The Wall Street Journal highlights “Battle Over an Orthodox Christian Monastery Tests Turkey’s Tolerance of Minorities”

Kartmin, Turkey
3/11/2009

Mor Gabriel, one of the world’s oldest functioning Orthodox Christian monasteries in Turkey for more than 1600 years, is in jeopardy of losing more than half its property. Turkish surveyors and Muslim villagers, armed with old maps and aerial photographs, are redrawing property boundaries owned by the monastery and plan to designate their land as public forest.

Last summer, Turkish officials informed the monastery that approximately 100 acres of land, currently enclosed within a high wall was actually state-owned forestland, resulting in a loss of about 60 percent of its core property. Even the monastery wall was also declared illegal. This threat by the Turkish government is an ongoing signal of religious persecution and confiscation of property rights of non-Muslim minorities, which includes institutions owned by the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

The dispute over Mor Gabriel is being closely watched in the United States and abroad as it is now in the hands of a Turkish court. Bishop Timotheus Samuel Aktas is battling to keep the monastic lands and has mobilized support from foreign diplomats, clergy, and politicians. The European Union and several embassies in Ankara sent observers to a court hearing in February, and a Swedish diplomat attended this week’s session.

The trial comes at a critical stage in Turkey’s 22-year drive to join the EU since protection of minority rights is a condition for entry.

The historic monastery, viewed by Syriacs as a “second Jerusalem”, was built in 397 A.D. and has seen invasions by Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, and Muslim armies. Three monks, fourteen nuns, a bishop, and thirty-five students reside and worship on the ancient grounds and preserve the Syriac liturgy in a chapel adorned with Byzantine mosaics.

The originally published article, which appears in The Wall Street Journal and reported by Andrew Higgins, can be read in its entirety below.

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