In today’s predominantly Muslim and Sunni Türkiye, tracing traces of Christianity takes you as an adventurer into ancient times. Christian sources in Türkiye are well known and forgotten after centuries under the Ottoman hammer. What we call it in the West … Fall of Constantinople (1453), understood by the Turks as the conquest of Istanbul (The Fall of Constantinople by Stephen Runciman should be mandatory reading). Much earlier, in 1204, Eastern Christianity had suffered its greatest insult with the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade and a brief period of the Latin Empire. When a pope from Rome visits Turkey (Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis), Catholicism must also remember its great disgrace.
Turkey is like a return to the springs of Christ, who is also a prophet of Islam. Saint Paul carried the preaching of Jesus Christ throughout the regions of Anatolia. In Antioch – here the earth trembles from earthquake to earthquake – the first Christians took their name as Christians. Near Ephesus, in Mirian Anna, is the house where the Virgin Mary is believed to have spent her last days in the company of Saint John the Evangelist, who would also die here, in Ephesus. Christians often forget that Muslims also venerate the Virgin Mary, whom they call “the daughter of Imran,” and that the Qur’an mentions her name up to 70 times (far more than in the Gospels).
Leo’s papal journey The Council of Nicaea (325) was held in present-day Iznik (Nicea in Turkish). When Pope Assad heard the usual crow sounds around Sultanahmet in the background outside and the usual Istanbul cats crept under the enormous muzzle. Details are not simple in the vast city where the noise is unbearable and the traffic is terrible.
The Christian presence in Istanbul (almost all Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Catholic) is today a testimony that goes beyond visible heritage. In Death in Istanbul, within the epic of Commissioner Garitos by Petros Markaris, we follow the trail of the vulnerable Greek community through different neighborhoods (Kortoluş, Tarlabaşı, Kumkapi) according to the bodies found after being poisoned with empanadas filled with pesticides. Markaris itself is an example of the great melting pot that occurs next to the Bosphorus. He was born in Istanbul, in the neighborhood of Tatavla (today’s Kurtuluş), to an Armenian father and a Greek mother (a horror for the nationalist Turks). The 1923 population exchange between Turkey and Greece (following the catastrophic year of 1922 for the Greeks in Asia Minor) and the 1955 pogrom caused the exodus of Orthodox Greeks in waves and the extinguishing of the Kirilison River from the Black Sea to Marmara. That the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople remains at the foot of the Fener district is a fascinating anomaly in time. Between the priests, the religious rituals and the ancient and beautiful ceremonies even in the time of TikTok, Leo XIV showed his respect to the long-lived Bartholomew I.
The Pope also visited the Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Spirit. It is almost hidden on Cumhuriyet Street, between the large Taksim Square and Nisantasi district, where Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk usually draws his novels like symbols on street maps. A medallion with the face of Pope John XXIII (the so-called “Friend of the Turks” when he was Apostolic Delegate of the Vatican in Turkey), overlooks the entrance to the temple (there is another statue of him in the Catholic Church, with the Venetian imprint, of St. Anthony of Padua, located on Istiklal Street, Old De Pera Street). Also at the entrance to the Cathedral of the Spirit is a statue of Benedict XV, the pope who in 1915 pleaded for mercy, alone and without being heard, for Christians killed in the controversial Armenian Genocide.
As I write these lines, Pope Leo A huge white cross, perhaps more suitable for preachers from a distance, presided over the liturgical ceremony in the Volkswagen Arena’s multi-purpose pavilion, in Maslak (not far from the ziggurats and skyscrapers of Levent’s financial district). What is strange is that Turkish President Erdogan, who treated Leo, referred in his opinion to the Roman circus in which Christians were torn apart by wild beasts.