Turkey

A report in the Washington Times by Julia Duin:

Religious artifacts on the divided island of Cyprus are in “great peril,” according to a U.S. Helsinki Commission document to be released Tuesday afternoon.

Thousands of Orthodox icons, manuscripts, frescoes and mosaics have been looted from churches, chapels and monasteries in northern Cyprus, ending up on international auction blocks, says the document, the result of a lengthy investigation by the Helsinki Commission and titled “Destruction of Cultural Property in the Northern Part of Cyprus and Violations of International Law.”

A copy of the 50-page document was provided to The Washington Times in advance of a Tuesday press briefing and panel discussion on Capitol Hill.

The panelists will include Charalampos Chotzakoglou, professor of Byzantine art and archaeology at Hellenic Open University in Patras, Greece; German art historian Klaus Gallas, who is a specialist on the international smuggling of art artifacts; and Michael Jansen, author of “War and Cultural Heritage: Cyprus after the 1974 Turkish Invasion.”

Most of the ruined property belongs to the Orthodox Church of Cyprus, one of the world’s oldest national Orthodox churches, with the rest belonging to Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Maronite and Jewish groups.

Thirty-five years of occupation of Northern Cyprus by Turkish forces have ruined “a plethora of archeological and religious sites,” says the report, which adds that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has been documenting the destruction since 1984.

According to the report:

• 500 Orthodox churches or chapels have been pillaged, demolished or vandalized.

• 133 churches, chapels and monasteries have been desecrated.

• 15,000 paintings have disappeared.

• 77 churches have been turned into mosques, 28 are being used by the Turkish military as hospitals or camps, and 13 have been turned into barns. Continue reading →

Fr. Dositheos Anagnostopoulos, spokesman for the Ecumenical Patriarchate, says the issue concerning the reopening of the Halki Seminary has been resolved:

In an interview published yesterday in the Taraf daily, … Anagnostopoulos said: “Erdoğan will certainly etch his name in history. He is the first politician to directly address issues, avoiding euphemisms when referring to them. He has talked about the “Kurdish question”, he has said that our status as an ecumenical church concerns the church only and later he said Turkey had made fascistic moves in the past. He is very open and courageous. That’s how he’ll be etched in history. We need people like this. Would this solve problems? Not right away, but the prime minister has started this. I think the Heybeliada problem has been solved.”

From Today’s Zaman.

Writing in Today’s Zaman, Orhan Kemal Cengiz throws a little cold water on current reports that the Halki Seminary may be reopened. Has anything really changed, he asks? Cengiz points to a long campaign, dating back to the Ottoman period, designed to either force the patriarchate to leave or to push it into extinction. The Turkish “deep state” was behind much of this, the writer says. And he places considerable blame for the patriarchate’s dire situation on its own passivity. Opinion piece follows:

Is the ecumenical patriarchate in Turkey waiting for Godot?

By Orhan Kemal Cengiz

Since the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) came to power in 2002, the reopening of the Halki Seminary has repeatedly returned to the political agenda in Turkey.

There is almost a pattern. Some government officials say, “There is no harm in reopening the school [which was closed down in 1971], and there are some preparations taking place to that effect.” If you read these statements you can get the (wrong) impression that there is only technical work needing to be done, and the government is working on it. For the last seven years, we have heard exactly the same story. But, in the end, nothing comes out. Why?

Because the Halki Seminary is only a part of a much more complex question that may not be well appreciated even by the government itself. The question is namely the existence of the ecumenical patriarchate in Turkey. There is a deep-rooted state policy that has brought the patriarchate to the verge of total extinction. This policy was shaped during the late Ottoman and early republican era and has been applied vigorously since then. This is a policy of taking gradual steps to push this historical institution into a corner to force it to choose one of the two options: Either it will stay in Turkey and will lose everything slowly and painfully, or it will leave Turkey once and for all.

The lesser of two evils

The name of the street in front of the patriarchate is Sadrazam Ali Paşa (Sadrazam means grand vizier). Ali Paşa was the state official who hanged Patriarch Gregorios over the front door of the patriarchate in 1821. His name was given to the very street to which the patriarchate opens its doors every day. It is a constant reminder of the “past,” of course. (I suggest the EU Commission get this onto their agenda and encourage the government to change this name showing some respect to this historical institution.) Neither was it a coincidence that a so-called “Turkish Orthodox Church” was established in the early years of the Turkish Republic. The Turkish Orthodox Church was designed to fight against the ecumenical patriarchate and was established with financial aid provided by the state. Papa Eftim, so-called patriarch of the Turkish Orthodox Church, had spent his entire life in war with the ecumenical patriarchate. We now know that the Ergenekon (deep state) gang held some of its strategic meetings on the premises of the Turkish Orthodox Church. Sevgi Erenol, press spokesperson of this church, is now in prison for being one of the high-ranking members of this gang. Continue reading →

Report from the Department of External Relations, Moscow Patriarchate:

The head of the Turkish Government expressed satisfaction at Patriarch Kirill’s visit and the fact that he visited not only Istanbul but also the Turkish capital city of Ankara.

The sides noted with satisfaction the developing relations between the Republic of Turkey and the Russian Federation.

Mr. Erdogan spoke about his experience of contacts with Russian leaders and the development of bilateral relations including in economy and tourism, pointing out that about three million Russian tourists had visited Turkey in the previous year alone.

His Holiness Kirill stressed that the Republic of Turkey is Russia’s friendly neighbouring country and expressed the conviction that the development of relations between Turkey, on one hand, and Russia, Ukraine and other nations nourished spiritually by the Moscow Patriarchate, on the other, may help promote not only the ‘beach’ tourism but also religious tourism involving pilgrimage and prayer. His Holiness thanked the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism for giving assistance to Russians in this respect.

Mr. Erdogan pointed to the importance of developing pilgrim tourism as well. The patriarch and the prime minister considered measures for developing further cooperation between the Russian Orthodox Church and Turkey in this field.

Patriarch Kirill also spoke about the great number of Russian-speaking Orthodox believers who reside in Turkey. He stressed that churches were needed to meet their religious needs. The prime minister expressed readiness to help in this matter and said that he personally was ready to deal with providing churches for Russian-speaking believers residing in Turkey. Continue reading →

Lots of press attention being paid to the possible reopening of the Halki Seminary in the wake of Patriarch Kirill’s visit to the Ecumenical Patriarchate. (The patriarch is now back in Moscow where he met with President Obama.)

In his analysis of the Bartholomew-Kirill meeting for Today’s Zaman, Ali Murat Yel argues for a reopening of the seminary (known to Turks as Heybeliada) if the Turkish state “wishes to be counted among the civilized and democratic countries in the world.” The writer also said that “Istanbul is anxious about the revival and renaissance of the Russian Church, as its weight and power might lead it to claim the overarching leadership of the Orthodox Church in the near future. The claim would not be groundless because the Patriarchate of Moscow has some 95 million followers, which constitute more than one third of the 250 million Orthodox worldwide.” Then there’s the problem of where to find Turkish clergy for the Ecumenical Patriarchate:

The closure of the seminary by the Turkish state was something against religious liberties in the first place. The Turkish state will allow the İstanbul patriarch to take and discuss the issue with foreign officials and garner support for the cause by keeping it closed. Otherwise, the clergy of the İstanbul Patriarchate will continue to receive their education in Greek seminaries or the monastery of Mount Athos in Greece. Furthermore, the state insists on having a Turkish citizen as a patriarch, yet it will be more difficult in the future to find a Turkish citizen to lead the İstanbul Church unless they are educated in Turkey. Otherwise, the İstanbul Church would be forced to naturalize clergy coming from other countries, without any knowledge of Turkish society or the state’s attitude towards the Church. These naturalized officials would also rely on their native countries in times of difficulty.

On the Reuters Faith World blog, Ayla Jean Yackley has a nice overview of the issue and frames the position of those Turks who want to keep the seminary closed this way:

Opponents of the seminary say it violates the secular constitution and reopening it would prompt radical Islamists to demand their own schools. All of Turkey’s Islamic theology faculties are located at strictly regulated state universities. Some Turks also fear it would legitimise Bartholomew’s ecumenical, or universal, title. Unlike most countries, Turkey doesn’t recognise that designation, arguing Bartholomew is only the head of the country’s tiny flock of Greek Orthodox.

Re-establishing a seminary would create an Orthodox “Vatican City” in Istanbul that could serve as a Fifth Column of Greece, the country’s historical foe, they argue. After all, Turkey closed Halki during a period of tension with Greece over Cyprus.

Yackley cites an April report on the Halki controversy by Turkish think tank TESEV (download the 40-page “Discussions and Recommendations on the Future of the Halki Seminary” here.) I quoted an earlier version of this report in my commentary “A Patriarch in Dire Straits.”

As for the Turkish resistance to opening the seminary, TESEV authors Elcin Macar and Mehmet Ali Gokacti outline two main views:

The first viewpoint is the more conservative one and was probably instrumental in creating the policy currently pursued towards the Greek Patriarch in Turkey. It states that the (Halki Seminary) HS is the Military College of the Patriarchate, and even of the Megali Idea. Turkey cannot therefore be expected to allow Greece to educate clergymen who will support such imperialist ideology. In the second position, a framework of “reciprocity” is advocated. That is to say, the issue can be used as a bargaining chip to bring Greece to a compromising position in order to help solve the problems of the Western Thrace Turks.

This group includes Kemalists, secularists sensitive to this issue, nationalists, and a smaller segment of the “Islamic Group” who emphasize nationalism.

Secularists fear that if the HS is permitted to open a school, Islamic groups would also demand to open religious schools. This could be a slippery slope and could permanently damage the secular system. This view can be critiqued in several ways. First, these groups either do not know or choose to ignore that the Megali Idea (Great Idea) was abandoned by Greece after the defeat in 1922. It is no longer the main aim of Greek foreign policy. The critics however are not uncomfortable if clergyman candidates from this “Turkish institution” have had education outside Turkey where they may learn “dangerous” ideologies. Furthermore, they cannot produce any evidence suggesting that clergymen of Megali Idea are educated at the said seminary. The Patriarchate failed to meet the requirements after the seminary was closed down and became dependent of the Greek Church in the education of clergymen. This sits in opposition with what the aforesaid people wanted. Continue reading →