(Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, 18 November 2004/Robert Raderschatt)

Thousands of devout Muslimshave prayed outside Turkey’s historic Hagia Sophia museum to protest a 1934 law that bars religious services at the former church and mosque.

Worshippers shouted, “Break the chains, let Hagia Sophia Mosque open,” and “God is great” before kneeling in prayer on Saturday as tourists looked on.

Turkey’s secular laws prevent Muslims and Christians from formal worship within the 6th-century monument, the world’s greatest cathedral for almost a millennium before invading Ottomans converted it into a mosque in the 15th century.

“Keeping Hagia Sophia Mosque closed is an insult to our mostly Muslim population of 75 million. It symbolises our ill-treatment by the West,” Salih Turhan, head of the Anatolian Youth Association, which organised the event, told the crowd, whose male and female worshippers prayed separately according to Islamic custom.

The government has rejected requests from both Christians and Muslims to hold formal prayers at the site, historically and spiritually significant to adherents of both religions.

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(Istanbul celebrates carnival, 7 March 2011/all photos by Jonathan Lewis)

Istanbul’s tiny Greek community has revived an all-but-extinct tradition by celebrating Bakla Horani, an evening of carousing at the end of carnival ahead of Lent. About 300 masked, painted and costumed revelers paraded on Monday through the streets of Istanbul’s Kurtulus district, known as Tatavla when it was home to Greeks decades ago.

The procession ended at a local hall where musicians performed rembetiko and cranked a laterna, a Greek mechanical piano. Partiers were served raki, the aniseed-flavoured spirit, and meze that featured beans. (Bakla Horani roughly translates as “eating beans,” referring to the austere Lenten diet that looms.)

For 500 years, Bakla Horani was celebrated in Istanbul, now a mainly Muslim city, and pre-Lenten street parties would run for weeks ahead of the 40-day period of self-denial Christians observe ahead of Easter. Lent began today, Ash Wednesday.

Though never on the scale of the Bacchanalian parties of Mardi Gras in New Orleans or Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Bakla Horani was a colourful feature of Christian life in Istanbul until its last commemoration in 1941. After that, Greeks, along with the city’s other non-Muslim residents, faced social and financial discrimination that made it all but impossible for them to stage such a splashy event.

A small group gathered to mark the holiday last year. This year, the municipality asked members of the community to organise a full-scale event, promising to provide security for the procession, said Dimitri Zotos, head of the Ayios Dimitrios foundation, which hosted Bakla Horani.

“Bringing this tradition back to life after 70 years helps keep our community alive,” said Zotos. “This is proof that we are here, that we still exist.”

Such a prominent public event by Greeks is a rare sight in Istanbul, a mostly Muslim city of some 17 million people that is home to fewer than 3,000 ethnic Greeks, most of whom are over the age of 55. About 60,000 Armenians and 20,000 Jews also live in Istanbul.

In 1923, 1.5 million Greeks fled Turkey in a population exchange that marked the birth of the modern Turkish Republic, though 100,000 still survived a half-century ago. Their decline since has been precipitous. Istanbul, the seat of the Byzantine Empire for a millennium until 1453, is still home to the Ecumenical Patriarchate, spiritual centre for the world’s 250 million Orthodox faithful. In recent years Turkey’s government has taken a few steps to expand rights for Christians and other minorities, as it seeks to advance a bid to join the European Union.

Bakla Horani was always an inter-communal event, and this year revelers included Muslims, Armenians and foreigners. Former residents returned from Greece for the party, and a handful of young Greek Orthodox residents also celebrated. “It’s very nice to see this many people together, when there’s so few of us left,” said George Kara, an 18-year-old student. “Perhaps we now have a new tradition. In 70 years I will tell my grandchildren that I was here.”

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Chief Rabbi Isak Haleva and Istanbul Governor Avni Mutlu light a candle at Neve Shalom Synagogue to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day/Murad Sezer

In a rare show of unity with Istanbul’s dwindling Jewish community, government officials attended the country’s first official commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the anniversary of the 1945 liberation of Nazi concentration camps.

“For generations in Istanbul, we have lived together with love, tolerance, fraternity and without discrimination, and we are extremely determined to continue living this way,” Istanbul Governor Avni Mutlu said before lighting a candle with Chief Rabbi Isak Haleva at Neve Shalom Synagogue on January 27. Neve Shalom was one of two temples targeted in a 2003 bomb attack in Istanbul that was blamed on al Qaeda. Twenty-one Muslims and six Jews were killed, and hundreds more were wounded.

Turkish Jews, whose numbers have dwindled to about 18,000 in a country of almost 74 million Muslims, have in recent years again felt under threat as relations between Israel and Turkey, each other’s closest allies in the Middle East until recently, have deteriorated.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, a devout Muslim, castigated the Israeli government in early 2009 for its incursion into the Gaza Strip. Relations hit a nadir on May 31, when nine pro-Palestinian Turkish activists bringing aid to Gaza were killed by Israeli commandoes during a raid of their ship, the Mavi Marmara, in international waters.

Holocaust Remembrance Day in Neve Shalom Synagogue/Murad Sezer

Erdogan has condemned anti-Semitism and said he differentiates between Turkey’s Jews and Israeli policies. Still, both episodes kicked off popular anti-Israeli protests in Turkey that frightened Turkish Jews already fretful about their survival in a city that had served as a safe haven for centuries.

“At times of tension, as we saw with the Mavi Marmara incident, some Jews have concerns about their personal security, and in general many wonder what will happen in 20 years with the strain they feel just from their dwindling numbers,” said Louis Fishman, an expert on Turkish religious minorities at Brooklyn College in New York. Hundreds have quietly left for Israel in the last decade in an unofficial migration, he added.

Most Istanbul Jews are descendants of Sephardim who fled the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. During World War Two, when 6 million European Jews were killed in the Holocaust, Turkish diplomats helped rescue a few thousand expatriate Turkish Jews, and neutral Turkey offered safe passage to several thousand others.

“Even in these darkest days of history, there was still conduct in the name of humanity that made us proud and raised our spirits,” Sami Herman, president of the Turkish Jewish Community, said during the memorial ceremony. “There were real heroes who put their careers and the lives of their families and themselves at risk to save others … and among these real heroes were members of our country’s Foreign Service.”

Despite the history, efforts to reconcile Israel and Turkey since the Mavi Marmara incident have been largely fruitless. The Holocaust remembrance on Jan 27 coincided with an angry back-and-forth between the erstwhile allies after Israel published its findings in a probe of the raid that exonerated its soldiers’ use of force.

Mavi Marmara leaves Istanbul for Gaza May 22, 2010/Emrah Dalkaya

Turkey in turn released details of its own report that accused Israel of using excessive and disproportionate force against unarmed civilians.

Matters won’t be helped much by the release on Jan 28 of a new Turkish film, “Valley of the Wolves: Palestine.” The revenge fantasy is a spinoff of one of Turkey’s most popular television series and is about a Turkish commando team that goes to Israel to hunt down the commander responsible for the Mavi Marmara raid. For more on this, see my colleague Seda Sezer’s Turkish action film set to worsen ties with Israel.

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(Photo: Andreas Zografos at St Nicholas Church in Heybeliada island near Istanbul October 10, 2010/Osman Orsal)

Andreas Zografos left Turkey in 1974 amid economic and political turmoil to find work in Europe, but he always knew he would return home. “The ties of this land are strong. I was drawn back by the blue of the sea, the colour of the sky,” he says.

A Greek Orthodox Christian, Zografos, 63, and his wife today tend to the 19th-century St Nicholas Church, where his grandfather painted vibrant icons, on Heybeliada, or Halki in Greek, an island off the Istanbul coast.

Heybeliada was home to a few thousand ethnic Greeks when he left, Zografos says. About 25 remain, part of a dwindling community of 2,500 Greeks in Istanbul, capital of the Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empire until the Ottoman conquest of 1453.

Vast numbers of Christians have left their ancient homeland and now make up just 0.13 percent of Turkey’s population of 73 million people.

Read the full story here.

See also our factbox on Christians in the Middle East and analysis Vatican synod to mull Middle East Christian exodus.

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(Photo: Orthodox Christians at Sumela Monastery, 15 August 2010/Umit Bektas)

Europe Papadopolous’s grandparents were children when they fled their village in northeast Turkey and settled in Greece almost 90 years ago, yet she still felt she was in exile.

Papadopolous, 45, was one of thousands of Orthodox faithful who journeyed to Sumela Monastery, built into a sheer cliff above the Black Sea forest, on Sunday to attend the first mass here since ethnic Greeks were expelled in 1923.

(Photo: Sumela Monastery, 15 August 2010/Umit Bektas)

“Being apart from this place feels like Ulysses: always searching for your home,” Papadopolous said, tears streaming down her face and adding that even though her grandparents are dead, she was sure they could see her “homecoming.”

The historic service is part of a broader easing of religious restrictions in Muslim Turkey as Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan seeks to fulfill pledges to expand minority rights, which could also kickstart Turkey’s stalled European Union bid.

(Photo: Ecumenical Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew (centre) at Sumela Monastery, 15  August 2010/Umit Bektas)

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual leader of the world’s 250 million Orthodox Christians, celebrated the divine liturgy to mark the feast day of the Virgin Mary. The faithful believe Jesus’s mother Mary was taken up to heaven on Aug. 15 after her death, or dormition in Orthodox theology.

“This monastery is the bequest of a civilisation that had a culture of living together. Let’s ensure this bequest survives so the pain does not recur,” said Bartholomew.

(Photo: Orthodox worshippers light candles at Sumela Monastery, 15 August 2010/Umit Bektas)

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About 1,000 Greek Orthodox gathered in central Turkey this weekend for a pair of emotional liturgies led by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew as the Greek faithful seek to reclaim a cultural and religious link to their ancient homeland.

Elderly women wept as black-clad nuns and monks recited mournful chants on Sunday in the 19th-century St Theodore’s Church in Derinkuyu, a sleepy hamlet Greeks once called Malakopi in the popular tourist region of Cappadocia. Most of the worshippers were the descendants of Greeks who were expelled from Turkey almost 90 years ago with the collapse of the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire.

(Photo: Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew at St Theodore’s Church in Turkey, 27 June 2010/Simon Johns)

Bartholomew of Constantinople faced the altar flanked by three crowns: Patriarch Theodore of Alexandria, Archbishop Ieronymos of Greece and Archbishop Hilarion, the head of Russian Orthodox external relations. Hilarion has been a key player in a rapprochement between the Churches of Moscow and Istanbul. Bartholomew said Hilarion came on a pilgrimage to Cappadocia.

Hilarion urged worshippers to continue returning to the land of their forebears to maintain Orthodox holy sites. “Cappadocia is a much suffered land, as its churches, once magnificent and beautiful, have fallen in desolation,” he said. “We believe that the light of Christian faith will be rekindled in this holy land.”

Bartholomew began presiding over annual June services a decade ago in Cappadocia’s deconsecrated churches as Muslim Turkey, a European Union candidate, relaxed restrictions on Christian worship. In a sign of the growing tolerance, Bartholomew recently won permission to celebrate the Divine Liturgy this August at the more politically sensitive Sumela Monastery on the Black Sea for the first time since 1923. Last year, local authorities and residents tried to block Greek and Russian tourists from praying there.

St Theodore’s frescoes are almost completely gone and its Corinthian columns are etched with graffiti. The basilica, like most churches outside of Istanbul, is no longer a functioning house of worship but the property of the Tourism Ministry.

On Saturday, the liturgy was celebrated in the Church of Saints Constantine and Helen, built in 1729, at the other end of Cappadocia. The church in Mustafapasa, a pretty little town of stone houses formerly called Sinasos, was reportedly used as a stable for animals in the past; this year it bore a banner from the mayor that welcomed the town’s “friends from Greece.”

(Photo: Rock formations in Cappadocia, 12 December 2008/Tan Shung Sin)

The warmer reception has been a saving grace for the descendants of the Mikrasiates prosfyges, or Asia Minor refugees. An estimated 1.5 million ethnic Greeks departed Turkey, while 500,000 Muslims fled Greece in a population exchange after World War One. Today, 3,000 Greeks remain in Turkey, residing mainly in Istanbul, still home to the ecumenical patriarchate, spiritual centre of the world’s 250 million Orthodox.

The population transfers included tens of thousands of Christians from Cappadocia, famous for its fantastical landscape of so-called fairy chimneys: natural, free-standing columns of volcanic tuff. The earliest Christians carved thousands of homes, monasteries and churches into the rock.

“For more than 1,000 years, there were Greek Orthodox here, and then they were gone. Now we have this special day with the patriarch here again,” said Georgia Dimaki, who traveled from Thessaloniki in northern Greece for the services. She pointed to goose bumps on her arm. “It means so much. It’s fantastic, but it is still very sad to think about those who came before us.”

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