In recent years, around 60-100 Syriac Orthodox families
have returned from central Europe to Turkey. Encouraged by changes in the
political atmosphere, the minority nonetheless faces a host of problems, from
the expropriation of land belonging to a monastery, to a ban on special schools
and kindergartens, and also a lack of places of worship in Istanbul.
A sign in Aramaic at the side of the road defiantly bids
visitors "Welcome to Kafro" next to the official Turkish sign on
which the village is called "Elbeğendi". Here, some 15 kilometres
south of Midyat, live 17 Syriac Orthodox families. There are no shops in the
village, but there is a café that allegedly serves the only decent pizza in the
area.
"German is the lingua franca amongst the children in
the village," says the pizza maker in flawless German, which he learned
while living close to Stuttgart. All of the families here have returned to
Kafro after living in Germany and Switzerland, some of them for decades.
Among them is also the muhtar, the elected village chief,
Aziz Demir, who lived with his family in Zurich and near St. Gallen. "Even
if our lives there as Christians were very pleasant, something was still
missing," he says on the terrace of his house, where he lives with his
wife, from a neighbouring village, and their youngest son, Josef, who attends
secondary school in Midyat. With a sweeping gesture beyond the newly landscaped
garden out onto the plain, he says "This is simply our home."
Urgent need of restoration
The Demirs and the other 16 families all live in new
houses, because the buildings of the old village, within site of the new
developments, were for the most part destroyed in the clashes between the army
and the PKK. As was the old church, which is in urgent need of restoration but
still awaits the necessary permits.
Land dispute with the Turkish government and Kurdish
village leaders: The Mor Gabrial is the oldest surviving Christian monastery in
the world. There have been claims that the monastery was built on the grounds
of a previous mosque - regardless of the fact that the monastery was founded
over 170 tears prior to the birth of Mohammed
The inhabitants of Kafro have therefore erected a small
chapel with the help of the "Evangelical-Lutheran Church in
Württemberg", as the sign next to the entrance indicates. Services only
take place here once in a month, however, as the village does not have its own
priest. From the roof of the old church, Demir points out the surrounding
villages from east to west: "One is Christian, one Arabic, one Kurdish,
one Yazidi and then another one Christian: Enhil (in Turkish Yemişli), where
Tuma Çelik comes from."
Çelik already moved with his family to Istanbul as a
ten-year old, in 1974, and then emigrated to Switzerland in 1985. There, he
became an activist fighting for the interests of the Syriac Orthodox church. He
wrote for Aramaic magazines and was one of the founders of "Suroyo
TV", which broadcasts in Aramaic from Sweden. He has been living again
mostly in Tur Abdin since 2010.
Legal proceedings against Mor Gabriel
Last summer, he founded the first Turkish-Aramaic monthly
magazine, Sabro (Hope), which is published by volunteers in Midyat. Also last
summer, he launched a website called "We have grown up in this world
together", devoted primarily to the legal proceedings against the region's
oldest monastery, Mor Gabriel.
The Syriac Orthodox Church claims to derive its origin
from one of the first Christian communities. It uses Syriac, a dialect of
Aramaic spoken by Jesus Christ and his Apostles, as its official and liturgical
language. Pictured: Altar in the Curch of Kafro
Mor Gabriel was founded in 397. 1,611 years later, a
complaint was filed by the surrounding villages alleging that the monastery was
illegally occupying land, some of it even located inside the monastery walls
and for which the monastery has paid property taxes regularly since 1937.
Nevertheless, the courts have been handing down decisions against the monastery
since 2008 and have granted around 28 hectares of its land to the Turkish
forest ministry; the last judgement was passed in July 2012.
Now the only hope is to take the case before the European
Court of Human Rights. Erol Dora, the first Syriac Orthodox member of the
Turkish parliament, who was elected for the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party
(BDP) in Mardin in 2011 and previously worked as a lawyer for minority
foundations, commented: "We as the BDP and as the Assyrian people will do
all we can to support the monastery at the international level, because we
believe that in this trial we have justice on our side."
Just one of many problems
For Çelik, however, Mor Gabriel is but one problem among
many: "This is just a small drop in the ocean. Assyrians lived mainly in
rural areas, where the land registry system was the least active. That's why so
many churches, monasteries and community buildings are not even
registered."
In Switzerland, he became an activist fighting for the
interests of the Syriac Orthodox church: Tuma Çelik
In addition, the foundation has been submitting
applications for years to build a new church, for which it needs land to be
assigned to it by the municipal administration. Last year, the city made two
"immoral offers" of land confiscated from Catholic and Greek Orthodox
communities. The Syriac Orthodox leaders therefore rejected the offers for the
time being. Should the plot in question be returned to the Catholic Church,
however, they would be prepared to try to reach an agreement with the Catholic
priests to erect a new church next to the Catholic cemetery.
"You are not a minority"
But that is not the only problem confronting the Istanbul
community. Outside of Tur Abdin, only a minority of its members are fluent in
Aramaic. Çelik estimates that "around 3,000 people in Istanbul speak the
language, but only about 200 can also read and write it." The foundation
had therefore submitted a request to open a kindergarten with instruction in
Aramaic. The response of the ministry of education was: "You are not a
minority; therefore you cannot teach your children a foreign language."
Although Syriac Orthodox Christians are clearly not
Muslims and thus should be able to benefit from the minority rights stipulated
in the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, the Turkish State has granted these rights thus
far only to Greeks, Armenians and Jews, with numerous infringements.
An adjustment of Turkish laws to European minority rights
standards, long overdue, would not only solve the problem of the kindergarten,
but would also create a modern frame of reference for all the other issues.
Nothing revolutionary, just equal rights for all.
Ekrem Eddy Güzeldere
© Qantara.de 2013
Translated from the German by Jennifer Taylor
Editor: Lewis Gropp/Qantara.de
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