Hatay Christians in Turkey worry that the exodus from the earthquake will end centuries of coexistence

In front of a now-ruined 150-year-old church in the southern Turkish city of Samandag, Rev. Trifon Yumurta is overseeing the distribution of 2,500 meals a day prepared by volunteers.

The 54-year-old hopes that shared food and a sense of belonging will encourage locals to stay in the affected area, located near the epicenter of the Feb. 6 earthquake that killed more than 50,000 people in Turkey and Syria.

But most people fled to safer cities. Much to the despair of Father Tryphon, it is unclear if they will ever return.

It would be another drain on the once-prosperous minorities that populated the Ottoman Empire and that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government says it wants to re-emerge in modern Turkey.

“We want people to stay here,” Father Tryphon told The National.

“We don’t want them to go to another country or another city and leave their culture behind.”

The earthquake is a double blow to the country’s small Orthodox Greek community, which has retained its presence in Hatay, mostly due to the province’s privileged integration process into the modern country.

Many say the community is now divided and frightened as memories of past dispossession have come back to haunt them.

Overall, experts believe that the Christian population living in Anatolia has shrunk from over a million in the 19th century under the Ottoman Empire to nearly 100,000 today in modern Turkey.

Hatay is known for housing a number of religious minorities, including Alevis, Assyrians, Jews, and Armenians, although the numbers have dwindled over the past century.

More recently, public authorities have reinforced this interfaith aspect, and her name has sometimes appeared spelled with a Jewish star of David in place of an “A”, a Christian cross in place of a “T” and a Muslim half-moon in place of a “Y”.

Its capital, Antioch, was one of the most important cities of Christianity, along with Rome and Jerusalem.

“Alevi Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Armenians live here,” said Father Trifon, one of two priests in Samandag, which, according to him, has four churches in total and 400 Orthodox families.

“We go to their funerals, they come to our celebrations. We live in peace. We don’t want to break this mosaic.”

In the hills above the city of about 200,000, the cave church founded by Saint Peter is said to be the first church in the world in which Christians celebrated Mass separately from Jews. It attracts pilgrims from all over the world.

But the Feb. 6 earthquake and its aftershocks have turned the once-proud Mediterranean city, which built its fortune in part thanks to its geostrategic location on an ancient trade route, into a ghost town.

Throughout the day, cranes continue digging through the rubble of collapsed buildings to help rescue teams search for bodies to be buried in mass graves in the suburbs.

In the old city, former neighbors hugged each other in tears as they searched for their belongings in the rubble.

Antakya, one of Turkey’s last symbols of tolerance and diversity, is no more.

Century-old mosques and churches have been reduced to piles of stones, and the local synagogue stands empty, its doors locked.

It was reported that the handful of elderly Jews who lived in the city before the earthquake had died or had died. Nobody thinks they will return.

A woman receives help after another earthquake in Antakya in Turkey’s Hatay Province. All photos from Reuters

Christians worry that they will suffer the same fate.

“There is no life anymore,” said Father Ignatius Yapitzioglu, a Greek Orthodox priest from Antakya.

“Our biggest fear is that the young man will leave and never come back, and that is a very difficult thought. It is a very sad time.”

There are no hospitals or schools. “For young families with young children, it is very difficult to return once they have built their lives elsewhere,” said Father Ignatius.

special place

Hatay has a distinguished history that has enabled it to maintain its multi-faith identity, unlike many other regions in the country.

“The balance of communities in Hatay is a stunning microcosm of what the Ottoman Empire once was,” said Hugh Pope, former director of communications at the International Crisis Group and author of a book on the history of Turkey.

After the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, the region, which at that time was called Alexandretta, was placed under a special administration within the French Mandate of Syria, falling outside the borders of the new Turkish Republic in 1923.

In 1939, it joined Turkey in a controversial referendum, and the country’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, named it Hatay. The choice of name was a reference to the ancient Hittites who lived in Anatolia more than 1,000 years before Christ.

It was also a way of claiming the land by suggesting that modern-day Turks have direct connections to the Hittites and lived there before any other ethnic and religious group, said Christine Filio, a professor in the University of California’s Department of History. Berkeley.

Hatay’s late incorporation into the Turkish state spared its Greek Orthodox community a forced population exchange with the Muslim population of Greece in 1923.

“This is why there is still a large Greek Orthodox population in Hatay today,” said Ms. Filiu, who is the author of several books on the Ottoman Empire.

Minorities in the region that were the targets of the 1915-1916 Ottoman genocides – notably Armenians and Assyrian Christians – were able to return to their ancestral homes, albeit in smaller numbers, with some leaving again for Syria in 1939.

said Hegnar Watenbaugh, professor of art history at UCLA.

Ioannis, brother of Father Ignatius, who is a priest and also holds a PhD in Ottoman and Byzantine history, said the number of Greek Orthodox Christians is still small at about 10,000 out of a population of 1.6 million across Hatay province.

Father Ioannis said the Orthodox population in Istanbul is even less than that, at around 2,000.

The destroyed Antiochian Orthodox Church in Antakya. France Press agency

Over the past century, the Greek Orthodox community has left in droves for countries such as Greece, Germany or the United States after multiple traumatic events.

These included exclusionary legislation imposed by the Turkish Republic, most notably the massacre of 1955 and the forced expulsion from Istanbul in 1964.

“These events are engraved in our minds,” said Father Ioannis.

The largest number of departures were from Anatolia, said Risat Kasaba, a professor of international studies at the University of Washington, but many Greek Orthodox Christians living in southern Turkey left as well, especially after anti-Greek sentiment rose after Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Cyprus.

“I remember when I was a little kid, my parents had Greek Orthodox friends who pretty much disappeared overnight,” said Mr. Kassaba, from Antakya.

“The community felt increasingly insecure, which is why young people in particular ended up leaving.”

Most of them went to Syria and Lebanon because of ethnic, family and historical ties, according to Mr. Kasbah.

“Because Hatay remained under the French mandate, they are torn between the Syrian Arab, Turkish and Greek nationalities,” he said.

Despite the dwindling numbers, the presence of such minorities in the Antakya region is still felt in the social interactions of the people, who are reputed to be more open and tolerant.

Turkey’s first Christian mayor was elected in 2004 in the town of Arsuz, about 80 km from Antakya, Mr. Kasaba noted.

“Even if the numbers are much lower now, this long history of the existence of all these communities explains how people relate to each other even in other regions,” he explained.

In other areas, it is common for Christians to be asked where they come from even though their community has lived in what is today modern Turkey thousands of years ago.

“We are so few in number that it is normal that some people do not realize that there are non-Muslims in their country,” said Ana Maria Bilonioglu, co-founder of an online platform called Nehna, dedicated to the Greek Orthodox in Antakya. Community.

“I have to explain to people that I am not a foreigner, I am originally from Antioch. They ask me ‘When did you come to Antioch?

Antioch felt safe for the Christians. In public, unlike in Istanbul, Ms. Bilonioglu said, they wore crosses around their necks.

She explains that this is why the fear of loss has become so great after the recent earthquakes.

She said, “I personally built my culture and identity on being Antiochian.”

“If we don’t have Antioch anymore, we’ll be in exile forever.”

Turkish writer and political analyst Cengiz Akter explained that modern Turkish identity is rooted in Islam, despite it being a secular state.

“Turkish and Muslim are the same in people’s minds. Whatever is non-Muslim is considered non-Turkish.

Despite the country’s troubled history with minorities, public authorities attempted to take advantage of Antakya’s rich history with a major campaign in the early 2000s to emphasize the city’s history as a meeting place for different religions and ethnicities.

“At that time, a photograph taken at the same time as the bell tower of a Catholic church and the minaret of one of the oldest mosques was adopted as a symbol of Antioch,” said Mr. Katsaba.

Near Samandağ, the last Armenian village in Turkey is starting to renovate its church.

“People have come out of hiding a little bit in recent years because there is a slight opportunity [from the government]Mrs. Watnpaugh said.

Trauma Reconsideration

Such recent attempts to celebrate Hatay’s multicultural heritage have not allayed fears of dispossession in the aftermath of the recent earthquake.

Father Tryphon said he was concerned that if Christians did not return to the area, his church would be handed over to another minority.

Few shared this view, but experts on Christianity in Turkey said they understood why he expressed it.

“For 100 years now, Turkish identity has been upheld by the concept of ethnic purity without the legal protection or endorsement of minority populations,” said George Dimakopoulos, co-director of the Center for Orthodox Christian Studies at Fordham University in New York City.

“When exposed to external shocks such as a horrific earthquake that brings all kinds of economic uncertainty, minorities have every right to fear being made a scapegoat because it has become ingrained in Turkish culture that minorities are evil and a threat.”

Cracks in a farm in Kahramanmaras, epicenter of the first 7.8-magnitude earthquake in southeastern Turkey. France Press agency

Ms. Watenbaugh said minorities were worried that they would not get the attention they needed after the earthquakes.

“Communities that have long felt they are treated like second-class citizens, not Turkish enough, fear they will be treated worse than everyone else after this terrible event,” Ms. Watenbaugh said.

“We really need to be concerned with how we move forward.

I hope there will be transparency and openness in the reconstruction process.

The Turkish Ministry of Tourism promotes the ethnic and religious diversity of Hatay.

“It should stay that way.”

Back in Samandag, Father Tryphon tries to collect money from the Orthodox diaspora in Germany to repair his church in St. Elias.

At the time of The National’s visit, he assessed the damage to the church, which was built on the site of an older church in the 1870s after another major earthquake, at $200,000.

He has made calls but has not received any financial support yet.

“They promised to donate, but no money has been received yet,” he said.

Updated March 13, 2023, 3:06 AM

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