TURKEY: IS ORTHODOX DENOMINATION CONNECTED TO COUP CASE?
February 7, 2013 – 4:01pm,
by Alexander Christie-Miller Turkey EurasiaNet’s Weekly Digest
The priest’s voice echoed off the crumbling plasterwork of the
sanctuary, as only two worshippers took part in a recent Sunday
service in Istanbul’s Meryem Ana Church. The low turnout is typical
these days. The Turkish Orthodox Church is possibly the country’s
smallest Christian denomination, and certainly its most controversial.
Turkish prosecutors allege the church, which traces its roots to
the upheaval surrounding the founding of the Turkish republic,
is connected to an ultra-nationalist movement, known as Ergenekon,
which reportedly plotted to overthrow the government of Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Church spokesperson Sevgi Erenerol, sister of the current patriarch,
has been imprisoned since 2008 on charges that include establishing
and directing an armed terrorist organization as part of the supposed
Ergenekon conspiracy. A host of ultra-nationalist groups established
in 2004 and 2005 had “the same” founders, and “they were all gathering
at the Turkish Orthodox Patriarchate,” claimed Orhan Kemal Cengiz,
a human rights lawyer.
Meanwhile, Vural Ergul, a lawyer for Erenerol, calls the government’s
case “fake and imaginary.” Ergul acknowledged the church’s links
to prominent ultra-nationalists, including Ergenekon co-defendant
Veli Kucuk, who has been linked to the 2007 murder of three Christian
missionaries in the eastern town of Malatya, but maintained that both
his client and the Turkish Orthodox Church are victims of government
persecution.
“Members of the church are scared and anxious,” Ergul said. “It is
impossible not to see … [Prime Minister Erdogan’s] intolerance
against the church.”
Beyond the possible Ergenekon connection, Cengiz, the rights lawyer who
has worked extensively with Turkey’s non-Muslim minorities, contends
that Turkish Orthodox Church members have routinely harassed members
of other Christian denominations in Turkey. “It [the Turkish Orthodox
Church] has a central role that has not been addressed adequately by
the prosecutors,” Cengiz said.
How and why did a tiny Christian church gain a reputation for being
antagonistic toward fellow Christians? The answer lies in its origins.
The Turkish Orthodox Church’s founder, Pavlos Karahisarithis was
a Turkish-speaking, Greek Orthodox priest, who, in 1922, at the
end of the Greco-Turkish War, broke with the pro-Greece Ecumenical
Patriarchate of Constantinople, the supreme Orthodox patriarchate,
and allied himself with victorious Turkish nationalists led by Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk.
Ataturk took a personal interest in the Turkish Orthodox Church, and
expressed his support. Karahisarithis, meanwhile, took the title Papa
(“Pope” in Turkish) Eftim, and later changed his last name to the
Turkish family name of Erenerol. “Ataturk may have had a pronounced
secular view of the world, but he was going against a great trend
in history in which religion marked you out as part of a particular
group,” commented Anthony O’Mahony, director of the Centre for Eastern
Christianity at the University of London’s Heythrop College.
But once Turkey’s 1924 population exchange with Greece took place,
Eftim’s potential followers dwindled. The Turkish Orthodox Church’s
“raison d’être disappeared” with the 1.2 million Christians who left
Anatolia as part of the exchange, said O’Mahony. “History has left
it behind.”
Other Orthodox patriarchates never recognized the church. Ataturk,
however, did not forget it. Papa Eftim and his family were exempt
from the population exchange and moved to Istanbul, where they were
given the Meryem Ana Church, which the government expropriated from
the Ecumenical Patriarchate. “It [the Turkish church] was conceived
as a replacement for the Ecumenical Patriarch and the real Orthodox
Church, and as a kind of proxy completely at the service of the
state,” elaborated Cengiz Aktar, a political scientist at Istanbul’s
BahceÅ~_ehir University.
Over the ensuing decades, Eftim chastised Turkey’s other Christian
minorities, twice occupying the Ecumenical Patriarchate building
in Istanbul, and taking over two churches in the Turkish Orthodox
Church’s neighborhood during the 1955 and 1956 anti-Greek riots.
(Today, the Ecumenical Patriarchate is contesting those property
seizures).
Together with his sons, Turgut and Selcuk, who, in turn, succeeded
him as patriarch, Eftim continually railed against Christian groups,
claiming that they were agents of foreign powers.
His grandson, the current patriarch Papa Eftim IV, has largely
shunned publicity. Until her arrest, however, his granddaughter,
Sevgi, continued to rally feelings against other Christian groups.
At a 2006 security conference hosted by the military, she described
missionaries as “a pawn in political chess” whose “only goal is to
invade this land.” She was also involved in harassment of the late
Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink, throwing coins and
pencils at his lawyers during a court appearance. Dink was shot dead
in a 2007 killing linked to Turkey’s ultra-nationalist movement.
“Sevgi Erenerol was one of the most prominent people waging a war
against non-Muslims in Turkey,” commented Cengiz, who claimed that the
number of attacks and threats against non-Muslims has decreased since
Erenerol’s arrest and those of other prominent Ergenekon suspects.
“Although they themselves are supposed to be a minority, they hated
other minorities, particularly Armenians,” added Aktar.
Prosecutors are expected to rest their case against Erenerol this
month. Ceremonies at the Meryem Ana Church continue uninterrupted,
although its future has never been more uncertain. “The number
of members … is declining with each passing day,” said Ergul,
the lawyer.
Meanwhile for the Erenerol family, which makes up the bulk of the
church’s congregation, the charges in no way diminish their belief in
the justness of their cause. “As long as we have belief in God,” said
Sevgi Erenerol’s 84-year-old mother Claudia, one of the two worshippers
at the recent service, “our problems will seem insignificant.”
Editor’s note: Alexander Christie-Miller is a freelance reporter
based in Istanbul.
http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66525