Ekklesia, UK
Jan 28 2007

Attack on Turkish church signals further nationalist tensions
-28/01/07

Hours after a nationalist protester with a handgun made an attempt to
hijack a commuter ferry in the Dardanelles strait on 27 January 2007,
unidentified attackers stoned at a church in the northern Turkish
town of Samsun today (Sunday), the Anatolian news agency has
reported.

There were no casualties, according to Mehmet Orhan Picakcilar, a
priest at the Agape Church. "This does damage to Turkey. This attack
depicts [our country] in a bad way before international public
opinion," he commented

Nationalists have been angered by pro-Armenian sentiment in Turkey
following responses to the murder of the Turkish-Armenian editor
Hrant Dink on 19 January, which prompted large pro-Armenian protests.

Dink was among those, including church groups, who have tried to
speak out about the 1915 Armenian genocide, which claimed one million
lives. It is illegal in Turkish law to raise this issue, and the
authorities deny that the event happened.

A rise in nationalism among young people from Turkey’s Black Sea
towns has come under the spotlight since the teenager suspected of
killing Dink and his alleged supporters were found to have come from
the town of Trabzon.

A Catholic priest was killed in his church in Trabzon in February
2006 by a Turkish teenager. The killing was believed to have been
part of protests in Islamic countries against cartoons in Danish
newspapers that mocked Prophet Mohammad.

Christians in secular but Muslim-majority Turkey – Armenians, Greeks,
Syriacs, Catholics, some Evangelical denominations and Jehovah’s
Witnesses – make up less than one percent of the country’s 72 million
people.

The country, now 99 per cent Muslim, has a significant Christian past
going back two millennia.

After Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem, his followers scattered
across the ancient world. What is now called Turkey was a key
crossroads between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and the
fledgling Christian faith took hold in what was then a Roman province
with a rich Greek heritage.

Turkey’s bid for accession to the European Union has caused
controversy in relation o its record on human rights and its
religious and cultural profile.

The Catholic Church and others have argued that Turkish membership of
the EU would compromise the continent’s largely Christian heritage.
Secularists fear a country with another large religious majority.

But those who favour Turkish inclusion point to the collapse of
Christendom in Europe, the significance of minority traditions, the
desirability of handling civil rights questions within a regional
framework of law, and the need to challenge both Islamist and
neoconservative attempts to buttress a `clash of civilizations’.

Pope Benedict, formerly strongly against Turkey’s accession, which
analysts say is still a long way off, seems to have moderated and
even changed his view following a recent visit to the country – and
the fallout from his own misjudged speech on Islam, Christianity and
reason in Germany.

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