Throughout the 19th century, women from the United States travelled as wives or alone to remote regions of the world under the auspices of mis sionary work. One of the largest of the missionary organizations was the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), origi nating in Boston Massachusetts in 1810. The ABCFM, along with other missionary organizations, not only gave women the respectability and insti tutional support they needed to travel and remain within the bounds of Victorian womanhood, but also elevated and in some cases made heroines of them. Historians have generally conceptualized missionaries within the framework of their Christian identity and evangelical goals, and often as cultural imperialists. This essay shifts the focus to the individual women missionaries as lone travellers, bringing their western cultural ideas and imaginings to politically tumultuous Turkey in the 19th century. The women in the study were educated at women's colleges in the US and were, in turn, the founders of educational institutions for women and girls. In Turkey missionaries were prohibited from proselytizing among Muslims, and concentrated their efforts among Greeks, Armenians and other minorities who were colonized within the borders of the Ottoman Empire. As founders of schools, missionaries were engaged not only in the central missionary enterprise of religious conversion, but also in negotiat ing concepts of womanhood, in understanding the political context of edu cation and national identity formation, and in navigating tensions among powerful and competing religious ideologies. Applying the metaphor of travel opens up a new way of analysing missionary women's experiences, looking not only at where they went and what they did, but the ideas, objects and beliefs they carried with them. Although the nineteenth-century ideology of travel was to broaden and mature the traveller, missionaries on the other hand were also expected to remain steadfast in their religious convictions and purpose. This essay focuses on the interaction between the missionaries and the people they came to save, a process leading inevitably to mutual accommodation. Culturally hybridized mission schools came to reflect the power of local