The Ottawa Citizen
Sunday, September 21, 2003
Once-thriving Christian churches are falling by the wayside in Turkey, but one new, less rigid evangelical church is defying the odds in that Muslim world
Michael Petrou
Citizen Special
Evangelist Jerry Mattiks, is convinced the future of Christianity in Turkey lies in the new church across the street from the nearly (abandoned church), headed by Father Yusuf Akbulut, right.
CREDIT: Michael Petrou
The haunting ruins of the Surpagab Kilisesi church in Diyarbakir, a sign of the once-strong Armenian presence in Turkey .
Evangelist Jerry Mattiks, is convinced the future of Christianity in Turkey lies in the new church across the street from the nearly abandoned church, headed by (Father Yusuf Akbulut).
Evangelist (Jerry Mattiks), is convinced the future of Christianity in Turkey lies in the new church across the street from the nearly abandoned church, headed by Father Yusuf Akbulut.
DIYARBAKIR, Eastern Turkey – Deep in the heart of Muslim Turkey stand two Christian churches, their front doors facing across a narrow, garbage-strewn street where gangs of children chase plastic soccer balls and play with scraps of paper.
On the north side of the Diyarbakir street is the Meryem Ana Kilisesi, the Church of the Virgin Mary, an ancient Syrian Orthodox church whose courtyard is surrounded by high and crumbling basalt walls.
Once home to hundreds of worshippers, the Church of the Virgin Mary is now an empty place. A few families still attend, but most of the Christians who lived here have left for Western Europe and North America.
Father Yusuf Akbulut is 35, but already his beard is flecked with grey and he carries with him a premature air of almost whimsical nostalgia. His flock is dwindling, and he is far too young to preside over a decline.
Some of his parishioners left for economic reasons. Others were pushed out by subtle social pressure and, in the 1980s and 1990s, by murders and terrorist attacks by Hezbollah, the militant Islamic organization that targets both Christians and Muslims.
“We do feel lonely,” he says. Decades ago, “we had 150 families and now we have 15.”
Four families live within the walls of the church courtyard. In a small garden with olive and pine trees, a water fountain stands surrounded by climbing grapevines and empty olive oil cans that now serve as water jugs. Children, some of them belonging to Father Yusuf, play beneath the trees. “They won’t come back,” Father Yusuf says of his missing parishioners.
“But they can live away for years and still be foreigners. I want to stay. We have history here. This is home.”
Father Yusuf’s voice is tinged with sadness. Diyarbakir, it seems, is not an obvious place for Christianity to grow.
And yet, across the street is a brand-new building, with strong straight walls, gleaming floors and plush chairs inside. Workers cart out debris and arrive with new building material.
This new, as yet unnamed evangelical church was paid for with American money and is supervised by Jerry Mattiks, a 24-year-old from Washington state.
Jerry has a fuzzy moustache, a serious, if friendly, adult demeanour, and a wife. He arrived after graduating from bible college, where he read that Christian congregations in eastern Turkey needed help.
He’s been here for 19 months and speaks fluent Turkish; his voice is highlighted with the tones of a true believer.
“I’m just serving the Lord Jesus Christ,” he says.
At Jerry’s church, all congregants are converts from Islam. The church has only been open for a couple of weeks and about 30 people, if not really members, at least stop by regularly. But there is room for 150 to 200 people. The congregation is expected to grow.
And although the two churches exist perhaps three metres from each other, the congregations do not pray together at all.
“They are based on race,” Jerry says. “It is the Assyrian Orthodox Church. And sometimes they don’t even open the gate when people bang on it. We’re open to everyone.”
Christianity’s past in Turkey is encapsulated in the decaying walls of Father Yusuf’s empty church. Jerry is convinced its future is in his building across the street.
Lands that are now Turkey were once home to millions of Christians, mostly Armenians in the eastern part of the country and ethnic Greeks on the Black Sea coast.
The Pontic Greeks left in the early 1920s after a failed Greek invasion. Ethnic Turks in Greece, and ethnic Greeks in Turkey, were forced to leave their homes and move to respective nation-states.
The disappearance of the Armenians was more deadly.
In 1915, with the Russian army advancing on the crumbling Ottoman Empire, Armenians in the city of Van revolted, murdered many of the local Muslims, and held the town until the Russians arrived. It was the latest in a series of Armenian rebellions. The Ottomans responded with massacres and ethnic cleansing.
Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed, and many more were deported to Syria. Kurdish tribesman savaged the long columns of starving survivors and carried off young women on horseback. When it ended, between 800,000 and 1.5 million Armenians were dead, and the Anatolian heartland was virtually empty of Christians.
It was the 20th century’s first genocide, although it is rarely acknowledged.
“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Adolf Hitler asked before his slaughter of the Jews.
Today, few do.
Turkey downplays the tragedy, claiming the numbers are exaggerated, and that the Armenians died in a civil war or from disease.
It remains a bitter dispute in Turkey and among Armenians worldwide, highlighted in Canada by fatal Armenian terrorist attacks on Turkish diplomats in the 1980s.
The subject is taboo in the Turkish press, but is hardly a secret among Turks on the street.
“Do you know about 1915?” Israfil, a Turkish Kurd in Diyarbakir, asks. “Yes, many died. Maybe my grandfather killed someone, but not me. I didn’t kill. And it was a different government then, the Ottomans.”
Three years ago, Father Yusuf told a newspaper reporter that Syriac Christians were systematically killed in the Armenian genocide — and he was promptly arrested.
Others, understandably, are more circumspect.
“We don’t know,” says Father Gabriel Akyuz, an Assyrian Orthodox minister in Mardin, one of eastern Turkey’s last towns with a significant Christian population.
“We didn’t see it with our own eyes,” because it was so long ago, he says. But evidence of the once-strong Armenian presence is scattered across Turkey, in empty churches and steeples that have been converted into mosque minarets.
In Diyarbakir, I visit the massive and haunting ruins of the Armenian Surpagab Kilisesi church. Most of the roof has caved in but soaring stone arches still cross the empty sky like tiny airborne bridges.
Ten-year-old Nazzam Shian lives in an adjacent building with her five brothers and sisters. Hers is the last Armenian family in Diyarbakir. She leads me through the deserted courtyard, past stone pools carved into the wall that once held holy water and whose tiles are fading. We climb darkened staircases and through narrow passageways, onto the top of the church walls.
Nazzam scampers along the decaying stone, 20 metres above the grounds, where she looks down at the roofs below us.
A flock of swallows, disturbed by our presence, wheels around and around above the ruined courtyard, their high-pitched calls echoing eerily off the crumbling ruins.
At Jerry’s evangelical church, Muhar- rem, my Turkish translator, is quietly grumbling. “I hear about churches like this, usually in Istanbul. They offer money and jobs to people who convert,” he says.
“I think that is why they had problems with their building permits.” Jerry says he has heard these accusations before, and that the city had frustrated attempts to build the church. Some in town believe the church spies for the Americans. Why else would you need such a large building where are no Christians?
“A lot of people don’t like that we convert Muslims,” says Jerry. “They think we’re dangerous. But we try to do it in a manner of peace and love. That’s what we’re trying to do — to bring peace to people here.”
Jerry says that his church doesn’t aggressively convert, but that locals arrive at the church after reading the New Testament or having a dream. “Our approach is to put the Gospel out to people so they can make the choice,” he says.
He also downplays connections to Christian organizations in the United States. “There’s no network at all. The bind between us all is the Holy Spirit that guides us.”
I am uncomfortable with evangelism, and am skeptical.
But later, over glasses of tea with some members of the congregation, a few tell me they have been Christians for more than a decade and met in each other’s houses before the church was built.
Ahmed Guvener, a leader of the Diyarbakir church, was an Alevi Muslim before converting to Christianity. He says arguments over religion with local Sunni Muslims caused his brother and him to question their faith. They turned first to atheism but felt “empty.” After reading an ad in a newspaper offering free Bibles, they researched Christianity, converted and started the church here.
“A new family has grown up around us, and we haven’t been rebuked by our own families,” he says.
Other members of the Diyarbakir church are not so grounded in their new faith.
Farhad Imanligolu, a friendly man with a smooth, round face, says he had been a communist and a heavy drinker until Jesus, a “treasure,” helped him move on from alcohol and Marx. But later, strolling together through the town, Farhad and I visit a mosque. I suggest we wait outside until the evening prayers are complete, but Farhad beckons me inside. “It’s OK. I’m Muslim too,” he says.
Muharrem, my translator, says Christianity is more lenient than Islam about alcohol and sex. And, he says, because it is something new here it may appeal to those who are poor and have little hope.
“I think Christian, Muslims and Jews should live together,” he says “But I think people should leave each other in peace. Father Yusuf and the families at his church should have peace. And the Muslims in Diyarbakir should have peace, too.”
After several days I leave Diyarbakir. The Eastern Orthodox Easter is approaching, and I want to be somewhere I will not feel quite so lonely. I travel 100 kilometres south to Mardin, a beautiful and ancient city of honey-coloured buildings. The town clings to a craggy mountain, overlooking green fields that extend south to Syria.
The Kirklar Kilisesi, or Forty Martyrs Church, is small, well-kept and more than 500 years old. It serves about 600 people, one of the largest Christian communities in Turkey. A volleyball net is strung across the courtyard, and children from the town kick a soccer ball beneath it.
Assyrian Christians settled here in the fifth century, and the pastor, Father Gabriel Akyuz, still conducts services in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus. Father Gabriel also preaches in Turkish and Arabic. This is a multi-ethnic town, and all Christians worship at the same place.
At 43, Father Gabriel has survived only the most recent troubles afflicting Christians, and indeed many Muslims, in eastern Turkey. But, like Father Yusuf in Diyarbakir, he says he will not leave the city.
“I feel I am a real Christian. And we are not afraid of anything, because the soul cannot die,” he says.
“I love my language and my history and my motherland. And for that I don’t want to leave. I hope I will die here.”
Besides, Father Gabriel says, relations between Muslims and Christians in Mardin are excellent.
It seems that way.
Everyone in town, Christian and Muslim, refer to Father Gabriel as “Papa.” And during Easter celebrations on Sunday, the church courtyard is packed with Christian worshippers and Muslim city officials.
Father Gabriel leads a service in three languages, his chants floating with incense smoke around the tiny chapel. Women ululate as religious icons are carried past the congregation.
Afterward, we spill out of the chapel and into the dazzling sunlight of the church courtyard. We eat hard-boiled eggs, dyed a deep red, and sweet, milky rice pudding.
Father Gabriel is optimistic.
“The Church may grow,” he says. “We hope. But we are not prophets.”
Michael Petrou is a Canadian journalist living in England.
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