ISTANBUL — They are the last descendants here of the once-mighty Byzantine Empire, a tiny minority of 2,000 in a city of about 12 million. Yet Istanbul’s remaining Greek-speaking citizens are waging a new battle in what was once Constantinople, this time a war of title deeds and land registers.
With Turkey’s drive to bring its laws governing minorities or property rights into line with the European Union, the city’s Greek minority has seized the opportunity to try to recover dozens of churches, monasteries, and other properties they say have been illegally taken from them by Turkish authorities in the past 30 years.
The return of the property would remove a major dispute between Greece and Turkey and could help foster better relations between the neighbors. It might also be a step toward halting the dramatic decline in Istanbul’s once-central Greek Orthodox population.
Today is the deadline for religious foundations to make property claims. Although contested claims are likely to end up in court, some land transfers are expected to be approved under a new law that gives the foundations new rights.
”Under the old system, the foundations couldn’t even repair the roof without written permission from the state” said Yusuf Bayazi, director of the Turkish authority dealing with the claims. ”Now they can be just like any other owner.”
Despite the dwindling ethnic Greek population, Istanbul is still the capital of the Greek Orthodox world and the home of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of an estimated 200 million Orthodox Christians. The church’s base, the Ecumenical Patriarchate, has stood on the banks of the Golden Horn, the city’s ancient harbor, since the 17th century.
”Once this city was the capital of the Greek-speaking world,” said Metropolitan Meliton of Philidelphia. ”In Greek, it’s just known as `the city,’ the most important one there is.”
Meliton works in an office stacked with files containing property deeds and claim forms for buildings that he said once dotted the city. But many have been destroyed or taken over since a mass exodus from the city of its Greek-speaking population in the 1950s and ’60s, he said.
”In 1912, there were around 6,000 properties belonging to the church foundations here,” he said. ”By 1936, this had fallen to 4,000. Now, we have 410. Most were taken by force.”
In 1936, Turkish authorities asked the Greek Orthodox foundations, along with the city’s Armenian and Jewish religious communities, to submit a list of their properties as part of what the government described as a routine audit.
But in 1971, the authorities decided to reinterpret this list as the maximum extent of property the religious foundations were allowed to own. ”As a result, we had a retroactive subtraction,” Meliton said.
Nearly all the property acquired by the foundations since 1936 was seized by the government, local authorities, and businesses, meaning the loss of more than 1,000 buildings, the Meliton said.
Meanwhile, many Greek speakers left the city, as relations between Turkey and Greece soured.
”A hundred years ago, the Greeks were one of the most powerful communities in the city,” said Erdem Eldem, a professor of history at Bosporus University in Istanbul. ”Yet with the growth of Turkish and Greek nationalism, they were doomed.”
The Greek presence shrank from around a third of the city’s population in 1914 to a fraction of a percent today, as a result of discriminatory tax laws during World War II, anti-Greek riots in 1955, the end of dual nationality in 1964, and the war in Cyprus in 1974.
Walking in districts such as the central entertainment quarter, Beyoglu, shows street after street of run-down or empty buildings, many once the homes of the city’s Greek-speaking population.
”We are a small community with a giant history,” said Lakis Vergis, an ethnic Greek who runs an Istanbul import-export business.
”Central to our community is the church,” Vergis said. Around 70 churches are still open for services on Sundays, even if there are ”only five or six people going to them.”
In addition to the loss of property, the church has struggled to fill the ranks of the priesthood since the government closed Turkey’s only Greek Orthodox seminary in 1971, when it put religious and military education under state control.
”The authorities say the law was aimed at shutting down schools set up by different revolutionary political groups, but it also finished us,” said Father Dorotheos Anastasiades, the only permanent inhabitant of the vast, 19th-century theological college on the island of Heybeliada, known as Halki in Greek, which lies just off Istanbul.
Each classroom still stands meticulously clean and tidy, just as it did when the institution closed. ”Everything is ready,” Anastasiades said. ”We are just waiting for the bees to come back and make honey.”
An international campaign is pressuring the government to reopen the seminary. Ironically, the election of a conservative government with Islamic roots in Turkey last November could help the cause. The new government has instituted reforms favorable to minorities.
Yet while Parliament may pass new laws, old attitudes may take longer to change. Several weeks ago, government authorities released their own list of properties that they said belonged to the religious foundations. It had half the number of properties that the patriarchate is claiming and includes 20 churches that no longer exist.
The application is complicated by the fact that the Turkish government does not officially recognize the patriarchate. While patriarchate officials worry that won’t have time to gather all the documents needed to challenge the official list before the deadline, the lights are burning late on the banks of the Golden Horn. At the shuttered seminary, Anastasiades is still hopeful.
”We trust in God, hard work, and a new government,” he said.
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