Aleppo College

Aleppo College is a school with two campuses on Taha Hussein Street in the Kallaseh district. Today it awards school leaving certificates. What puts it on this page is not the curriculum: this is where the American missionary school tradition in Aleppo ended up, and the buildings are one of the civil examples of mandate-era architecture in the city.

How the school got here

The roots are not in Aleppo but in Aintab, now Gaziantep. Between 1874 and 1876 the American Board founded Central Turkey College there. Most of the students were Armenian, and most of those Protestant Armenians, though others attended too. After the massacres of Armenians in 1915 the institution was moved to Aleppo through the efforts of its director John E. Merrill, and it has been here since 1923. In 1930, at the initiative of the American benefactor James Lack, 13 hectares on the south-western edge of the city were donated to the school. Construction only began in 1936 and was finished in 1939. The second building, the girls’ high school, was delayed by the Second World War; work started in 1950 and was completed in 1952.

Getting there

Kallaseh lies west of the citadel and away from the centre; this is not a walk, take a taxi. The two campuses stand 180 metres apart, boys to the south and girls to the north. From the street you see cut stone walls and a garden of mature trees; the school is not woven into the urban fabric but sits in the middle of its own ground.

Can you go in

No. This is a working school, not a building open to visitors. You look at the facade from the pavement and you do not pass the garden gate. The area is busy during teaching hours, and the street jams at the end of the day.

Who studied here

Until 1964 the college taught first and second-year classes in arts, engineering and medicine to students aged 16 to 18; today it issues leaving certificates at 16. Its alumni include Nazim al-Kudsi, a former president of Syria, the painter Fateh Moudarres and the film director Moustapha Akkad.

What most people miss

The second campus to the north. Most visitors stop in front of the boys’ school and turn back; the girls’ high school is 180 metres up the road, and the twenty years between the two buildings show in the architecture.