SECTION P

United States of America

Section P, view to the north

Section P, which runs along the cemetery’s west wall, contains approximately eighty plots, about sixty of which are marked with monuments. Most of the burials date to the nineteenth century and are for members the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and their dependents. Individuals who were affiliated with Istanbul’s Robert College, the oldest American school outside of the United States, are also interred here, including family of Cyrus Hamlin, the school’s founder. A plaque commemorating RC teachers and administrators buried throughout the cemetery is located in the middle of section P, on the wall behind the Hamlin graves.

One of the section’s most impressive monuments is the granite pedestal tomb of the scholar and linguist Elias Riggs (1810-1910), directly opposite this panel, in the last row of graves next to the wall. Riggs spent much of his sixty-year career in Istanbul translating the Scriptures, hymns, and tracts into various local languages. The epitaph on his tomb is inscribed in English as well as in Turkish, Armenian, Bulgarian, and Greek, some of the languages in which he worked. Like many of the cemetery’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century granite monuments, Riggs’ tomb was produced abroad and imported to Turkey: in this case from Aberdeen, Scotland.

Besides its built heritage, Section P has some of the tallest and finest cypresses in the cemetery. An impressive yew tree also thrives here, just north of the Robert College plaque and behind the grave of Mrs. A. G. Dwight. Because of its endurance and ability to regenerate, the yew represents death and resurrection and is often found in cemeteries, especially in Northern Europe. This symbolic characteristic makes the tree in Section P especially significant.