrian materials if we can. We have started an archive at Berkeley, which the exhibit that I'm that I am doing in California is eventually going to go into that. And we're trying to find other kinds of locations where we can find materials that haven't been destroyed, haven't been tossed out to try to save them. Yeah. So I think it's a it's a, it's a worthy endeavor because even if not a whole lot of people can read this material, at least it'll be saved. And digitization is an absolute savior for this. Yeah. So we're hoping to do some collaborative work with the Philadelphia, the Presbyterian Historical Society, the Library of Congress, which is not very good, frankly, on this area and stuff. They've just never, never, never cataloged or archived or anything. And then Harvard is pretty good. Yeah.

Well, it's it's my sincere hope that we can help contribute to that effort. I know that we have Assyrian language materials in the stacks. I think there's a there's a missionary who wrote a history of the Assyrian people in Assyrian, but I think it was an American missionary who wrote it. I would have to check my sources.

Yeah, I like your your archives a lot. I like the especially the shed collection is really wonderful. Yeah, but you really are very. It's also very confusing because you use so many different words for Assyrian and never the word Assyrian. I'm not suggesting that you go back and use Assyrian, but I think somewhere in brackets for all those terms that you use, you should write Assyrian not because it was used at the time, but because it's the only thing that's going to make sense historically.

Oh, yeah. No, I completely agree. And where the. We reflect a legacy of really kind of failed understandings about language and culture. I think you'll see.

That it's yeah, I don't know that you'll see things.

Like, like, like we'll say Neo Aramaic or Syriac because we're following what's actually in the Library of Congress.

That's not only the Library of Congress, but also your your missionary sources. Yeah. We'll go from using the term historian to using the term Persian, which is very confusing. So some of those photographs you have on the back, it says, Kasha, such and such means, Reverend, such and such. And as the title for it you have at Persian family. Well Persian to day means a muslim and so that that part of it I'm not quite sure what the system the new system or an adaptive system would be. It's not the fault of the missionaries and how they labeled it because things were evolving. But it is a problem in archiving where you have to understand how to reference those things, and that's a problem that still has to be solved. Yeah.

Yeah. But we're going to. There are all forms of description in our collections that are. Reformed and and continuing to be reformed. And I'm sure that there's more steps that we can take there as well. That's really an interesting set of questions, for sure.

Well, it's it's because the terminology has changed so much. And it's not as if it's not as if you can't keep up with it. You can keep up with it by having brackets and that sort of thing.

Excellent. Dr. Nabi I'm really glad that we were able to connect. And I feel like I owe you questions about the Peace Corps and Afghanistan. But that's probably that's probably a whole second to our.

You know, the Peace Corps in Afghanistan is not a topic I want to return to always. Yeah.

Well, then I'm fully comfortable closing it there. Do you have any anything else that you'd like to share with us about your your father and your mother and kind of growing up in the Assyrian and Presbyterian worlds in Urmiah.

Mm. Well, for me as a child, I was not aware of the genocide, so I. My parents spared me all that kind of naughty history, the kind that would have, I think, dented a young child's innocence unnecessarily. I didn't learn about any of these things until I was well into my adulthood. They simply my father spoke and parables and symbols. And my mother didn't talk about these things until I was much older. And I think that's a real question. Do you spare children knowledge of? How the families. Disappeared. So many dead. Or do you tell them these things and possibly damage their psyche? I think that's a very big question for situations like that of the Assyrians.

Thank you. I mean, this has been a remarkable conversation for me. You touch on like. So many areas of. Where I. I feel abjectly ignorant and it's.

Part of the deal, I guess.

Yeah, it's been remarkable.

I appreciate having the resources of the Presbyterian Historical Society. I hope you continue collecting and archiving. I suppose you have you have the Miller family materials. I would like to see more of the Labaree family materials because I know there are.

I think there's I know we have work of the Cochranes definitely. And most of this is in our we have a large collection of missionary personnel records group 360. I think that's the lion's share of.

The Labarees are are very important because they have continued. To hold on to a lot of stuff. It's an old Huguenot family. And there is a the son who was born in army, I think was a professor at Yale, and he died about three or four years ago. But there is a his brother, his younger brother is in Boston. And I really think it's a he's a his materials would be useful to have to.

Outstanding. Well, we'll we'll talk offline and see if you can introduce us to some folks. Sure.

Well, thank you.

Thank you so much. I'm going to stop recording.