Dormition in Turkey. Liturgy on the Black Mountain
The Monastery of Sumela
By:
Sandro Magister
13/8/2010
It is being celebrated by the patriarch of Constantinople, for the first time after many years, at an historic monastery that has fallen into ruin, with thousands of faithful including many from Greece and Russia. But Christians don’t trust the concessions of the Turkish government.
The news was released at the end of June by the agency “Fides” of the Vatican congregation for the evangelization. For August 15, which for the Orthodox is the feast of the Dormition of the Holy Mother of God, the Turkish government has authorized the celebration of a liturgy in a place that is a symbol of the Christian faith of the East, as much of its flourishing as of its violent uprooting: the monastery of Sumela or (its Greek name) of the Mother of God of the Black Mountain.
The concession was greeted with surprise by the Orthodox community, not only in Turkey, where the Greek-Byzantines of the patriarchate of Constantinople have been reduced to a few thousand, but also abroad, especially in Greece and Russia.
Nonetheless, it’s still a concession limited to a few hours. The liturgy will be allowed to be celebrated only once, outside of the monastery, in front of the ruins.
The monastery of Sumela, in fact, after withstanding the storms of history for fifteen centuries and staying alive even during Ottoman rule, was emptied and reduced to ruins in 1923, with the expulsion of the Greek Orthodox by the modern Turkish state.
Since then, it has been forbidden to celebrate the liturgy there. The monastery, a small portion of which has been restored, has become a destination for tourist excursions from nearby Trabzon, the city on the Black Sea where on February 5, 2006, a young Muslim killed the Catholic priest Andrea Santoro.
For August 19, the Turkish government has made a similar concession for the Armenians. It has authorized the celebration of a liturgy in the Church of the Holy Cross in Akhtamar, on an island of Lake Van.
This church, which had also fallen into ruin, was renovated in 2007. But it was set up as a museum, and until now the liturgy has not been permitted to be celebrated there.
When the Armenian patriarch asked for permission to place a cross on top of the renovated church, the Turkish authorities refused. The church had to remain without a cross, without bells, without sacred markings, without pastors, and without faithful. Instead, the ceremony for the conclusion of the renovations prominently featured images of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish state.
The liturgies at Sumela and Akhtamar on August 15 and 19 will be attended by a few thousand faithful, many of them from abroad: an unusual number for Turkey, a cradle of the early Christianity propagated by Paul and for centuries a land of flourishing Christianity, but where today the Churches – or the little of them that remains – don’t even have legal recognition.
Moreover, last August 5 two churches dating back to the fourth and sixth centuries in the village of Yemisli in the region of Mardin in southeastern Anatolia were reopened for worship. The buildings were renovated by seventy-two families of the Syriac Orthodox community, which numbers about five thousand faithful in Turkey.
The concessions made this August by the government of Ankara are being interpreted as a move on the chessboard of Turkey’s problematic entry into the European Union, which is impossible without minimal standards concerning religious freedom.
But these and other appearances of openness continue to be accompanied by massive and persistent constraint. One of the reasons why the Turkish authorities oppose religious freedom is the fear that an increase in places of worship would bring out into the open the many secret Christians, registered as Muslims, believed to be living in the country.
On the two imminent celebrations, and in particular on the history and symbolic significance of the monastery of Sumela, here is what was written for the August 1 issue of “L’Osservatore Romano” by a highly informed expert on the subject, Franciscan Fr. Egidio Picucci.
