Death Watch: One of the earliest Christian cultures totters on the edge of extinction in Turkey

Death Watch
One of the world's earliest Christian cultures totters on the edge of extinction.

Our Turkish-speaking drivers were taking us through the Fertile Crescent, that crossroads of great civilizations, but it did not appear very fertile. On this visit to eastern Turkey, religious freedom advocate Paul Marshall and I saw little cultivated land and a striking level of depopulation. We met the only two monks remaining in the monastery of the village of Sare (or Sarikoy). They were resigned, calm, and ready for the apocalypse.

Syriac-speaking Christians in this area have persisted through more than a dozen centuries of Muslim, Ottoman, and now Turkish rule. They languish between the secularizing government of the Republic of Turkey and an Islamic culture that views them as heathen outsiders. The government has long given them minimal "freedom of worship" while decisively restricting property rights for local congregations. Nor do authorities allow them any avenues of new growth—communication, speech, normal press freedom, or economic development.

Syriac-Aramaic comes as close as any living language to what Jesus spoke. It is the liturgical and poetic language of these Christians. Yet authorities forbid Christians on Turkey's southeastern border with Syria, Iraq, and Iran to teach that language—nor can their schoolchildren learn any subject in it. Christians in Syria, by contrast, legally teach and worship in that language.

Besides the secular and Islamic opposition, modern forces also threaten. Dams for electric power and irrigation are filling up the great valley of the Tigris, threatening to submerge lands—including churches and monasteries—on which Christian families have lived for more than a millennium. In any case, as in the rest of Turkey, Christians cannot buy property.

In short, the government would be pleased to see the Christian communities quietly disappear altogether. Christians have been caught in the middle of a war between the government and the Kurds. Now it matters little to the government that the Hezbollah as well as the Kurds are harassing them.

The Turkish government has told the Christian villages, in effect: You cannot have seminaries in your language. You cannot repair your churches. Or if you do, you must do it without any help and under local Turkish government surveillance.

Heirs of the ancient Chaldeans and Assyrians, today these Christians affiliate mainly with the Syrian Orthodox Church, with separate church patriarchates in Damascus: one Jacobite, the other Antiochene. The Christian population has dwindled to nearly nothing in villages that have called Christ Lord for well over 15 centuries.

No one doubts that there are viable arguments for continuity between these ethnic Syriac-speaking Christians and the earliest Christian beginnings. Before Christ, there were Jewish communities in this area in which the first generations of Christians eventually grew.

One of the major Christian centers of learning, hymnody, and monasticism during the fourth and fifth centuries a.d. flourished at Urfa, previously called Edessa (the ancient Haran). The fathers of the Edessa churches, along with their scholars, hymn-writers and poets, were lauded and quoted throughout the Christian world. By the seventh century, dozens of monasteries—some of them with up to 700 monks—covered the nearby hills. Few Christian families remain there.

In Nisibis (now Nusaybin), an ancient city in the upper Euphrates valley (on the river Djada), the Christian community dates back to the second century. A fourth-century church there was locked up and abandoned shortly after World War I, when the community fled south into Syria. For 60 years there had been no Christians in this church. Now the Syriac diocese has sent a Christian family from one of the surrounding villages into Nisibis. They live in a little apartment in the church and keep it from falling apart.

In the church crypt lies the tomb of Jacob of Nisibis, from whom comes the term Jacobite. Representing Syriac Christianity, he attended the Council of Nicaea in a.d. 325. Jacob was the teacher of the great poet, Ephrem the Syrian, whom John Wesley called "that man of the broken heart."

This ancient church, once so important in Christian history, now sits alone in an entirely Muslim culture. I turned my gaze from the sarcophagus in the crypt to the richly decorated arches, then to the geometric design on the lectern. Marshall, a Senior Fellow at Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom, stood with me by the silent crypt of this deserted church dating back to a.d. 359.

Suddenly, our driver broke into song, an ancient hymn of the church. His voice was strong and sure, filling the empty stones with a flood of music, without being prompted.

We asked him what the words meant. He said the lyrics came from the great Ephrem:

Listen, my chicks have flown, left their nest, alarmed By the eagle. Look, where they hide in dread! Bring them back in peace! This church had nurtured Ephrem, the greatest of the Syriac theologians. After being expelled from Nisibis, he spent the last 10 years of his life (363–73) in exile in Edessa (Urfa).

The Nisibis church and others in the area deserve to be introduced to the rest of the world. Yet they remain virtually inaccessible. Christians especially should have the opportunity to understand the area's history, poetry, liturgy, and the early growth of monasticism here.

An armed group, the Hezbollah, still operates in the area. This is not exactly the same Hezbollah that operates in the Middle East but is related to them. It has frequently attacked Christian villages in these areas and sought to drive them out. There may be only a few thousand Christians left in southeastern Turkey.

This community is coming to a decisive moment: either great courage or complete collapse. Some sense of solidarity with the outside Christian world would help. Their plight cries out for understanding by art historians, museum curators, theologians, political scientists, and sociologists, as well as concerned laypeople.

If Christians abroad began to take an active interest in them, either through business enterprise or by visiting, empathizing, and getting to know them personally, the balance could shift. The displaced Christians of Upper Mesopotamia who are now in Europe might begin to come back. That could encourage economic development.

The aggressive campaigns of the ministry of tourism notwithstanding, the Turkish government has grossly neglected these ancient Christian sites. The tourist literature nowhere mentions them. Instead, the government has supervised the demise of numerous Christian villages or passively watched them deteriorate.

Yet encouraging the government to develop area tourism would likely be more persuasive than moral arguments for freedom of religion. Some churches here have remained in use largely without interruption since the fourth century. As Freedom House's Marshall remarked, this whole area is a museum—an ancient Christian museum.

The possibility of a new wave of tourism appears very remote without encouragement from Western political, academic, and church interests. Through a kind of passive-aggressive neglect, the government denies access to all except those with insider connections. If I were a Muslim, I would be encouraged to go on Hajj to Mecca. But if Christians want to go to Nisibis, someone with a badge is standing in the path, saying, "Show me your invitation."

Eastern monasticism, music, liturgy and theology thrived here and spread to much of the remaining Christian world. These sites contain a precious heritage that belongs not just to the Turkish government. It belongs to Christians everywhere.

Thomas C. Oden is a CT executive editor. For more information on the area and on relief efforts, contact the Syriac Orthodox Archdiocese of the Western United States, 417 E. Fairmount Rd., Burbank, CA 91501.

Bat Ye'or's The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam. From Jihad to Dhimmitude: 7th - 20th Century

In two waves of Islamic expansion, the peoples of the Mediterranean regions and Mesopotamia, who had developed the most prestigious civilizations of the time, were conquered by jihad-wars. Millions of Christians from Spain and North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Greece, and Armenia; Latins and Slavs from southern and central Europe; as well as Jews, were henceforth governed by the shari'a (Islamic) law. They became dhimmis under the humiliating "pact" (dhimma), which spared their lives.

In this second major study, the author gives a lucid analysis of the dogma and strategies of jihad, providing a vast panorama of the history of the dhimmis (mainly the Christians) under Islamic rule. It contains a large section of documents illuminating the decline of Eastern Christianity over the centuries. A pioneer in a virgin field of research, for which she coined a new word ("dhimmitude"), Bat Ye'or here analyses this specific social condition that resulted from jihad.

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press/Associated University Presses (1996) EMAIL:aup440@aol.com

ISBN 0-8386-3678 ($45.00 cloth); -3688-8 ($19.95 paper). 528 pages, 70 illustratio

Introduction

Bat Ye’or

This is not a book about Islam; it examines neither its expansion nor its civilization. Its object is to study the large number of peoples subjugated by Islam and to determine, as far as possible, the complex processes – both endogenous and exogenous – that brought about their gradual extinction. A phenomenon of dissolution, when all is said and done, which is hardly exceptional and part and parcel of the evolutionary cycles of human societies. These dhimmi peoples – that is to say, "protected peoples" – represent those populations, custodians of scriptural revelations, who were conquered by Islam. In Iran and the Mediterranean basin, these populations englobed Zoroastrians, Christians and Jews.

For guidance, I used a wide range of sources which emanate from these peoples and often had the additional advantage of being contemporary with the events described. As these testimonials are confined to certain regions and periods, the dearth of material has, of necessity, determined the areas both of clarity and of silence in this study.

This work was originally conceived as a new French edition of Le Dhimmi, based on the revised and considerably expanded English edition. It is therefore hardly surprising that a resemblance still remains, particularly in chapter 3 (chapter 2 of Le Dhimmi). However, the abundance of new material gave rise to further analyses. Determined to keep the book to a manageable size, I was prompted to reduce considerably the section concerning the Jews of Islam, which had been widely covered in my earlier publications. Essential documents appear in both books.

Whereas there are innumerable studies and specialized works on the history of Islamic civilization, publications on the vanquished peoples remain fragmentary and limited. This makes all the more valuable those books which examine the organization and history of ethnoreligious groups according to geographic boundaries and religious affiliation. The present work is not a chronological recapitulation of the history of the various peoples who were subjugated by the Arabs, Turks, and Persians. That task should be undertaken by a group of historians who would not only be able to master Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, but also Spanish, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, the Slavonic languages and the dialects spoken by all those populations who, over the centuries, constituted the subjected dhimmis. These peoples have left plentiful evidence of their past: chronicles, narratives, poems and other documents. In other words, it would be impossible for any one person to encompass, in its effervescence and its contradictions, the entirety of a history which spans three continents.

My research follows a thematic structure dictated by the broad extent of the subject and its extreme difficulty. In spite of its disadvantages, this method does permit a synthesis of the themes within a long-term perspective. The idea of a general treatment of the history of the dhimmis was inspired by the research of the Serbian geographer and ethnologist Jovan Cvijic. In his essay on "human geography" (1918), the author defines the area of Islamic influence in the Balkans with the help of numerous maps and examines its variations in relation to demography, the nature of the soil, climates and urban or rural environment. My own study attempts to uncover the legal, sociological and historical framework which determined the evolution of the dhimmi peoples, yet far from exhausting the material, it barely sketches a rough outline.

I am indebted to Bechir Gemayel for the term "dhimmitude", which he mentioned on two occasions. This word could not better express the actual subject of my research (begun in 1971), on the manifold and contradictory aspects of a human experience which millions of individuals endured over the centuries, sometimes for more than a millennium.

The specific world of dhimmitude emerged from the documents, and the book itself – with its thematic reflections, landmarks and stages – was constructed in relation to, and with the aid of, the sources. If they differ somewhat on the chronology of dates – often dubious – they nevertheless agree on essential points. If witnesses, in different contexts and at different periods, describe certain facts based on the special provisions of jurist-theologians, such as the regulations concerning dress, these data can be regarded as a constant element in the status of the dhimmi.

I have approached this theme as an object of historical research and I have not considered it necessary to resort to apologetic formulas or historical embellishments which, under cover of objectivity, have unfortunately become the norm in this field. Evidently, such a study can only project a negative picture of the history of the Muslim peoples, since it is integrated – sometimes by chance circumstances, sometimes by political design – within the actual process of the disintegration experienced by the conquered peoples. Despite this important disadvantage, I did not feel it expedient to abandon this research, thinking that the prestige of a civilization, which has made such eminent contributions at both the cultural and scientific level would hardly suffer if, alongside its splendid and triumphant epic, a very small place in history was set aside for these forgotten peoples. I hope that I shall not be unduly criticized for offering them a tribute of well-deserved sympathy and respect.

The dhimmi status examined in this study only concerns Christians and Jews in the Mediterranean basin, Anatolia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Iran. The Zoroastrians, whose influence was preponderant on Islamic civilization, are only mentioned incidentally.

Having already published a considerable number of documents on the Middle Ages and the first half of the nineteenth century, I have limited myself here to little-known pre-medieval sources, particularly on the status of the peasantry, and to certain unpublished nineteenth century documents. The reader interested in the intervening period may consult the documentary section in the 1985 English edition of The Dhimmi, Jews and Christians under Islam (4th printing, 1996).

For this English edition of Les Chrétientés d'Orient entre Jihad et Dhimmitude, several nineteenth-century documents from the British Public Record Office have been enlarged and also from the Chronography of Bar Hebraeus. A document on Sudan from the late nineteenth century was added, as were several illustrations, others having been omitted.

How many crypto-Christians are there in Turkey? Forced to convert from Christianity to Islam and helped by no one?

Greek Speaking Muslims

In Turkey, there are two main Greek speaking Muslim ethnic groups: One of them are the Muslim Greek refugees coming from Crete called Cretans. The other group lives near Black Sea, Pontus. The largest group speaking Pontic Greek lives in 5-6 villages in ' Tonya', 'Trabzon' and in nearly 50 villages at the valley 'Yukari Solakli' that is south of 'Of'. And also there are at least two villages established by the emmigrants at 'Sakarya' near Istanbul. The language they speak is a dialect of archaic Cappadicia n Greek that is probably not spoken in Turkey now. They are Sunni Muslims, but it is claimed that some of the Pontus Greek Muslims are secret Christians.

There's no satisfactory research made on the Pontus Muslims. They speak Greak and carry on Greek traditions but they refuse to be accepted in an ethnic group other than the Turks. They call themsevels 'Turkos' and their language as 'Romaika'. They conside r the real Greeks as a seperate race and call them as 'Oromeos'. Many researches agree on that they are converted to Islam at 1700s. The archaic dialect is still living and spoken fluently by the young generation. Most women can only speak the Pontus Greek. Their population is estimated between 200.000-300.000. But in near future, there's no hope for the language to survive, because of the television and high rate of immigration.

There's no population estimation about the Cretans but I guess their number as 500.000. They live in the villages near Aegean Sea, Mediterenean Sea and Marmara Sea. These villages had generally occupied by the Greeks living in Mikra Asia. After 1922, the Orthodox Greeks in Turkey and the Muslims in Greece were exchanged by the goverments. There are also many Cretan Greeks living in large seaside towns as Izmir(Smyrna), Antalya, Ayvalik. The old generation is still speaking Cretan Greek. Some of them, the old individuals are monolingual. But the young generation can speak only Turkish. The language will dissapear after a few generation.

These two Greek dialects have no chance to live in Mikra Asia for long. As the Greeks are considered to be enemies, speaking Greek language attracts no symphaty. The children are educated in Turkish and nearly every house has a television 24 hour broadcas ting Turkish.

Pontian Greeks: In search of their identity Neither truly Greek nor Turkish, the Muslims from around the Black Sea have discovered that they are unwanted by the governments of either country

By Maria Delithanasi

Early last month the police arrested Retzai Yildiz at a building site in Ilioupolis, eastern Athens, as his residence permit had expired. The young student was working to earn the money he needed to renew his student visa. An A-student at Panteios University, where he is studying on a state scholarship, his case attracted media attention.

The young man with the Turkish name and Turkish nationality is a Pontian, a reversal of the usual state of affairs as perceived by the general public in Greece, for whom a "Pontian" is a "Pontic Greek," or an Orthodox Christian from the Black Sea.

300,000 near the Black Sea

One of the Grecophone groups that converted to Islam under the Ottoman Empire, are the Pontians - the others were among the Cretans, Macedonians and Cypriots. If it is not true that "every Muslim is a Turk," then it is equally untrue that "every Greek is an Orthodox Christian."

"The appearance of these groups is not only of interest to Turkish society, which is slowly becoming aware of its multicultural nature, but also to Greek society, as it discovers that the establishment of modern states in our areas entrapped groups that were caught in the middle and forced to become part of the state whose ideological foundation was a particular religion," said Professor Vlasis Agtzidis, lecturer in modern history at Thessaloniki University.

According to their own estimates, there are about 300,000 Muslim Grecophone Pontians on Turkey's Black Sea coast.

The problems began when some of them wanted to re-establish contact with their original language, Greek, and to experience life in Greece itself. For if the Greek State felt some limits had been reached with the arrival of the Orthodox Christian Pontians from the former Soviet Union, the presence of Muslim Pontians has disturbed deeply rooted views as to who is a Greek.

Retzai Yildiz is one of approximately 50 Muslim Pontians from Turkey who are living in Greece out of a deep desire to express their Greek identity. Nevertheless, the Greek authorities have already deported three of them - the most recent just over a month ago - and are ready to make Yildiz their fourth.

Pontians from Turkey feel unwanted by the authorities in both countries and are bitter that the question of Pontian Hellenism was not considered by those who signed the Treaty of Lausanne.

They face insurmountable obstacles in acquiring visas from Greek consular officials in Istanbul. They are under continual threat of deportation by authorities in Greece, where they beg for residence permits on humanitarian grounds, even when they are students with grants from from the State Scholarship Foundation.

Turkish authorities, meanwhile, regard them as a "threat to the nation."

One young man who went back to Trebizond for his summer holiday was stripped naked and detained for 30 days in a basement while Turkish security forces investigated suspicious moves and scheming by Greece against Turkey's territorial integrity.

Memet Karadeniz was the first Muslim Pontian to come to Greece in 1989. The creator of the website http:// members.nbci.com/Pontians, he has established a communication forum for Pontians around the world.

"What I want to say is that I am a Pontian. We write and talk about history, and don't concern ourselves with Greek-Turkish politics, only concerning Pontian issues," he said.

He also emphasizes that he has no connection with specific political parties in Turkey or Greece. Karadeniz came to Greece on a search for his personal identity. "When you have a mother tongue, no matter which one, you want to know why that is. I don't want to create a problem for any system. Yet when you try to stop me from expressing myself, I have to do something about it," he said.

Classic response

Retzai Yildiz's name is on a list of people under suspicion as possible threats to Greece's security, a list released in a Greek newspaper under the title "160 little Ocalans."

It shows that a sector of Greek society and Greek services regards them as a threat to national security.

Muslim Pontians' experience of police officers is that experienced by many other "foreigners."

The authorities' classic response is: "I don't care if they are Pontians, their papers say they are Turks."

If this response is due to prevailing stereotypes, there is another factor described by Yildiz.

"One person says you must be a Turk. Another, in Greece, says that you can't be a Pontian. At the point I have reached now, I simply say I am a human being."

Kara Bayram is another Muslim Pontian from Trebizond, who is studying political science and history at Panteion on a state scholarship.

The only document justifying his residence in Greece is his student ID, as his application for a student visa is still pending.

"I have been studying here for two years. What happens if they catch me? People are supportive (not because we are Pontians but because we are having a hard time). But the treatment we are getting from the state authorities is forcing us to go public in order to save ourselves.

"On the other hand, if we come out publicly in Greece and say we are Pontians, we are in trouble in Turkey," he said.

Theodoros Angelopoulos's film "Journey to Kythera" tells the story of a political refugee of Pontic origin, who comes back to Greece after years of exile in a communist country.

A Greek, but persona non grata in post-dictatorship Greece, he ends up on a raft in the middle of the sea with Penelope, his faithful wife.

No one wanted him anywhere.

Gift to Hellenism

Students of modern Turkey are surprised to discover the existence of Muslim converts and crypto-Christian populations of Greek origin who have preserved their Greek language and customs, according to Agtzidis.

"To understand the phenomenon of the survival of Greek Muslim populations, one has to go beyond the prevailing perception of the relationship between Islam and Christianity," he said.

"The Grecophone population of modern Turkey is particularly important, as it is one of the few real bridges of friendship betwen the two countries. They are also the only remaining vestiges of Hellenism, even in Muslim form, in the old countries of the East. The appearance of Muslim Grecophone Pontians in Greece reveals a well-kept secret. Claiming their Greek identity despite not being a part of Christian Hellenism, they are thereby introducing a new element into the mix. It is the first time that descendants of the many Muslim converts among Greek populations of the Ottoman Empire - also found in the Peloponnese, Crete, Macedonia and Asia Minor - have separated themselves from the Muslim social fabric that led to the creation of the modern Turkish nation, and are claiming a separate status. In other words, our Grecophone compatriots from Turkey are history's valuable gift to Hellenism," he said.

from the Kathimerini Newspaper of Athens

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