Turkey: Threats to Destroy the Oldest Functioning Christian Monastery
July 13, 2012 9 Comments
The Mongolians failed to destroy it 700 years ago despite the massacre of 40 friars and 400 Christians. Yet the existence of the oldest functioning Christian monastery in the world, the fifth century Mor Gabriel Monastery in the Tur Abdin plane (the mountain of God’s servants) near the Turkish-Syrian border, is at risk after a ruling by Turkey’s highest appeals court in Ankara.
Founded in 397 by the monks Samuel and Simon, Mor Gabriel in eastern Anatolia has been the heart of the Orthodox Syrian community for centuries. Syriacs hail from a branch of Middle Eastern Christianity and are one of the oldest communities in Turkey.
Today the monastery is inhabited by Mor Timotheus Samuel Aktash, 3 monks, 11 nuns and 35 boys who are learning the monastery’s teachings, the ancient Aramaic language spoken by Jesus and the Orthodox Syriac tradition.
Although the monastery is situated in an area at the centre of conflicts between Kurdish separatist with the armed PKK group and the Turkish army, Mor Gabriel welcomes 20,000 pilgrims every year.
The Syriac Orthodox community – estimated to be 2.5 million across the world – is under the authority of the Patriarch of Antioch and considers the monastery a ‘second Jerusalem’.
The monastery’s reputation 1500 years ago was such that Roman Emperors Arcadius, Theodosius and Onorio built new buildings around it and enriched it with art and mosaics. But in the past 150 years Mor Gabriel has gone through a decline after the massacres of Christians by nationalists at the end of the 19th century – 3,000 Christians were burnt to death in Edessa’s Cathedral in 1895 – and clashes between Turks and Kurds in the area during World War I.
In the mid 1960s the community in Tur Abdin numbered 130,000.
Today only 3,500 people are left and the ‘second Jerusalem’ is in danger. The heads of the three neighbouring Muslim villages, Kurds with the Belebi tribe, filed a lawsuit against the monastery years ago with the support of an MP member of the Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Under the lawsuit, the Syriacs are accused of practicing ‘anti-Turkish activities’ by providing an education to young people, including non Christians, and of illegally occupying land which belongs to the neighbouring villages.
After a number of contrasting verdicts, the highest appeals court in Ankara, which is close to the government, has ruled in favour of the village chiefs and said the land which has been part of the monastery for 1,600 years is not its property, Turkish newspaper Zaman reported.
The lawsuit also claimed that the sanctuary was built over the ruins of a mosque, forgetting that Mohammed was born 170 years after its foundation.
The verdict has been slammed by the Turkish media and Zaman wrote that the judges had ‘lost’ property and fiscal documents ‘proving that the land in question belongs to the monastery’.
Mor Gabriel now needs to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in order to survive, a move already undertaken with success a few years ago by the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople to re-obtain the building housing the Orthodox orphanage of Buyukada in Istanbul.
Wikipedia has more on the monastery here.
About Fr Stephen Smuts
In the Land of Constantine who adopted Christianity (Constantinoble) we see The Church under attack, a trend enveloping all Muslim territories. Having lived in peace for Centuries, it’s unfathomable that this scenario is spreading like wildfire. Much Prayer and Fasting (Our Blessed Mother’s Words) are needed, or our world will deteriorate further, with more Chastisements in store. Man has yet to heed the warnings of Our Lady of Fatima.
Lord have mercy. I know someone, a surgeon, who lives and works in Turkey. He tells me that many Turks are appalled by this court ruling, and there have been expressions of outrage both in the secular forum and even in some mosques. The extremists may have actually harmed their own cause.
Yes, it is absolutely deplorable!
Muslims. It’s always Muslims or Atheists nowadays.
Oh, and it’s not just Orthodox Syrians being abused, it’s also the ARMENIANS and the GREEKS. FOR THE LAST EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS!
I… I have no words I can use to describe how frustrated and angry I am about this. But I still have words.
You have Halki Seminary being prohibited from opening to train more Christian clergy, you have a dying Christian population that can trace its provenance to before these dirty Muslim squatters came and made Hagia Sophia into a mosque and then a museum. Not even Saint Nicholas was safe, as they relegated a pious sculpture of the saint into some corner, while they install a plastic red ho-ho-ho abomination in Demre’s town square. Oh, and they have the COJONES to demand the return of St. Nicholas’ bones to Turkey from Christian Italy. Probably for Muslims to desecrate and spit on as a sign of their triumph over Christianity. It’s what they always do. Muslims, on the occasion of their victory over their enemies, proclaim their victory through acts of sacrilege, such as converting places of worship into Mosques. it happened in Constantinople, in Cordoba, in the Dome of the Rock, oh, and most recently, an attempt to make a Mosques a distance away from Ground Zero.
it’s not the act of a “Religion of Peace” to erect what amounts to a giant flag of victory over the symbol of a broken people. And yet, that’s what they do, and what they do before is to murder those baptized in the name of the Triune God who would not submit to their false religion.
See, I really, really, really want to believe that oh, those peace-loving Muslims, they’ll never harm a soul! They worship the same God as us! That’s so much easier! But truth is, Iraqi, Syrian, Indonesian, Pakistani, Egyptian, and ALL other sorts of Christians are being MURDERED as we speak over here in the West and pretend as if there’s a choice over how to look at Islam.
“Oh, that’s not very compassionate! Not very charitable!” Compassion should be directed to the MURDERED, not the murderer! Charity is for the VICTIMS of Islam, not the murderous thugs that follow such a vile religion! Granted, you can be a holy man and go a step further and forgive them for what they do. That’s great, honestly! But that’s not fair for those who just want to live. Is it fair for any of us to say to a scared Assyrian Christian family to just be a martyr and be a holy doormat? It’s good for them to have faith and get strength from God, but it is not good for them to be told to do nothing. This is the point of Just War theory, that the just and the strong FIGHT for the sake of those who cannot.
The Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos was right, and Pope Benedict XVI was right in citing him:
“Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”
Just look at how the Religion of Peace responded to the Holy Father’s lecture at Regensburg. They certainly weren’t helping their own cause. And this particular news of Turkish threats is NOT SURPRISING, but only frustrating and enraging because there’s nothing we can do in terms of substantial actions.
Halki is still closed, Historic Christianity in Turkey is dwindling, there’s still a stupid Santa Claus statue in Saint Nicholas’ historic church, Turks are still desecrating Armenian solid rock churches and tombstones, and people in the West are STILL talking about Turkey as a “Exemplary model of a secular middle-eastern state.”
If you would like to take action, and I feel you would, check out
Even if you’re not American, this site will tell you how we are fighting back against
the threat of “Radical Islam” e.g. The Muslim Brotherhood, etc. I think you’ll find the
work there is positive against a real World threat.
The site is
Didn’t show above.
Evidently this site blocks sending other sites, like Act4America.com
If it does, it is not me, but the platform, WordPress.
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