Ayla Jean Yackley
A legal battle over the ownership of dozens of
churches, monasteries and other property in southeastern Turkey has
embroiled one of the world’s oldest Christian communities.
Turkish authorities have seized approximately 50
properties, totaling hundreds of thousands of square meters, from the
Syriac Orthodox Church on grounds their ownership deeds had lapsed,
church and community leaders said.
An appeal by the fifth-century Mor Gabriel,
one of the oldest working monasteries in the world, against the
confiscation was rejected in May by a government commission charged with
liquidating the assets.
Among the properties are at least two functioning monasteries erected
1,500 years ago, said Kuryakos Ergun, the chairman of the Mor Gabriel
Monastery Foundation. The loss of these monuments threaten the survival
of one of Turkey’s oldest indigenous cultures.
“Our churches and monasteries are what root Syriacs in these lands;
our existence relies on them. They are our history and what sustains our
culture,” Ergun said. “While the country should be protecting this
heritage, we instead see our culture is at risk.”
Syriacs, sometimes called Assyrians, are heirs to a civilization in
historical Mesopotamia that dates back as far as 3500 B.C., and many
today still speak a dialect of Aramaic, the language of Christ. Most are
Orthodox, but Syriacs belong to different Christian denominations.
Their homeland of Tur Abdin, which translates as the Mountain of the
Servants of God, is situated on a high plateau between the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers and is studded with more than 80 monasteries, most in
ruins as a number of Syriacs have fled to Europe to escape poverty and
persecution over the past half-century.
For years, the titles of the properties now in question had been
listed in the national land registry as belonging to villages where
Syriacs lived. When those villages were incorporated as neighborhoods in
the newly established greater municipality of the city of Mardin in
2012, their legal status was dissolved — along with their ability to own
property, said Erol Dora, who is a Syriac and one of a handful of
Christian lawmakers in the Turkish parliament.
Last year, the liquidation commission began transferring to state
institutions assets whose status it had determined were no longer valid
following the municipal reform. Among them were dozens of houses of
worship, cemeteries and other properties used by the Syriac community
for centuries that should have been turned over to Mor Gabriel, Dora
said.
Dora has submitted a parliamentary question to the prime minister in
the hope of fostering a political solution to a problem that he sees as
part of Turkey’s wider failure to enshrine the rights of its minorities.
“Turkey must adopt policies that protect citizens of different
faiths. This has to be part of efforts to comply with modern democratic
principles and rule of law,” said Dora, who represents Mardin as a
deputy in the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party.
In the meantime, graveyards have been redistributed to the Mardin
municipality. Several churches and monasteries that were handed over to
the state Treasury have been given to the Department of Religious
Affairs (Diyanet), a powerful state institution that oversees Muslim
houses of worship, Dora and Ergun said.
The fifth-century limestone Mor Meliki, a monastery set beside a
spring revered by pilgrims for its healing powers and tended by two
Syriac families, is among those properties reallocated to Diyanet, Ergun
said.
An official at the religious affairs office in Ankara denied that it
had been given the properties, saying it had received no official notice
of the matter.
However, a copy of a document purportedly provided by Mor Gabriel to
members of the community show the Diyanet is listed as the recipient of
several properties.
Turkey has taken some steps in recent years to improve conditions for
Syriacs, including allowing the community to open its first school in
nine decades.
Community leaders have said that early in the Syrian conflict,
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then prime minister, invited the Syriac
Orthodox Patriarchate to return to Turkey, its seat from A.D. 37 until
Turkey expelled it to Syria in 1925. The move did not materialize.
The expulsion followed the massacres of as many as 250,000 Syriacs by
Ottoman forces during “Seyfo,” or the Year of the Sword, in 1915.
Armenians were killed in even greater numbers in the chaos of the
Ottoman Empire’s collapse during World War I in what both groups call a genocide.
Violence between the Turkish army and Kurdish militants that erupted
in 1984 forced the descendants of survivors to flee Tur Abdin, reducing
the Syriac population to 3,500 or so from more than 50,000 in 1950,
according to researchers. Istanbul is home to fewer than 20,000 Syriacs.
Syriac Christians also survive in pockets of Syria, Iraq and Iran.
The latter-day fight over land may be bloodless, but for some Syriacs, it is evidence they are still not welcome.
Mor Gabriel is entangled in other property disputes with the state. In 2013, Erdogan pledged to return 30 parcels of land taken from the monastery, but Ergun said less than half have been restored.
Families seeking to reclaim
gardens, farms or homes occupied by Muslim neighbors or arbitrarily
redistributed during an overhaul of the national land registry in recent
decades face yearslong court battles that can deplete their savings and
incur the ire of the wider community, said Tuma Celik, who heads
Turkey’s branch of the European Syriac Union and is the editor of the
Syriac newspaper Sabro.
He estimated the amount of disputed property measures in the millions
of square meters and worries that the legal wrangling discourages the
trickle of Syriacs who have begun to return to Tur Abdin to tend
ancestral vineyards and fields. In the summer months, the population of
Syriacs can swell by as many as 10,000 people.
“The hope that we have cultivated in recent years that this remains
our homeland is fracturing. Instead, the message we hear is to leave,”
Celik said.
Islam always obliterates any previous culture. It wants to destroy Christianity and Judaism mmost of all.
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