Turkey: First church to be built in 85 years

Mayor Kerimoglu with Bishop Cetin

Source: Fides

Construction work on the first church to be built in Turkey since 1923, will begin next February. The news was announced on Tuesday, 8 January, by Bulent Kerimoglu, mayor of Bakirkoy, the district of Istanbul where the new church will be built.

The news was reported to journalists after a meeting between the mayor and Syro-Orthodox Bishop Yusuf Cetin. The construction works should last for a maximum of two years. The church will be built in an area not far from the Ataturk International Airport, and will accommodate more than 700 faithful.

The construction of the new church was first announced in 2015 by the then Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu during a meeting with representatives of Turkish non-Muslim religious minorities. At that time, the Syro Orthodox Christian community present in Turkey had seen a noticeable increase in the number of its faithful, with the arrival of refugees from war-torn Syria.

In the early years of the Syrian conflict, the Turkish authorities set up a refugee camp for Christians in Syria capable of hosting 4,000 refugees.

Currently, there are about 25,000 Syriac Christians living in Turkey, mostly concentrated in the suburbs of Istanbul. Many of them live in the areas near the place where the new church will rise.