www.byzcath.org Forums News & Events Church News Greek Bishop Brands Turks "Barbarians"

To this day the Turkish government denies the genocidal murders of 1.5 million Christian Armenians, along with the atrocities Turkish soldiers committed on the island of Cyprus in just the last 40 years (picture the Germans and Japanese taking a similar position) When you consider that this is Greece's next door neighbor to the East, the Bishop's comments don't sound that outrageous, at least not to me anyway.

Tim, No, of course the condemnation of an entire people can never be justified...but I just think that history certainly does shed a little light on his remarks and explain them somewhat...or at least you can sympathize a little with the Greek attitude toward things Turkish. It's very much like talking to an Irishman about the 'Black-n-Tans' don't you know? It will take centuries and centuries to undo some things...and even then, they may never ever be perfect. Fallen humanity gets over things VERY slowly...and ONLY Christ Jesus Our Blessed Lord can remove such deep wounds from the human mind and heart---and then only with much time and patience!

In His great love for ALL mankind,
+Father Archimandrite Gregory

It's not like talking to "an" Irishman.

You wouldn't call "an" Irishman "his beatitude."

History doesn't explain away a Christian prelate espousing hatred and racism.

--Tim Cuprisin

A. You WOULD call an Irishman His Beatitude IF he were the presiding archbishop of an Orthodox diocese (and we DO have several in Orthodoxy, (Bishop TIKHON (Fitzgerald) the bishop of San Francisco and Western America for example!)

B. I DID'NT say that it explained it away. I said, "...history certainly deos shed a little light on his remarks and explain them somewhat." That's quite a bit different.

C. The bee in your bonnet is probably dead by this time. You can relax...no one disagrees with you that it was probably NOT the most Christian statement. One does wonder though...if you were Orthodox, would you still be beating this horse???

May HE bless you always!

In His Holy Name,
+Father Archimandrite Gregory

Somehow, a frank and open discussion of a controversial statement by a religious leader suddenly yielded a comment on my religious affiliation.

I would say the same thing if it was Louis Farrakhan, or the Rev. Ian Paisley or the Ayatollah Khomeini or Pope John Paul II or the Greek Catholic bishop of Presov who had made these comments.

Hate is hate, whether it comes from one of ours or one of theirs. And to be honest, I have always thought of the Orthodox in terms of "us" rather than "them."

--Tim Cuprisin

Dear Tim,

NO ONE is disagreeing with you about the remark being politically incorrect, Christianly inappropriate, and insensitive. We are just trying to make you understand from where he is coming from.

What the Ottoman Turks did WAS Barbarian. What the Nazi Party did WAS Barbarian, etc. Certain things said about those who perpetrate ATROCITIES are true, and to deny evil is to allow it to flourish. Perhaps it would have been better if His Beatitude kept his honest feelings to himself or shared them with only a few close friends.

So you see Tim, I respect and agree with what you are saying, and so has the Archimandrite.

No offense, but you often seem a wee bit combative on this forum. We are your friends, not your enemies.

life is too short for anger; you are amongst Christian friends. Calm down!

May God bless you,
Alice

P.S. I think that the Archimandrite probably meant, 'if you were Greek Orthodox would you still feel this way'. This is more of an ethnic/religious thing than a blanket Orthodox 'thing'.

Dear Alice, Yes...thank you...I DID mean if he were GREEK ORTHODOX, perhaps he might overlook the comment a little more easily. And, yes, I did think he sounded a bit angry or frustrated or combative. Emphasis on SOUNDED, he may not have actually BEEN so.

In Him Who calls us,
+Father Archimandrite Gregory

Tim,

The brutality of the Ottoman Empire extended well in to the lands of Eastern Europe, including those of the Rus people. I'm not sure if they reached as far as Preshiv (Presov), but assumption would be yes. So perhaps this issue would interest you from a historical perspective.

For generations prior to the renaissance, the Turks would raid the villages, burning them, then take all the young women and men into slavery. The older adults were killed. The youngest children were taken and forced into the Sultan's 'military orphanages'. Once grown, it is these men who later repeated the evil. The people refused to submit to the Sultan, and never abandoned their Christian roots no matter how much evil they were exposed to.

Europe itself was almost overun by the Turks, and if it were not for the combined armies of many nations in Vienna in 1643 (?), perhaps the continent would be a lot more Islamic today. The Vatican Museum gives a place of great prominence to a painting of this famous battle which saved Christian Europe from an invading Islamic army.

There is some physical evidence of the this past even within today's church architecture. In the mother of all Slavic Christian churches, the St-Sophia in Kyiv (Ukraine), each of the floor tiles of the large church has an engraving of the crescent. The hope of the hierarchs was that the people would walk over the symbol of Islam to show that they have not submitted to the Sultan's Islamic religion. Also the crosses on the many domes of the church were placed over crescents (facing up). Again, this was to symbolize the defeat of the Sultan's Islamic Ottoman Empire by Christianity. The symbols remain today to remind the people of the suffering they witnessed for their faith. Perhaps the crescent tiles should be replaced with hammer and sickle tiles !

I believe that the Greek Orthodox Patriarch was speaking for much of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe (Armenians also) when he said the Turks WERE barbaric. It is to late for a "Nuremburg Trial" but perhaps as a first step, the Turks should return the Hagia Sophia to the Greek Orthodox Patriarch as a symbol of a break with the barbaric past of the Ottoman Empire.

Don't read too much into how the Greek Orthodox cleric expressed himself. I believe that this was an attempt to get the Turks to clean up their act (in respect to the treatment of the GOC) as part of any conditions for entering the European Economic Union. All members must make peace with their religious minorities prior to entering.

Just becuase Tim is upset that the Archbishop called the Turks barbarians--which is pretty much true to this day, despite a small minority of decent Turks (I know some personally)--does not mean we should distance ourselves from the Archbishop's remarks.

I would *dis*agree with His Beatitude that Turks and Greeks can't live together--I think having the Turks in the EU would keep them in line, actually--for certainly, if say for instance the nation of Turkey were opened up, we would have to bring the gospel to the Turks. And the Gospel calls us to love them and evangelize them.

That still doesn't lessen the fact that the country of Turkey is a barbarian nation. Plain and simple. The Archbishop was right on that mark, and no one should feel ashamed to speak the truth. It's not hate, it's not bigotry. It's just realism. If the Turks had the chance, they would try to take back more land from the Greeks, and any Greeks living in the path of destruction would be killed off or exiled. Just look at what has been happening even in the 1990's in Turkish Occupied Cyprus, and you will plainly see that nothing has happend with the Turks.

In case anyone think that I am some "anti-Muslim bigot" it really has nothing to do with Islam, as I love Arabic culture and Indian culture and I was engaged for a time to a Muslim girl. Indian Muslims are among the friendliest people I know. But I dislike the "nation" of Turkey becuase of its savagery and its ethnocentrist racism. I don't hate Turkish people, but I don't believe the "nation" of Turkey deserves the position it has. It even mistreated the Arab muslims living in its borders, and mistreats its Kurdish muslim brothers!!

anastasios

Dear Hritzko,

Thanks for the informative historical post about the Ottoman Empire.

Dear Friends,

If any of you are students or lovers of Art History, I recommend you try to see 'The Massacre of Chios' by Delacroix. (A true, horrific historical event). That was my grandmother's island. Almost every monastery and Church there has a story of sheer Ottoman 'barbarism'.

Your friend in Christ,
Alice

In two reporting expeditions to the former Yugoslavia in 1994 and 1995 for the Milwaukee Journal, I saw first hand what verbal expressions of ethnic and religious hatred can lead to in this region, a historical fault line between both Islam and Christianity, as well as between eastern and western versions of Christianity itself.

Orthodox Serbs in Belgrade and Catholic Croats in Medjugorje railed endlessly about "The Turks," and what Turkish rule had cost them. At the same time, they spoke of the "The Turks," when they talked about fellow Slavs, Bosnian Muslims.

During a few days in besieged Sarajevo in '94, I went to the soccer stadium, which had been converted to a graveyard for countless "Turks." Of course, the dead were mostly Slavs, with plenty of Orthodox, Catholic and atheist Sarajevans lying among the Muslims.

In an essay from the mid-1970s titled "Repentance and Self-Limitation," Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn goes into great detail on what the Poles did to Orthodox Slavs, and then what the Russians turned around and did to the Poles conquered by the tsar's forces. But he ties up his recitation of history with a forceful conclusion.

"Who has no guilt?" writes Solzhenitsyn. "We are all guilty. But at some point the endless account must be closed, we must stop discussing whose crimes are more recent, more serious and affect most victims. It is useless for even the closest neighbors to compare the duration and gravity of their grievances against each other."

These are the words I expect from a Christian.

--Tim Cuprisin

Actually to correct a point made by Hriztco, St Sophia's in Ukraine is not the Mother of All Slavic Churches. If any can lay claim to that, it can be either the Moravians or the Bulgarians. It may be the mother church of the eastern slavs but not on the southern ones. Just a correction.

Anton I

I had read this in the paper recently and I was saddened by it. Most of us have "barbarians" in our past - or perhaps behaved like "barbarians" ourselves; some of us may even have - or perhaps even are - "barbarians" in our present. Fighting our own barbarism is part of being human. Remember that saint - Alipius, I think? - who had to cure himself of his obsession w/ watching gladiators kill each other? Even good people struggle with some level of "barbarism" on an individual level.

I have had the pleasure of having a few Turkish friends over the years. They were good, kind, charitable and peaceful people. I don't like the idea of painting a people with a broad brush. I'm a little saddened to hear that coming from a man of God. He could have made his point more gently. One should work to bring people together, not push them apart. And as they used to tell us when we were kids: words can hurt.

From the news.....
Watering down his controversial contention that Turks are “barbarians” who should not be allowed into the European Union, the head of the Church of Greece on Saturday voiced “respect for the Turkish people.”

Archbishop Christodoulos told an Athens congregation that Orthodox Christians respect all the peoples of the world, including the Turks. Christodoulos, who has frequently railed against the perils posed to Greece's national identity by globalization and the European Union, also expressed a desire to see a “more European” Turkey.

“We want to see Turkey adopt democratic sensibilities and European manners,” he said. On Thursday, Christodoulos described the Turks as barbarians with no place in the EU, which he called “the family of Christians.” In an apparent dig at Christodoulos on Saturday, Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarch Vartholomaios, who is engaged in a bitter turf war with the archbishop, said Turkey's EU prospects would help Greeks and Turks “live in peace, far from myopic approaches.”

In the end, it would seem that perhaps we should always give EVERYONE the benefit of the doubt and try to NOT judge them by their WORDS...but place more stock in their actions? We can ALL be so easily misinterpreted...we can ALL speak so quicky and without sufficient prayer and thought...we are ALL so subject to 'moods' and anger---that probably it would be better to be lenient in most things???

Just a thought from an aging monk.

In Christ Who calls us,
+Father Archimandrite Gregory