A Statement by Archbishop Oshagan on the True Condition of Christian Churches in Turkey

       The recent statements made by Ambassador Francis Ricciardone, President Obama’s appointee as the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, about Christian churches in Turkey, is so blatantly false that it cannot remain unchallenged.

       The Ambassador recently stated that most of the more than 2,000 “Christian churches  functioning prior to 1915 are still operating as churches.” He went on to state that some operate “as museums. The remaining have fallen into disrepair or were converted to mosques for lack of use.”

      How pleased we would be if this were true. However, the facts of the fate of Christian churches in Turkey are quite different from that described by the Ambassador. As a representative of the United States of America, the champion of religious liberty and freedom, we expect better of Ambassador Ricciardone who has a duty to uphold the standards set by the United States.

      The facts are quite clear. From the massacres of Armenians in 1895-96 and the Armenian Genocide in 1915, to the decades following the establishment of the Turkish republic, Christian houses of worship were systematically destroyed or confiscated. My own church’s hierarchal see, the Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia, was a victim of this process, and today is exiled in Lebanon. The archives of the Catholicosate contain hundreds of original deeds and other documentation of churches and church owned property that were confiscated.

      The Ambassador may be looking to ingratiate himself in the eyes of the Turkish government, but he cannot create his own “facts” and try to pass them as the truth. The Ambassador need only to look in our own State Department’s archives to confirm the facts. Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Syriacs, and all our Christian brothers and sisters here in the United States who share roots in their biblical Anatolian homelands can attest to the truth of the wholesale destruction of our sacred houses of worship, first by the Ottoman Empire and later by the Republic of Turkey.

Archbishop Oshagan Choloyan
Prelate

August 15, 2011