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ABSTRACT
The policies of the Turkish Justice and Development Party (AKP) towards religious minorities exhibits a fundamental ambiguity. Though the AKP has supported a number of high-profile changes in policy towards Armenians and other non-Muslim minorities, the party has left the underlying legal structure intact. This article describes developments in the treatment of non-Muslim vakıfs (often translated at ‘religious foundations’) under the AKP, specifically the restoration of the Holy Cross Armenian Cathedral on the island of Akdamar and the reopening of the Surp Giragos Armenian Church in Diyarbakır. Using these examples, the article demonstrates how the tension between changing policy and enduring legal structure points to an ‘ambiguous attitude’ on the part of the AKP towards Turkey’s religious minority populations.
Acknowledgment
The research for this paper has been supported by the American Research Institute in Turkey’s Department of State, Educational and Cultural Affairs Fellowship in 2012–2013, the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship (2012), a Division of the Social Sciences Short-Term Research Grant from the University of Chicago, and the University of Chicago’s Pozen Center for Human Right’s Graduate Research Fellowship in 2014. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the ‘Turkey at Critical Crossroads: Dynamic Trajectories for Society, Politics and Culture’ conference in Lisbon, Portugal, with travel funding by the Lichtstern Conference Travel Award from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. The writing was supported by the Alex and Marie Manoogian Foundation Post-doctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Michigan. The author would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their incisive and helpful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on Contributor
Christopher Sheklian is a Manoogian post-doctoral fellow in Armenian Studies and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, where he studies secularism, religious minority rights, the embodied and affective components of the Armenian liturgical tradition, and Armenian theology as a source for social scientific theory and method. He received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago with his dissertation, ‘Theology and the Community: The Armenian Minority, Tradition, and Secularism in Turkey.’
Notes
1. Signage at the church states that ‘The Church of Sourp Giragos, dated from the fourteenth century, was also the seat of an Archbishopric.’ While the early history of the church is controversial, the shape and location of the current building dates the second half of the nineteenth century.
2. Margosyan, Gâvur Mahallesi.
3. Staff, “Pilgrims from the Eastern Diocese.”
4. Dogan News Agency, “Armenian Church.”
5. While there has been much written journalistically about Surp Giragos in past few years, including several articles cited in this text, the full story of its disrepair, renovation, and, tragically, the more recent battles over expropriation after the breakdown of the Kurdish peace process in Turkey in 2016 has not been given a full narrative treatment.
6. The Cathedral of the Holy Cross is one of the most famous and iconic of all Armenian churches, a high point of Armenian architecture of the Armenian kingdom of Vaspurakan. It was completed in 921, and was the seat of an Armenian Catholicosate for several centuries. The church is particularly famous for its bas-relief carvings. See Der Nersessian and Vahramian, Aght’amar. The spelling and name of the island on Lake Van in Eastern Turkey is itself a point of contention between Turkish and Armenian sources. I use the official Turkish Akdamar, which can be translated ‘white vein.’ However, the Armenian, derived from a folktale made famous by the nineteenth century writer Hovhannes Tumanyan, is Akhtamar, the interjection ‘Akh!’ and the name Tamar. Most Armenian sources and newspapers will write Akhtamar.
7. This is not to say that the experience of all the religious minorities in the Republic of Turkey is the same. However, what we can call the ‘Lausanne minorities’ or ‘millet minorities’ are in a similar legal situation. First and foremost, these are the only legally recognized religious minorities in the Republic of Turkey. Thus, though Alevis or other non-Sunni Muslims certainly fit a descriptive understanding of religious minority, they do not have distinct legal status. Crucially, there are particularities in the Armenian case that heighten the complexity of state-minority relations, most importantly the Armenian Genocide of 1915, unrecognized as such by the Turkish state, which continues to be a major point of contention..
8. See, for instance, Çizakça, A History of Philanthropic Foundations; van Leeuwen, Waqf and Urban Structures; Moumtaz, “Modernizing Charity”; and Dallal, “The Islamic Institution of Waqf.”
9. I rely heavily on those few sources dealing specifically with non-Muslims waqf/vakıf, and they are cited extensively in what follows.
10. Levy, “Millet Politics.”
11. “Treaty of Lausanne.”
12. Ekmekçioğlu, Recovering Armenia.
13. Tambar, The Reckoning of Pluralism, 79.
14. Çizakça, A History of Philanthropic Foundations, 6.
15. Coulson, A History of Islamic Law, 28.
16. The website of the Ministry of Foundations lists 165 active ‘Community Foundations’ in Turkey today. All of these would have been founded during the Ottoman era. https://www.vgm.gov.tr/en/Sayfalar/SayfaDetay.aspx?SayfaId=20.
17. Sheklian, “Theology and the Community.”
18. van Leeuwen, Waqf and Urban Structures, 11–12.
19. Much of what follows depends heavily on the 2012 Declaration prepared by the Hrant Dink Foundation as a response to the promised return of properties (see below). A longer treatment, of which this section is a partial modification, of the history, law, and problems faced by the ‘community foundations’ or ‘non-Muslim vakıfs’ is given in my dissertation, “Theology and the Community,” 93–114.
20. Zencirci, “From Property to Civil Society,” 536.
21. Reyna and Moreno Zonana, Son Yasal Düzenlemelere, 35.
22. Polatel et al., 2012 Declaration, 35.
23. Istanbul, under closer scrutiny of Western observers throughout the First World War, was spared much of the violence of the Armenian Genocide. After the first deportation of over two hundred Armenian intellectuals from Istanbul on 24 April 1915, the date that has become the commemoration of the Genocide, there were few deportations from the Ottoman capitol. Similarly, the Armenian churches and other foundations throughout the city were spared the physical destruction to which many of the Anatolian churches were subjected.
24. Kurt, “The Plunder of Wealth.”
25. Akçam and Kurt, The Spirit of the Laws, 22–25.
26. Ibid., 64.
27. Ibid., 15.
28. Polatel et al., 2012 Declaration, 41–43.
29. Kurt, “Revisiting the Legal Infrastructure,” 705.
30. Der Matossian, “The Taboo within the Taboo,” 10.
31. Polatel et al., 2012 Declaration, 49.
32. T.R. Directorate General of Foundations, “Our History.”
33. Zencirci, “From Property to Civil Society,” 538.
34. “Foundations Law No. 5737.”
35. Zencirci, “From Property to Civil Society,” 538.
36. Polatel et al., 2012 Declaration, 51.
37. Ibid.
38. Bayir, Minorities and Nationalism in Turkish Law, 116.
39. Walton, Muslim Civil Society, 26.
40. BBC News, “Ankara Restores Armenian Church.”
41. Mkrtchyan, “Akhtamar Mass.”
42. Candar, “The So-Called Akdamar Museum.”
43. Hürriyet Haber, “Armenian Historian.”
44. The second parliamentary elections, which they won, took place on 22 July 2007.
45. Eurasianet.org, “The Cross Goes Up.”
46. I would insist that, despite whatever hidden or insidious intentions there might be on the part of the government, these actions have resulted in concrete benefits for the minority populations. My point is not to praise or condemn the current government, but simply to recognize that there have been important positive results for Armenians and other religious minorities.
47. Again, this is exactly how I define ‘ambiguous’ for the purposes of this essay: a willingness to alter some policies, especially in a cosmetic manner, without also changing the underlying legal structure that could offer a more permanent and secure alternative for religious minorities.
48. Shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of an independent Republic of Armenia, the border between Turkey and Armenia was closed. It remains closed to this day, and there are no formal diplomatic relations between the two countries. The 2008 Protocols, signed during exactly this ‘ambiguous era’ was an ambitious attempt to normalize diplomatic relations between the two countries. For various reasons, including tying diplomatic normalization to the history of the Genocide and the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Protocols failed in the domestic political arenas of both countries.
49. The Turkish spelling of Ramadan.
50. Arsu, “Turkish Government.”
51. The vakfıyes which were often never given to the non-Muslim foundations at all, as many of the minority vakıfs established by decree of the Sultan. See above.
52. Starr, “How the World’s.”
53. Çelikkan, “Patriarch Bartholomew.”
54. In the context of the breakdown of the Kurdish peace process, street battles were fought between the PKK (and other urban Kurdish groups and youth) and the Turkish security forces in a number of cities in the Southeast of Turkey where the Kurdish population is sizeable. Along with the destruction of property and death, after the fighting itself subsided, the Turkish government has expropriated areas where the fighting occurred, ostensibly for renovation. See Yeginsu, “Turkey’s Seizure of Churches” for a description of the re-expropriation of the Diyarbakır’s churches.
55. The Halklarin Demokratik Partisi (HDP), or ‘People’s Democratic Party,’ is a political party in Turkey that grew out of the Kurdish political movement. While still a majority Kurdish party, the HDP includes several non-Kurdish parliamentarians, and passed the 10% electoal threshold to enter parliament as a party in the June 2015 elections in part through its appeal as a broader party emphasizing minority and human rights. Many of its parliamentarians have been imprisoned and/or stripped of their seats since the 15 July 2016 coup attempt.
56. Hurriyet Daily News, “HDP MP Garo Paylan.”
57. As of the time of writing, the expropriation of Surp Giragos has been suspended. See Gültekin, “Stay of Execution.” The ultimate fate of the church, now in disrepair, is still undecided.