The never ending story of Halki Theological Seminary reopening

Gül Demir and Niki Gamm report for Hurriyet :

ISTANBUL - Since 1971 there have been attempts to reopen the Halki Theological Seminary on Istanbul's Heybeliada and while the appeals have not fallen on deaf ears, various reasons have been put forward as to why it should not be reopened. Successive Turkish governments have argued that reopening Halki would lead the way to applications for Muslim universities, even though Muslim seminaries were never opened before. However, the current education minister has said he can see no reason why it cannot be reopened

The never ending story of Halki Theological Seminary reopening Ever since 1971, the Halki Theological School that belonged to the Orthodox Church on Heybeli Island near Istanbul has been closed on the grounds that all private schools of higher education be shut down.

This occurred following a period of increasing period of internal strife and near chaos that led to an intervention but not an outright coup by the Turkish military establishment. The closure of the schools of higher education was an attempt to quell some of the chaos that in part was being perpetrated by university students. It was not directly aimed at the Halki Theological School; however, this closure was carried out by the National Education Directorate, not the ministry and not the military.

In 2004 on the occasion for year-long celebrations for the 550th anniversary of the Greek School in Fener, Turkey's Education Minister Hüseyin Çelik attended ceremonies with the Greek Education Minister at the time Petros Efthimiou. Çelik pointed out that he didn't see any reason why it couldn't be opened, a claim that he repeated in a Sabah newspaper interview in August 2004. At that time he pointed out that if an Islamic religious faculty with a Turkish Muslim in charge of it could be built in the center of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, why couldn't the school be reopened. In 2005, the new Greek Minister of Education Marietta Yannakou came and Çelik was present at this occasion as well.

Since 1971 there have been attempts to reopen the Halki School and while the appeals have not fallen on deaf ears, various reasons have been put forward as to why it should not be reopened. These have mainly been put forward by groups that could be considered ultra-nationalists who believe their concerns are valid. They see the very existence of the Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul as a nest of spies working to undermine the Turkish Republic and they don't hesitate to express their antipathy by staging protest meetings at the gates of the Patriarchate in Fener. Along with this they believe that the opening of the school would lead to the education of additional Turkish enemies who would act as agents for the Greek government as if Greece were the same country that it was many decades ago. In the meantime all this was played out against a backdrop of Turkish and Greek Cypriot troubles with each side seemingly each other's bargain chips to gain the upper hand or at least that held each other's populations "hostage."

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