Turkey Continues Desecrating Historic Churches

As millions of Christians were celebrating Christmas Eve on December 24, 2021, the Head of Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) opened a historic church, also known as Ainos (Enez) Hagia Sophia Church in Edirne, as a mosque after its restoration was completed by Turkey’s General Directorate of Foundations.

Referring to the former Greek church as a “historic mosque,” the website of Diyanet announced on its website:

The historic mosque, which was turned into a mosque after the conquest of Enez by [Ottoman sultan] Mehmed the Conqueror and became unusable as a result of the earthquakes in the following years, reunited with its congregants after 56 years through the Friday prayers led by the President of Diyanet, Ali Erbaş.

Edirne is in eastern Thrace, where, according to genocide scholars, the 1913-23 Christian genocide that targeted Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks commenced prior to the First World War. The decision to eliminate Christians was made by the political party in power in the Ottoman Empire, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), also known as the Young Turks. The city, ethnically cleansed of its indigenous Greek population by Turks, is a former Greek city – like other cities in Thrace and Asia Minor. The Ottoman Turks captured Adrianopolis (Edirne), a major Byzantine Greek city in Thrace, in the fourteenth century and made it the Ottoman capital until they invaded Constantinople in 1453. 

The Greek Genocide Resource Center details the persecution of the Greeks of Eastern Thrace:

The methods used to eliminate Greeks in the region included: boycotting businesses, looting, murders, deportation, extortion and the pillaging of towns, villages and places of worship. The methods were so effective and were met with such little or no resistance and international condemnation, that similar methods were later used against other Greeks and other minorities in the Empire to bring about their destruction.

Over one hundred years after the genocide, the history and cultural heritage of indigenous Christians is still being systematically erased in Turkey. Countless churches, monasteries and other religious and cultural heritage sites belonging to Christians have been violated, destroyed, or left in disrepair across Turkey. For instance, only a wall remains of the Armenian St. Bartholomew Monastery, which has become an excavation site for treasure hunters and villagers in the city of Van, eastern Turkey.

The Firat News Agency (ANF) reported on January 1 that the monastery was once used as a police station. The monastery was for years closed to transportation as it was within the borders of Albayrak Police Station, which was used as a base by the Turkish Special Operations Teams since 1990. After the police station was moved to a new building, the [usage right of the] church was transferred to Turkey’s Ministry of Culture. Although the then Governor of Van Münir Karaloğlu announced in 2011 that the restoration works would be started, no steps have since been taken. President of the Environment Association of Van, Ali Kalçık, stated that the mentality of “We have destroyed the Armenians in the past; let’s destroy their history now” continues to wreak havoc on historic structures.  

Van was a majority-Armenian populated city for millennia until the genocide collapsed the Christian population there. The city was invaded by Seljuq Turks in the eleventh century. In 1548, it was besieged and captured from the Safavid Empire by Ottoman Turks. This city, writes Raffi Tapanian, “has a long history of being populated by thousands of Armenians in the past 3,000 years under the various Armenian kingdoms and foreign empires, but following the Armenian Genocide of 1915 perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire, the Armenian population has vanished. Along with the erasure of the Armenian population of Van, the erasure of thousands of years of Armenian heritage has and continues to take place.” Tapanian refers to the destruction as “cultural genocide.”

Tapanian then gives some examples of churches and monasteries in Van that are in ruins, have been demolished or used for sacrilegious purposes. The Hokiats Monastery, for instance, was used by locals in Van to hold livestock. He continues:

In 1914 there were 2,538 functioning Armenian churches and monasteries in the Ottoman Empire. Following the Armenian Genocide of 1915, this number was reduced drastically, now there are only 34 functioning Armenian churches, mainly in Constantinople.”

Assyrian (Syriac) churches face the same pattern of desecration. The Syriac Mor Addai Church in a village in the Idil district of Şırnak, for instance, fell into disrepair, and the villagers started to use it as a barn. The church is estimated to have been built in 620 C.E. According to 2021 media reports, although the walls of the historic church are mostly standing, the rest of the church is largely in ruins, for it has not been preserved or restored. The indigenous Assyrians were forced to leave the village completely in the 1990s as the war between the Turkish army and the Kurdish PKK intensified in the region. The village headman told the Mesopotamia Agency (MA) that “The church is a structure that can be included in the UNESCO world heritage list. There is not a greater church than this in the area… However, if it remains as it is [and not restored], its collapse is inevitable.”

Idil (Azakh, or Beth Zabday in Assyrian) is situated in Tur Abdin, the historic Assyrian homeland in southeast Turkey. Today it is a demographically Kurdish town with few Christians left, although it was originally built and resided in by Assyrians. To learn more about the history of de-Christianization of the town, please read this report.

In the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922), the sultan had the authority to decide the “fate” of churches in cities conquered by Ottomans. Traditionally, Ottomans converted the biggest church of the cities they conquered into a mosque to demonstrate their superiority and dominance over other faiths.

For this reason, the Hagia Sophia, the then largest church in Constantinople, was converted into a mosque and became a property of the Sultan Mehmed’s foundation after the Ottoman takeover of the city in 1453, but it was not the only Hagia Sophia that was converted into a mosque. There are at least nine historic (former) churches named Hagia Sophia in Turkey today. They are now either used as mosques, or are so-called “abandoned” buildings being restored as mosques, according to the book Türkiye’de Kilise ve Manastırlar (Churches and Monasteries in Turkey) by Dr. Ersoy Soydan.

This was also the case in Ottoman-occupied Cyprus (1571–1878). The St. Nicholas Cathedral in the Cypriot city of Famagusta, for example, was transformed into a mosque with the addition of a mihrab and a minaret after the 1571 Ottoman invasion of Cyprus. It was opened to worship through a sermon that Lala Mustafa Pasha gave on behalf of Ottoman Sultan Selim II. From the date it was converted into a mosque, it was known as “the Little Hagia Sophia”, “Famagusta’s Hagia Sophia” and “the Great Mosque”. In 1954, the then Muslim mufti of Cyprus, Mehmet Dana Efendi, renamed the mosque “Lala Mustafa Pasha Mosque” after the Ottoman commander who invaded and captured the island.

The status of churches and synagogues in the Ottoman Empire was regulated in accordance with Islamic sharia law. Dr. Mehmet Akman, who teaches at the school of law at Marmara University, writes that according to the Islamic law, “the property rights of non-Muslim temples in the lands captured through war belongs to the Islamic state… In the cities they conquered, the Ottomans turned the biggest church of that place into a mosque as a sign of domination.

According to classical period Islamic jurists, Christians and Jews could perform their religious rites and worship collectively only inside churches and synagogues. Church bells could not be rung in Muslim cities; crosses were not allowed to be carried through the streets and the rituals were not to be performed in a way that Muslims could hear.

As a rule, new church construction was not allowed in the Ottoman empire. As stated in the Bosnian Sanjak Laws of 1516, 1530 and 1541, the churches that were built later [after the Ottoman conquest] and that were built in places where churches were not registered officially had to be demolished. The prohibition of building new churches continued until the last years of the Ottoman state, but there were some exceptions to this rule.”

Dr. Aşkın Koyuncu, a historian, presents some information about the rules concerning the building and repairing of churches during the Ottoman era:

In the Ottoman Empire, in accordance with the Sharia law and until the declaration of the [1856] Reform Edict, it was forbidden to build new churches and synagogues. The repair or rebuilding of temples was subject to the approval of the Sultan.  It was also forbidden to heighten or expand the buildings. There are many examples of temples that were built later, or whose parts were repaired without being faithful to the original form that were demolished.

He also notes:

When the policies of the Ottoman Empire towards churches, synagogues, and monasteries until the declaration of the Reform Edict are examined, it is understood that the construction of new churches, synagogues and monasteries was not theoretically allowed within the framework of Islamic law. Repairing the existing ones in accordance with their original forms or rebuilding them depended on the approval of the Sultan. The expansion or elevation of the buildings during the repairs was prohibited. As a matter of fact, there are many examples of the demolition of churches that were built later and the destruction of additional parts of the buildings built without permission.

The Republic of Turkey, founded in 1923, is not ruled according to the Islamic law. However, an even more abusive version of the sharia-based Ottoman tradition that systematically violates churches is ongoing in Turkey, a NATO member and candidate for the European Union membership.  

Dr. Vasileios Meichanetsidis is a Greek Genocide scholar and temporary Teaching Assistant at the University of Athens.