Hatred towards non-Muslims is so intensive in Turkey that even the lifeless can not escape it.
A latest demonstration of this hostility took spot in the Turkish money of Ankara. Graves in an Armenian cemetery there had been reportedly desecrated, in accordance to the news internet site Bianet:
The Armenian Stanoz Cemetery in Ankara’s Sincan district has been the concentrate on of treasure hunters for decades. The cemetery has been harmed quite a few occasions prior to. A section of the Armenian cemetery with agricultural land subsequent to it is also utilised as a picnic location. The barbed wires put all over the cemetery by the Sincan Municipality in purchase to shield the cemetery have been eradicated and included to the land of the winery properties designed in the valley. The photos of scattered human bones coming out of graveyards dug by treasure hunters hunting for burials in the cemetery have been posted on social media many occasions. On the other hand, due to a absence of action [by authorities], only a couple of tombstones with Armenian inscriptions and cross carvings keep on being.
Opposition member of parliament Garo Paylan, who is of Armenian origin, questioned Turkey’s lifestyle and tourism minister Nuri Ersoy the following questions via a parliamentary movement:
- Why have you not protected the Ankara Stanoz Armenian Cemetery?
- Do you have a approach to protect the many Armenian cemeteries throughout the region?
- Have you tried out to capture the treasure hunters who looted the Stanoz Armenian Cemetery?
The minister has but to response Paylan’s questions.
These kinds of attacks are not isolated incidents in Turkey. They are widespread and the explanation seems to be the hatred and intolerance a lot of Turks have for non-Muslims. Even a bulk of the associates in the Turkish political opposition do not elevate their voices towards the abuses of non-Muslim cemeteries and graves. Meanwhile the examples retain accumulating.
In February, 20 of the 72 gravestones at the Ortaköy Christian Cemetery in Ankara were destroyed, according to information stories. A different assault was carried out on a grave in the cemetery of the Santa Maria Catholic Church in Trabzon in northeast Turkey.
In March, a 300-calendar year-old cemetery belonging to Yazidis, a non-Muslim people today, in the Nusaybin district of Mardin in southeast Turkey was ruined by unknown men and women. Gravestones and marbles had been damaged. Some religious symbols ended up also shattered. Among the shattered symbols were being the sunshine and peacock, which are regarded as sacred by the Yazidis.
In the identical month, the gravestones of Alevis, a religious minority in Turkey, ended up reported to have been damaged in the town of Aydin. The family members of the deceased described the incident to the law enforcement, who told them that “this was not the first [attack] and the perpetrators would be investigated.” Such assaults versus Alevi graves are commonplace and even the victims of massacres are in some cases focused. In 2013 and 2015, for instance, the mausoleums of 33 Alevi intellectuals who have been burned to dying in the 1993 Sivas massacre have been attacked and weakened in the Karşiyaka Cemetery in Izmir by unidentified people. The vandals taken off the plates on the mausoleums with the names of the useless.
Jewish cemeteries are also not exempt from attacks. In February 2019, a Jewish cemetery in the town of Antep located in southeastern Turkey was attacked. Its graves and epitaphs have been damaged. Another attack took spot in 2016. When Jews visited the cemetery in the southern metropolis of Hatay on June 19 (Fathers’ Working day), they noticed that the wall of the cemetery was broken. The gate experienced been torn down and the gravestones harmed. The cemetery includes the graves of Jews and Armenians, as effectively as of Muslims.
An additional story from 2016 is also pretty telling as to the scope of the aversion to non-Muslims in Turkey. Miho Irak, an Assyrian Christian from Turkey, shed his lifetime at the age 77 in Belgium, in which he experienced been dwelling for 22 a long time. Irak was a member of the funeral fund of Turkey’s Presidency of Spiritual Affairs, the Diyanet. He regularly compensated membership expenses. His daughter Nezahat Irak reported that Diyanet officials gave up on their options of getting her father’s dead overall body to Turkey following they uncovered he was a Christian. The spouse and children then took Irak’s entire body to Turkey and buried him in the town of Mardin on August 25.
Regrettably, the desecration of cemeteries of non-Muslims has a lengthy historical past in Turkey. The Turkish governing administration has targeted them for a long time in an try to erase the background of the land’s indigenous peoples. The author Hüsnü Gürbey writes that the Turkish point out has wrecked several cemeteries of Armenians, Assyrians, Yazidis, Greeks, and other individuals and made general public buildings on them. Through the 1955 anti-Greek pogroms in Istanbul, for instance, the major Greek Orthodox cemeteries were being vandalized and, in some instances, wrecked.
Nowadays, Christians in Turkey are a very small, oppressed minority. But the land that includes Turkey was the moment inhabited and dominated by indigenous Christians. In the mid-19th century, there had been concerning 3 and 4 million Christians (Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians), all around 20 percent of the total population. By 1924, via 3 successive waves of genocidal violence, Christians had been lessened to 2 percent of Turkey’s inhabitants. Historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi doc these realities in their 2019 ebook The Thirty-Calendar year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924.
Violence and discrimination in opposition to non-Muslims did not stop with the institution of modern day Turkey in 1923. According to scholar Amy Mills:
Because the beginning of the republic, Turkey’s leaders required to maximize the participation of Muslims in the economy and minimize minority affect in the overall economy, specifically in Istanbul… In the course of the teens and early 1920s, boycotts in opposition to non-Muslim enterprises and the expulsion of minorities from hundreds of careers the place they experienced dominated resulted in thousands of non-Muslims leaving Istanbul. By 1929, 70,000 non-Muslim folks had left Turkey.
In 1922, the National Turkish Trade Association was started to identify which corporations have been Turkish. The affiliation learned that 97% of the import-export trade in Istanbul, and all stores, merchants, places to eat, and amusement centers in Beyoğlu ended up owned by minorities. This survey was a precursor to steps taken with the aim of Turkifying the city’s overall economy. In 1923, non-Muslims were being expelled from investing work opportunities and insurance plan companies. In 1924, minorities have been barred from provider positions, bars, places to eat, coffeehouses, as well as trades these kinds of as boat captain, fisherman, and streetcar driver, work earlier dominated by non-Muslims. In 1934, a law determined more minority-dominated professions to be prohibited to foreigners.
Also, in 1934, Jews in japanese Thrace had been exposed to a pogrom. From 1941 to 1942, Turkey enlisted all Christian and Jewish males in the military, like the elderly and mentally unwell. They were being pressured to work beneath horrendous situations in labor battalions. In 1942, a prosperity tax was imposed to get rid of Christians and Jews from the economic climate. In 1955, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews were specific by a pogrom in Istanbul. And in 1964, the remaining Greeks were forcefully expelled from Turkey. All of the previously mentioned contributed to the ethnic cleaning of Christians and Jews in Turkey.
Today, only all over .2 p.c of Turkey’s population are Christians or Jews. Yet Turkey is even now referred to by numerous as “the next Holy Land.” All through much of the 1st century, it was the central land of the early church. Numerous Christians are unaware of this point because the Bible refers to the area as “Asia Minor” or “Anatolia,” but back when the population primarily consisted of Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians, and Jews, Asia Minor was house to the 7 church buildings of the Book of Revelation and seven ecumenical councils. Significantly of the New Testomony was composed either to or from church buildings in Asia Minor. Numerous saints ended up born there and the 3 significant apostles—St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John—either ministered or lived there. The Turkish-Islamic existence in the area commenced only in the 11th century. The Turks from Central Asia arrived in Asia Minor in 1071.
Jews also have a lengthy record in Asia Minimal. Professor Franklin Hugh Adler writes that Jews have lived
continually in Asia Minor from Biblical periods, talked about by Aristotle and quite a few Roman sources, such as Josephus. Jews, in truth, had inhabited this land prolonged before the birth of Mohammed and the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, or for that make any difference, the arrival and conquests of the Turks, commencing in the eleventh century. On the eve of the start of Islam, most of environment Jewry lived under Byzantine or Persian rule in the lands of the Mediterranean basin.
Rapid forward to the 21st century, and Turkey’s non-Muslims cannot even relaxation in peace.
Uzay Bulut is a Turkish journalist and political analyst formerly based in Ankara. Her writings have appeared in The Washington Moments, The American Spectator, The Christian Post, and The Jerusalem Write-up. Her operate focuses largely on human legal rights, Turkish politics and background, religious minorities in the Center East, and antisemitism.
