TURKEY: World’s oldest Syriac Orthodox monastery fights back after illegal government land grab

LANDS belonging to the oldest surviving Syriac Orthodox monastery in the world have been returned after a six-year land dispute with the Turkish government.

Mor (meaning Saint) Gabriel Monastery, located in southeastern Turkey, received the title deeds to forty per cent of the contested land on the 25 February, and is continuing its legal process to regain the remaining land still under dispute.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised on 30 September to return all the land, and the President of the Mor Gabriel foundation, Kuryakos Ergün, is hopeful for the remaining 320,000 square meters.

‘We are happy to receive back the deed of the land without coming to the European Court of Human Rights phase,’ he said.

Turkey's Ministry of EU Affairs has welcomed the news, calling it an ‘important achievement towards strengthening the fabric of fraternity and realizing the goal of advanced democracy in our country’.

The dispute began in 2008 when the Forestry Minister, the Land Registry Cadaster Office and the villages of Yayvantepe, Çandarlı and Eğlence sued the monastery for allegedly ‘occupying’ their fields.

Five separate lawsuits were brought which contested the monastery’s right to retain land that church leaders said they had owned for centuries but were unable to register due to bureaucratic stonewalling.

One lawsuit even claimed that the sanctuary was built over the ruins of a mosque, forgetting that Mohammed was born 170 years after its foundation.

The government’s charges rested partly on a law that farmland which lies fallow for more than twenty years can be reclaimed by the state as ‘forest’.

The 1,700-year-old monastery is located in the southeastern province of Mardin’s Midyat district.

Founded in 397 by the monks Samuel and Simon, Mor Gabriel has been the heart of the worldwide Syriac Orthodox community for centuries, and welcomes around 20,000 pilgrims every year.