Turkey is a NATO member, a US ally, a jihadist patron, a sponsor of international terror, and a genocide denier with grand neo-Ottoman ambitions. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s imperial ambitions span Libya and the eastern Mediterranean (including Cyprus), reach into northern Syria and northern Iraq, and run through the south Caucasus and Turkic Central Asia.
In February 2016, the Turkey’s ruling AKP government confiscated the newly renovated Armenian Apostolic Cathedral, Surp Giragos in Diyarbakir. The confiscated church, which was given over to looters, remains shut to this day. Along with Surp Giragos, the Surp Sarkis Chaldean Church, the Virgin Mary Ancient Assyrian Church, and the city’s Protestant church were also expropriated. The Surp Giragos complex included priests’ houses, chapels, and a school. The Cathedral, which was renovated with funds raised entirely through the Armenian community, was the largest Armenian Apostolic church in the entire Middle East.
A Christian pilgrim prays at the historic Deyruzzaferan monastery in Mardin, in southeastern Turkey, AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis
When the renovated Surp Giragos Cathedral reopened in 2011, it awakened many to the reality that Turkey was once home to a sizable Armenian community. Indeed, the renovated cathedral became the centre of a movement: a coming out of “hidden Armenians” https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/04/24/402003465/invisible-for-generations-hidden-armenians-emerge-in-turkey (the forcibly Islamised and Turkified descendants of Genocide victims). It also held the deeds of thousands of plots of land confiscated from Armenians by the Turkish nationalist regime during the Armenian Genocide.
The Hagia Sophia. David Spender, CC BY
Recommended:
Trauma and Resilience: Armenians in Turkey - Hidden, not hidden and no longer hidden.
by Raffi Bedrosyan (Gomidas Institute, 4 December 2018).
Further to this, the ruling AK Party of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has for years been fuelling toxic Armenophobia (as bad as any anti-Semitism you’ve ever seen), both in the media and through the school curriculum. Erdoğan is thus creating an anti-Armenian tinderbox that risks igniting at any moment; it is a Christian Crisis in the making.
Recommended:
The Erdoğan Revolution in the Turkish Curriculum Textbooks
Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), March 2021
