Last Patriarch End Game?

By James M. Kushiner

Mere Comments - January 25, 2008

Charlotte Allen has written an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about the precarious situation of the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate in "Istanbul." And the Patriarch's, Bartholomew I's, dealings with the EU and the Turkish government. There has been "talk" --rumblings, rumors, all that unsubstantiated sort of thing-- about up and moving the Patriarchate to someplace such as New York City, or Washington or Geneva, Switzerland.

I will mention, in passing, a book related to this part of her article:

Today, Bartholomew has only about 4,000 mostly elderly fellow believers (2,000 in Istanbul) left in Turkey's 71 million-plus population. The quasi-militaristic regime of Kemal Ataturk that supplanted the Ottoman Empire during the 1920s forcibly Westernized the country's institutions but also made Islam an essential component of the Turkish national identity that it relentlessly promoted.

"Kemalist ideology regarded Christianity as Greek and thus foreign," says Greek Orthodox writer Joshua Treviρo. The result was a series of official and unofficial ethnic cleansings, population transfers, massacres and pogroms in Turkey, such as the wholesale destruction of Orthodox churches in 1955.

The book is Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions That Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, which movingly tells the story of the population exhanges between Turkey and Greece in the 1920s. The author, Bruce Clark, an Orthodox Christians and an editor at the Economist (and friend) tracked down and interviewed survivors on both sides of that exchange of Christians in Turkey for Muslims in Greece, an exchange the sort of which undercuts any notions of pluralism, ethnic, religious, or otherwise. One nation, one language, one religion, one ethnicity. Or else.

Turkey has successfully rid itself, by various means, of just about all of its Orthodox Christians. When the British and the French had control of Constaninople after World War I, there were hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Christians there. And now, we may be looking at the Last Patriarch of Constantinople. Well, the city and kingdom that endures is the heavenly Jersualem.