Sunnia Rose reports in The National News on March 13, 2023.
In front of a now destroyed 150-year-old church in the southern Turkish city of Samandag, priest Trifon Yumurta supervises the distribution of 2,500 meals a day cooked by volunteers.
The 54-year-old hopes that shared food and a sense of community will encourage locals to remain in the devastated region, located close to the epicentre of the February 6 earthquake that killed over 50,000 people in Turkey and Syria.
But most people have fled for safer cities. Much to the despair of Father Trifon, it is unclear if they will ever return.
That would represent another haemorrhaging of once thriving minorities who filled the Ottoman Empire and who the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says it wants to re-emerge in modern-day Turkey.
“We want people to stay here,” Father Trifon 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 tiny Greek-Orthodox community, which had kept a presence in Hatay, in most part due to the province’s distinct integration process into the modern state.
Many say that the community is now scattered and fearful as memories of past dispossession have returned 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 roughly 100,000 today in modern Turkey.
Hatay is famous for housing a number of religious minorities, including Alawites, Assyrians, Jews and Armenians, though numbers dwindled throughout the past century.
Recently, public authorities have boosted this multi-religious aspect, and its name sometimes appeared spelt with a Jewish star of David in lieu of an ‘A’, a Christian cross in lieu of a ‘T’ and a Muslim half-crescent moon in lieu of a ‘Y’.
Its capital Antakya was once one of Christianity’s most important cities alongside Rome and Jerusalem.
“Alawite Muslims, Greek-Orthodox Orthodox and Armenians live here,” said Father Trifon, one of two priests in Samandag, which has four churches in total and 400 Greek Orthodox families, according to him.
“We go to their funerals, they come to our ceremonies. We live peacefully. We don’t want to break this mosaic.”
In the hills above the city of roughly 200,000, a cave church founded by Saint Peter is said to be the first church in the world where Christians celebrated mass separately from Jews. It attracts pilgrims from around the world.
But the February 6 earthquake and its aftershocks have transformed the once proud Mediterranean city, which built its wealth in part thanks to its strategic geographical location on an ancient trade route, into a ghost town.
All day, cranes continue digging through the rubble of collapsed buildings to help rescue teams search for bodies which will be buried in mass graves in the suburbs.
In the old city, former neighbours hug each other in tears as they search for their belongings in the ruins.
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 stone, and the local synagogue stands empty, its doors locked.
The handful of elderly Jews that lived in the city before the earthquake is reportedly gone or dead. No one thinks they will come back.
Christians worry that they will suffer the same fate.
“There’s no life anymore,” said Father Ignatius Yapitzioglou, a Greek Orthodox priest from Antakya.
“Our biggest fear is that the young will leave and never return, and that’s a very difficult thought. It’s a very sad time.”
“There are no hospitals, no schools. For young families with small children, it’s very difficult to return once they’ve built their lives elsewhere,” said Father Ignatius.
A special place
Hatay has a distinct history which enabled it to preserve its multi-religious identity, unlike much of the rest of the country.
“The balance of communities in Hatay is an amazing 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 Turkey’s history.
After the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, the region, at the time called Alexandretta, was put under a special administration within the French mandate of Syria, falling outside the borders of the new republic of Turkey in 1923.
In 1939, it joined Turkey in a controversial referendum and was dubbed Hatay by the country’s founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The choice of name was a reference to the ancient Hittite people who lived in Anatolia more than 1,000 years before Christ.
It was also a way of laying claim to the land by indicating that modern-day Turks had direct links to the Hittites and lived there before any other ethno-religious group, said Christine Philliou, professor at the department of history at the University of California, Berkeley.
Hatay’s late integration into the Turkish state spared its Greek Orthodox community a compulsory population exchange with Greece’s Muslim population in 1923.
“This is the reason why there is still a sizeable population of Greek Orthodox in Hatay today,” said Ms Philliou, who has written several books on the Ottoman Empire.
Minorities in the region that had been the target of the 1915-1916 Ottoman genocides — notably Armenians and Assyrian Christians — were also able to return to their ancestral homes, albeit in smaller numbers, with some leaving again for Syria in 1939.
“The process of homogenisation that you have in other parts of Turkey did not take place with the same ferocity that it did in Hatay, which is why it has such a different character,” said Heghnar Watenpaugh, professor of art history at the University of California.
Yet at about 10,000 out of a population of 1.6 million across Hatay province, the number of Greek Orthodox Christians remains small, said Father Ignatius’s brother, Ioannis, who is also a priest and holds a PhD in Ottoman and Byzantine history.
The Greek Orthodox population of Istanbul is even smaller, at about 2,000, Father Ioannis said.
Over the past century, Turkey’s Greek Orthodox community left in large numbers for countries like Greece, Germany or the US after multiple traumatic events.
They included exclusionary legislation enforced by the Turkish republic and most notably a 1955 pogrom and forced expulsion from Istanbul in 1964.
“These events are seared in our minds,” said Father Ioannis.
The highest number of departures were from Anatolia, but many Greek-Orthodox Christians living in southern Turkey also left, especially after anti-Greek sentiment rose following Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Cyprus, said Resat Kasaba, professor of international studies at the University of Washington.
“I remember as a small child, my parents had Greek-Orthodox friends who pretty much vanished overnight,” said Mr Kasaba, an Antakya native.
“The community felt increasingly unsafe, which is why younger people especially ended up leaving.”
Most of them went to Syria and Lebanon because they of ethnic, family, and historical ties, according to Mr Kasaba.
« Because Hatay remained under the French mandate, they were torn between Syrian Arab, Turkish, and Greek nationalisms, » he said.
Despite dwindling numbers, the presence of such minorities in the region of Antakya is still felt in people’s social interactions, reputed to be more open-minded and tolerant.
Turkey’s first Christian mayor was elected in 2004 in the town of Arsuz, around 80km from Antakya, pointed out Mr Kasaba.
“Even if numbers are much smaller now, this long history of the presence of all these communities explains how people relate to each other even in other areas,” he explained.
In other regions, it’s common for Christians to be asked where they come from despite their community having lived in what is today modern Turkey for thousands of years.
“We are such a small number that it’s normal that some people do not realise that there are non-Muslims in their country,” said Anna Maria Beylunioglu, one of the founders of an online platform called Nehna, which is dedicated to Antakya’s Greek Orthodox community.
“I have to explain to people that I’m not a foreigner, I’m originally from Antioch. They ask me ‘when did you come to Antioch?’ I say ‘I was there first, you came later’,” she said, using Antakya’s ancient name.
Antakya felt safe for Christians. They would wear crosses around their necks in public, unlike in Istanbul, said Ms Beylunioglu.
That is why the fear of loss is so great after the recent earthquakes, she explained.
“Personally, I built my culture and identity on being Antiochian,” she said.
“If we don’t have Antioch any more, we’ll forever be a diaspora.”
Modern Turkish identity is rooted in Islam, explained Turkish writer and political analyst Cengiz Aktar, despite being a secular state.
“Turkish and Muslim are the same in people’s minds. Anything that is non-Muslim is considered non-Turkish,” he said.
Despite the state’s turbulent history with minorities, public authorities tried to capitalise on Antakya’s rich history with a big campaign in the early 2000s to emphasise the city’s history as a place where different religions and ethnicities converged.
“At that time, a photograph that simultaneously captured the bell tower of a Catholic church and the minaret of one of the oldest mosques was adopted as a symbol of Antakya,” said Mr Kasaba.
Near Samandag, the last Armenian village in Turkey started renovating its church.
“People had come out of hiding a little bit in recent years because there’s been a slight opening [from the government],” said Ms Watenpaugh.
Traumas revisited
Such recent attempts to celebrate Hatay’s multicultural heritage have not quietened fears of dispossession following the recent earthquake.
Father Trifon said he was worried that if Christians do not return to the area, his church would be handed over to another minority group.
Few shared this opinion, but experts on Christianity in Turkey said that they understood why he expressed it.
“For 100 years now, Turkish identity has been propped up by a notion of ethnic purity with no legal protection or endorsement for minority populations,” said George Demacopoulos, co-director of the Orthodox Christian studies centre at Fordham University in New York City.
“When you have exogenous shocks like a horrific earthquake that brings all kinds of economic uncertainty, minorities have every right to fear that they’re going to get scapegoated because it’s become ingrained in Turkish culture that minorities are evil and a threat.”
Ms Watenpaugh said that minorities worried that they would not receive the attention needed after the earthquakes.
“Communities that have long felt treated as second-class citizens, and not quite Turkish enough, fear that they will be treated even worse than everyone else after this terrible event,” Ms Watenpaugh said.
“We really need to pay attention to how things will move forward.
“I hope there will be transparency and openness in the reconstruction process.
“Turkey’s Tourism Ministry touts Hatay’s ethnic and religious diversity.
“It has to stay that way.”
Back in Samandag, Father Trifon is trying to raise money from the Orthodox diaspora in Germany to fix his church of St Elias.
At the time of The National’s visit, he evaluated 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 been making calls but so far received no financial support.
“They promised to give, but no money has come through yet,” he said.