|
|
|
Published by the
Financial Times,
August 27, 2005
Financial Times Interviews
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew
|
 |
 |
FT Reporter Vincent Boland Reviews Religious
Freedom in Turkey and Closure of Halki
8/27/2005
 One
recent Saturday afternoon, in the enervating
heat and noise of Istanbul, the holiest man in
the Orthodox Christian Church joined a queue to
catch a ferry. His All Holiness the Ecumenical
Patriarch Bartholomew I stood in line with about
200 others, mostly tourists, bound for the
little island of Heybeliada, about an hour's
ride from the city. For many of those boarding
the boat, a visit to the island is part of the
experience of being in Istanbul, something
recommended in the guidebooks. It has excellent
beaches, a naval high school and a watersports
club popular with Istanbul's rich.
The Patriarch might have been just another
day-tripper too, were it not for his long black
cassock, the beautiful staff he carried, and a
small entourage fussing around him and carrying
briefcases and his travel bags. Still, even that
was not enough to merit the attention of most of
the other travellers, anxious to get a good seat
on the ferry. They might have glanced at the man
in black, but they did not acknowledge him.
 The
Patriarch doesn't normally queue, he admits a
few minutes later, when I remark on the
informality of his embarkation. As the boat
manoeuvres around the stretch of water where the
Bosphorus joins the Marmara sea and begins our
journey, he explains that the Patriarchate is
awaiting the delivery of a new private boat to
replace one that was sold recently. Until it
arrives, he says, he is happy to line up with
everybody else.
Bartholomew is the 270th occupier of the
Patriarchate of Constantinople, one of the
founding churches of Christendom. For his
followers he is first among equals among the
patriarchs of his church. His position is not
universally accepted; in the notoriously
schismatic Orthodox Church there is intense
rivalry between Bartholomew and Alexei II of
Moscow, whom the Russian church--and perhaps the
Russian government--would claim to be
Bartholomew's equal (they are involved in a
fierce battle for the allegiance of the Orthodox
Church in Ukraine). And since the Orthodox
Church is organised more along national lines
than the Roman Catholic Church, there is
frequent dispute among the patriarchy. Still,
Bartholomew is regarded, especially in Greece
and the Anglo-Saxon world, as the leader of the
world's 300 million Orthodox Christians, and he
has the mien and bearing of a man of influence.
And for him, a visit to Heybeliada--known in
Greek as Halki--is more a pilgrimage than a day
out.
It is also a political act. At the summit of
this speck of land stands a Greek Orthodox
seminary that has been at the centre of an
extraordinary dispute between Orthodox
Christians and the authorities in Turkey since
it was closed by Ankara in 1971. The dispute
pits Turkey's fiercely secular authorities
against one of the world's great Christian
churches. It raises a profound question about
the degree to which Turkey--whose prime minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan is said to pray at least
three times a day--is committed historically and
constitutionally to secularism. Can it grant
rights to minority religions that it is not
willing to grant to the majority faith? It also
poses a dilemma both for Turkey and for Europe:
can a Muslim country that aspires to join the
European Union embrace freedom of religion and
remain committed to stifling political Islam?
 The
seminary, built on the site of the Holy Trinity
monastery, is a splendid piece of mid-19th
century school architecture, airy,
high-ceilinged and with views of the sea or the
city in every direction. It was opened in 1844,
during a period of reform in the late Ottoman
empire known as the Tanzimat, as a theological
school to train priests for the Orthodox Church.
The Patriarch himself was a student here from
1954 to 1961, and he describes it as "a perfect
place between Earth and heaven".
The seminary was closed as part of a campaign by
the Turkish state beginning in the 1960s to rein
in private educational institutions, which were
felt to be a threat to the state ethos,
especially if they were religious institutions.
The seminary was included in this crackdown
partly through a legal ruling that it could not
remain independent. So it was officially
"discontinued". And despite a three-decade
campaign by the church to reopen it, that is how
it remains.
The silence of the seminary's halls and
classrooms and the threat from neglect to its
library of theological and history books and old
manuscripts, are emblematic of a wider problem:
what Orthodox Christians claim is the systematic
mistreatment of the Patriarchate over many years
by successive Turkish governments. They say
Ankara has confiscated not only the seminary but
thousands of buildings--churches, schools,
hospitals--that are the property of the
Patriarchate, impoverishing it in a deliberate
attempt to destroy it, or force it to leave
Istanbul, where it has resided for 1,700 years.
So the conduct of the Turkish government,
Orthodox Christians claim, is both an offence
against Turkish history and a rebuke to the
principle of religious freedom enshrined in the
constitution. Every visit the Patriarch makes to
the seminary, including the one he will make on
this trip to Heybeliada, is therefore a way of
reminding the authorities of what the church
considers a violation of its historical and
constitutional rights.
"We are a part of this country, born and
educated here," His All Holiness tells me on the
ferry, in a voice that is both grave and soft.
"That is why we are so disappointed, because
although we [Orthodox Christians] are part of
this country we are treated as second-class
citizens. Because of our faith and our national
background [essentially Greek] we are seen in a
different way [to Muslim Turks]. It is a shame
and a pity to have such a beautiful place empty
when the Patriarchate has such great need of
it."
After his visit to the seminary, the Patriarch
attends to the immediate task that has brought
him to Heybeliada: the reopening and
reconsecration of the tiny church of St Nicholas
in the island's little seaside town. Dressed in
his most elaborate ecclesiastical robes and
attended by several priests, some of whom have
travelled from Greece, he begins the elaborate
ceremony with prayers, incense and hymns sung in
deep male voices. There is quite a crowd: most
are tourists from Greece or from Istanbul's tiny
Greek Orthodox community, or have been invited
especially for the occasion regardless of their
religion.
The church has a plain exterior, but its
interior is full of iconography: Jesus Christ,
Mary, the saints. Its vaulted ceiling draws the
gaze upwards towards the icons and decoration on
the walls, and the high altar is a rich
elaboration of wood and gold. Like a lot of
interiors of Orthodox Christian churches, its
decoration seems excessive. It is a vivid
contrast with the places and forms of Muslim
worship in Turkey. There are many wonderfully
elaborate mosques all over the country; the
collection of great mosques in Sultanahmet and
Fatih, in old Istanbul, is among the world's
finest. But their elaboration is an exterior
one; inside they are as austere and simple as
the ceremonies they hold. Still, not even the
fascination of the ceremony at St Nicholas can
keep everybody entranced; the stifling heat soon
sends some of the congregation outside, where
evening is approaching and it is a little
cooler.
 The
Patriarchate - which is for Orthodox Christians
what the Vatican is for Roman Catholics - is a
collection of mostly wooden buildings that sits
squarely in the middle of old Istanbul, in a
district called Fener. Once this area was home
to a sizeable population of Jews and ethnic
Greeks; now it is among the most conservative
Muslim quarters of the city. Women here are
invariably covered from head to toe; their
menfolk sit in teashops smoking and chatting. It
seems an odd place for the world headquarters of
a Christian church.
This modest compound is the focal point of
Istanbul's Greek Orthodox Christian community.
Inside, it is a warren of corridors and rooms
where informality appears to be the norm.
Visitors to His All Holiness bow and kiss his
hand on meeting him, but there is none of the
ritual that surrounds the Pope in Rome. Outside,
guards hover at the gate and there is
airport-style security. On the advice of the
local mayor, the Patriarch has a police
bodyguard - seated discreetly behind us on the
ferry - because of occasional hostility from
neighbourhood nationalists.
 The
Orthodox community in Turkey has three main
components: Armenian, Greek and Syrian. Figures
for how many adherents each branch has are
difficult to find - the census does not classify
them. Official estimates, however, suggest about
3,000 Greek Orthodox Christians, and there is
little doubt that the community has been in
decline for many years. Its interaction with the
wider Turkish community in the city has
invariably reflected over the years the state of
relations between Turkey and Greece, which were
antagonistic for many decades until the late
1990s but are now the warmest they have been for
years (the prime ministers of the two countries
are friends).
The relationship between Turkey and Greece is
ancient and complex. But to understand their
postwar history, it is necessary to recount the
fate of the Greek Orthodox community in
Istanbul. If nothing else, it helps to explain
why there are so few members of that community
today. In 1955, over a period of about 24 hours
on September 6 and 7, Istanbul witnessed a mob
assault against its ethnic Greek inhabitants
that marked the beginning of the end for the
community and the Orthodox Church in the city.
This community numbered about 100,000 at the
time, when Istanbul was much smaller than it is
today.
The precise cause of what the Greek-American
historian Speros Vryonis, in an exhaustive new
history of the incident, calls a pogrom (ie that
it was orchestrated by government forces) is
complex. But it started when reports reached
Istanbul that the house where Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk--the founder of the republic of
Turkey--is said to have been born, in the Greek
city of Thessaloniki, had been bombed by Greek
nationalists. The reports were not true; even
today the origins of the reports appear unclear.
Within a few hours hundreds of Greek businesses
and institutions in Istanbul were ransacked and
about 40 people were killed.
Walking the pleasant district of Cihangir in
central Istanbul now, where much of the
community lived, one sees houses on every other
street standing empty even as the neighbourhood
undergoes rapid gentrification. These are the
homes of Greek families who fled after 1955 and
that now exist in a kind of legal limbo awaiting
some resolution that is not forthcoming. By the
Besiktas fish market an Orthodox church stands
silent and shrouded, and opposite it a school
appears to be rotting away. These were centres
of Greek life in Istanbul at one time; now they
are reminders of an ugly and barely remembered
incident in the city's recent history.
Perhaps this is why Istanbul now feels like a
city with something missing. Many residents of
the city regret 1955 deeply. Today, however,
thanks in part to the remarkable turnaround in
Turkish/Greek relations, the Greek Orthodox
community's prospects may be brightening. Not
only is the Patriarch a widely respected and
much-liked man; the community, like many small
minorities, is mostly wealthy and successful,
and some of those who left in the 1970s and
1980s are returning to reclaim and renovate
their properties, according to Alexis
Alexandris, the consul-general of Greece in
Istanbul.
One legacy of the disaster that befell the Greek
Orthodox community in 1955, though, may be
paradoxical: it has created a greater sense of
its position inside Turkey today. What the
community seeks now from the Turkish state--the
reopening of the seminary on Heybeliada and a
recognition of the Patriarch's "ecumenical"
status as a worldwide leader--they seek as
Turkish citizens rather than as a religious
minority. Part of the dismay the Patriarch feels
at his treatment by the state is that he is
intensely loyal to that state. "I spent two
years in the Turkish army," he tells me. "We
[Orthodox Christians] pay our taxes, obey the
laws, and we are very loyal citizens."
So the quarrel between the Orthodox Church and
Turkey is not one between Christians and
Muslims. It is one between the church and the
country's secular authorities; and the stakes
are high. Activists in the Orthodox Church say
the very survival of the Patriarchate is at
issue. For Turkey, the dispute raises a
fascinating question about the place of religion
in a secular society. It asks searching
questions about Ankara's treatment of minority
religions. These questions, in turn, trouble the
European Union, which Turkey wishes to join and
which has absolute positions on such principles
as religious freedom. The controversy offers a
revealing glimpse of the dilemmas that Turkey
faces as it becomes a freer and more democratic
society.
Despite--or perhaps because of--the high stakes,
Turkey has trouble making its case for the
defence. This may be because Turkey does not
have one: the fate of the seminary on Heybeliada
appears, on the face of it, to be open and shut.
Or it may be because it is unwilling to
undertake a unilateral act before October 3,
when it begins the formal EU accession process.
Reopening the seminary could therefore be a
bargaining chip to be played at a more
propitious moment.
The issue is extremely sensitive, nonetheless.
Not only did both the directorate of religious
affairs and the foreign ministry decline to
speak on the record for this article; it is
difficult to ascertain even what the official
position is on the seminary. What is clear,
however, is that reopening it is not a simple
matter. If it were, a decree to do so would have
been issued long ago because, officials assured
me, the government is "pre-disposed" to finding
a solution. But, the officials said, reopening
the seminary presents a complicated legal,
political, diplomatic and electoral quandary for
the current government, which is headed by the
most openly devout Muslim prime minister in
Turkey's recent history.
I
first got a sense of how potent the quarrel is
becoming about three months ago, during a
conversation with two Americans over coffee in
an Istanbul hotel. Anthony Limberakis is a
radiologist in Philadelphia, and one of the
leading members--or 'archons'--of the Greek
Orthodox church in the US. With him was Father
Alex Karloutsos, an Orthodox priest from Long
Island.
They had arrived in Istanbul from Brussels,
which has become the latest and, arguably, the
most important battleground in the seminary
dispute. The Patriarch himself was there a few
weeks ago, raising the issue with the European
Commission and expressing his support for
Turkey's EU membership. Limberakis and
Karloutsos say they also support Turkey's EU
bid. But there is a sense of urgency in their
words, and not a little anger.
The plight of the Patriarchate inside Turkey,
Limberakis says, "is an impending catastrophe.
We are talking about the very survival of the
spiritual centre of world Orthodoxy. For a
secular country to be consumed with [a perceived
threat from] a few thousand Christians is very
perplexing. Turkey ought to be greater than
that." He also finds insulting Turkey's refusal
to recognise the term "Ecumenical" in the
Patriarch's title, which refers to his worldwide
vocation.
Karloutsos hands me a list of properties listed
as "confiscated by the government of Turkey
between 1974 and 2002". It contains details of
153 hospitals owned by the Patriarchate that
were, in effect, nationalised by the state
during that time. The list is part of a hefty
batch of documents presented to the US Congress
(which Karloutsos also gives me) as part of an
intense lobbying effort that has won the backing
of powerful US politicians and church leaders.
Limberakis and Karloutsos have now turned their
attention to the EU, aware that it offers the
best immediate hope for a solution. During the
accession process Turkey can expect the minutest
scrutiny of its record in observing and
implementing human and civil rights. Its record
is poor but improving; its stance on the
seminary, according to diplomats in Ankara, will
be a test of how far it is prepared to go to
accept certain principles that may conflict with
its current, secular constitutional settlement.
On the face of it, this settlement ordains a
strict separation between the state and religion
in Turkey. Ataturk decreed that the country was
to be secular, nationalist, republican, popular,
statist and modern. These are its governing
principles today, 82 years after it was created
from the ruins of the Ottoman empire. So the
people of Turkey, the majority of whom are Sunni
Muslims, are free to worship. But what and even
how they worship is, to a large extent, dictated
by the state.
One of the main functions of the Directorate of
Religious Affairs, an arm of the government, is
to write the sermons that are preached in
mosques every Friday. Religious schooling is
permissible but limited, and is tightly
controlled. Many Turkish people are quite
content with this arrangement, believing that it
protects them from a stifling and perhaps
oppressive Islam. Others are not, believing that
it has left a spiritual vacuum, perhaps even a
hostility to religion per se, at the heart of
the Turkish state.
However, as Ali Carkoglu, a professor at Sabanci
University in Istanbul, puts it, the result is
that Turkey does not recognise any religious
authority independent of the state. This, as
much as anything, is what secularism means in
Turkey today. "All imams [in Turkey] are state
officials--clerks, basically," Carkoglu says.
"They follow orders. So, if [Turkey] recognises
a religious authority that is not under state
control, the whole system will change. The issue
of the Patriarchate touches that nerve."
There is an irony to Turkey's stance on
secularism--or, more accurately, French-style
laicism - that is not appreciated very well in
the EU. By strictly controlling what they say,
Turkey in general has avoided the phenomenon of
radical imams that is now causing such
soul-searching in Britain and France. Instead,
religious practice in Turkey is largely a
private matter, which is how the constitution
and the secular authorities have always regarded
it, Carkoglu says.
According to Cengiz Aktar, a prominent Turkish
academic who is the head of a Turkish/Greek
friendship society, part of Turkey's dilemma
about how to deal with the Patriarchate and with
other Christian religions is that the
authorities in Turkey do not really understand
the Christian world. "There are lacunae in the
appreciation of the role of the Patriarchate in
the world among the secular authorities," he
says. "In a wider sense, reopening the seminary
would strengthen the position of Istanbul within
the Orthodox Church. But there is no
appreciation among the secular authorities that
this might be beneficial for Turkey."
Olli Rehn is the EU's commissioner in charge of
expanding the union to include new members. He
sums up the EU's position in fairly stark terms:
"Freedom of religion is one of the core issues
to be addressed by Turkey, and the reopening of
Halki is a critical litmus test of its
implementation," Rehn says in a telephone
interview. "I have significant difficulties to
understand how a tiny Christian minority could
pose any threat to the Turkish state or to the
predominant culture in Turkey. It should be as
easy to open a church in Eskisehir [a town near
Ankara] as it is to open a mosque in Finland.
But it is not, for the moment."
So why is Ankara not acting to reopen the
seminary? In my conversations with officials and
with opinion-formers who are familiar with the
issue, I got a clear sense that there is a
desire bordering on urgency to find a solution.
They acknowledge that the reopening of the
seminary, and the benefits it would bring to the
Orthodox Church, present no threat to Turkey;
the opposite is true. It would reap instant
dividends in relations with the EU and the US.
It would also help to neutralise the growing
body of opinion outside Turkey that the country
does not respect the fundamental value of
freedom of religion.
The government, rooted in the country's
tradition of political Islam, arguably should
have ordered the reopening of the seminary after
it came to power in late 2002 on a wave of
popular disenchantment with the state of Turkish
politics. Perhaps it would have done had it
realised how thorny the problem would become.
Now, however, it may be too late for this
government to act. To understand why, it is
necessary to appreciate the difficulties in
which Erdogan now finds himself and his
government. Rehn's comment about Turkey becoming
more like Finland is not glib; it cuts to the
heart of the Turkish dilemma.
When Erdogan and his Justice and Development
party were elected, the bedrock of their support
came from Muslim voters outside the big cities
who were appalled at the corruption that was
then (and still is) rampant, and whose way of
life had been undermined by a financial crisis
in 2000-2001 that scarred Turkey's emerging
middle class. The government has not wiped out
corruption. But it has steadied the economy,
satisfying at least one demand of its core
voters.
Now those core voters want something else. They
want their sons to be educated at religious
schools (which is permitted) and then to have
the freedom to pursue a university education of
their choice (which is not). They may even want
to make adultery a criminal offence, as Erdogan
tried (and failed) to do last autumn, to the
horror of secularists. Most of all, they want
their daughters to be able to wear a headscarf
as a matter of civil and religious liberty
("covered women" may not enter official
buildings or attend classes at state
universities, and may not be appointed to a
range of jobs in the civil administration). One
might say that they want what Patriarch
Bartholomew wants - the freedom to govern their
religious lives as they choose, without state
interference.
Yet whenever Erdogan tries to make concessions
to these voters, he bumps up against the
constitution, and sometimes even against the
military, which considers itself the guardian of
Ataturk's legacy. When he sought last year to
allow boys from religious high schools to pursue
a university education of their choosing, he was
forced to abandon the measure because of fierce
opposition from secularists. Despite his huge
parliamentary majority (due less to the size of
his core vote than to the electoral rules
concerning parliamentary representation),
Turkey's secular forces are remarkably powerful,
and even if they cannot stop him, the
constitution and constitutional court probably
will.
So if Erdogan cannot provide his core Muslim
voters with greater religious freedom, how can
he offer it to Turkey's tiny Orthodox Christian
community? It would be electoral suicide. It is
not that the vast majority of Turkish Muslims
want to keep the seminary closed; it is that, if
the Orthodox community can have a religious
school independent of the state, then so should
they. Turkey may ultimately be able to present a
solution to the seminary closure, one that is
acceptable to everybody, only through a wider
move that addresses the grievances of all
religions. There is no sign that this country is
ready for such a constitutional upheaval.
In the past, Patriarch Bartholomew has expressed
his belief that the seminary on Heybeliada will
one day reopen. He said he believed it would
reopen as he believed in God. When I ask him, on
the ferry, what he thinks today, he sounds
pessimistic, even deflated. He says: "I still
hope that one day we will get permission to
reopen it." And he cannot resist referring to
one last irony of the closure of his beloved and
silent seminary. In the garden in front of the
seminary there is a bust of Ataturk above a
slogan attributed to the great man that reads:
"The main virtue in life is knowledge." His All
Holiness smiles a weak smile. "How ironic," he
says, "that this should appear at the entrance
to a closed school."
Vincent Boland is an FT correspondent based in
Ankara.
|
