Turkey’s oldest indigenous culture fears extinction

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.

Venice 2014: 'The Cut' Review

John Bleasdale

★★★☆☆

Medz Yeghern is the synonym Armenians gave to the brutal extermination of their people by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to the end of First World War, which also gave a new word to the English language - 'genocide', coined by Raphael Lemkin. Also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the state-sponsored murders were widely seen as foreshadowing the modern techniques of murder that would be brought to terrible perfection by the Nazis during the Second World War. Turkish-German director Fatih Akin has chosen this catastrophic event for his new epic film, The Cut (2014), which screened in competition at the 71st Venice Film Festival [August 27 - September 6, 2014] and tells the tale of a father's search for his family.