POPE VISIT LEAVES CHRISTIAN TURKISH VILLAGE COLD
by Burak Akinci

Agence France Presse — English
November 26, 2006 Sunday 2:31 AM GMT

Pope Benedict XVI’s planned visit to Muslim Turkey this week has
the world abuzz, but in Tokacli, the country’s only entirely Greek
Orthodox Christian village, most people couldn’t care less.

"So he’s coming, is he? What do you know…" commented an incredulous
native who said he works for the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in
Istanbul, some 1,100 km (700 miles) away, but refused to give his name.

"After what he said about the Muslims, it would have been better for
him to stay away. I’m surprised he decided to come," said the owner
of the only cafe in Tokacli, 25 kilometers (15 miles) from Antakya.

The thirtyish shopowner smoked up his establishment as he tried
to light the stove, explaining that he too would rather not give
his name, "because I don’t want people to think I’m against peace"
among Christians.

Turkey’s Christian community is no more than 200,000-strong in a
country of 70 million, most of them Greek Orthodox or Gregorian
Armenian.

Tokacli has a population of 350 in winter and more than 2,000 in the
summer, when native sons seeking their fortunes abroad — mostly in
Western Europe — return for the holidays.

They have restored the old homes where they come to live for one month
a year, although some of the modern rebuilding appears to have cost
the village part of its original charm.

Tokacli is attached to the Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, as
Antakya used to be called, and where St. Peter founded the first
Christian church and where the word "Christian" first originated to
describe the followers of Jesus.

The Patriarch of Antioch himself, however, has been a resident of
Damascus since the 14th century and the people of Tokacli, like many
people in Hatay province, three-quarters surrounded by Syria, speak
Arabic among themselves.

Gathered at the cafe on a recent evening, most of them after a day
working their olive groves — the economic mainstay of the community
— the men of the village made favorable comparisons of the late pope
John Paul II, who visited Turkey in 1979, to Benedict XVI.

Respected community leader Josef Naseh, 53, an archaeologist who runs
a profitable real estate business in Antakya and heads an NGO to defend
community rights, brandished a photo to prove he was the first head of
an Orthodox civic organisation to have an audience with John Paul II,
back in 2003.

"The pope (Benedict XVI) is coming basically to attend mass with the
Greek Orthodox in Istanbul — it is the only reason for his visit," he
said. "If it had been John Paul II, things would have been different."

"He was different," Naseh sighed.

The mukhtar — the village headman — was more enthusiastic about
the papal visit.

"It was a good decision to come to our country — his visit will
contribute to bringing religions together," said Mikail Kar, a brawny
man in his fifties, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

Kar said he returned to his native village only last year to be elected
headman after 28 years in Norway; his "modern mukhtar" aspect shows
as he drives rather than walks the narrow alleys of his village to
meet his constituents.

"The pope is welcome," he said. "But we would have liked to see him
here on our lands as well, where Muslims, Christians and Jews have
always lived in peace, without any problems."

No one remembers the last time there was a religion-related incident
in the village, even as Christian clergymen elsewhere in Turkey
became recent targets of Muslim extremists, like Italian Catholic
priest Andrea Santoro, shot dead by a teenager in February outside
his church in Trabzon, on the Black Sea coast.

After the Santoro killing, followed by at least two more attacks
against Christian clergymen, the Turkish authorities put two bodyguards
on duty to guard Tokacli’s Priest Musa.

But it only lasted a month, because, Kar said confidently, "in any
case, no one ever expected anything to happen here."