Jerusalem Pilgrimage 2008

At last, the annual holy pilgrimage of the Friends of Orthodoxy on Iona has come about. This time, we have journeyed to the Holy Land. We begun our pilgrimage with the blessing of His Beatitude, THEOPHILUS, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem.

For our pilgrimage group blog, go here:

Also, see the Friends of Orthodoxy on Iona homepage.

Turkey is still repressing its Greek Orthodox Christians

Orthodox Christianity under threat
By Nicholas Gage
Published: September 8, 2008

When Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and his Islamic-rooted party came under fierce fire this summer from secularists, who came close to persuading the country's supreme court to bar both from politics, he called the campaign an attack against religious freedom and a threat to Turkey's efforts to join the European Union.

Yet in nearly six years in power, Erdogan has shown no inclination to extend even a modicum of religious freedom to the most revered Christian institution in Turkey - the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the spiritual center of 300 million Orthodox Christians throughout the world. As a result, Turkey's persecution of the Patriarchate looms as a major obstacle to its European aspirations, and rightly so.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate, which was established in the fourth century and once possessed holdings as vast as those of the Vatican, has been reduced to a small, besieged enclave in a decaying corner of Istanbul called the Phanar, or Lighthouse. Almost all of its property has been seized by successive Turkish governments, its schools have been closed and its prelates are taunted by extremists who demonstrate almost daily outside the Patriarchate, calling for its ouster from Turkey.

The ecumenical patriarch, Bartholomew I, is often jeered and threatened when he ventures outside his walled enclave. He is periodically burned in effigy by Turkish chauvinists and Muslim fanatics. Government bureaucrats take pleasure in harassing him, summoning him to their offices to question and berate him about irrelevant issues, blocking his efforts to make repairs in the few buildings still under his control, and issuing veiled threats about what he says and does when he travels abroad.

Read the rest HERE.

The Forty Languages of the Caucuses

The dozens of languages of the Caucasus say much about the Georgia conflict.
By Ellen Barry
Published: August 24, 2008

Two weeks ago, when Georgian troops began shelling Tskhinvali, Eduard Kabulov could not stop thinking about the trouble he had taken to learn Georgian: its base-20 counting system; its ridiculous consonant clusters ("gvprtskvni"); its diabolical irregular verbs.

Kabulov, who is 22, had grown up in a valley where South Ossetians have coexisted with Georgians for many centuries, but that did not make it any easier. Ossetians speak a language related to Farsi; Georgians speak a language whose closest relative, some linguists say, is Basque. Kabulov's friends were so hostile to the Georgians and their language that he kept his studies secret. He sounded bitter talking about it. He hasn't opened a textbook since Aug. 8.

The languages of the Caucasus explain much about the current conflict.

About 40 indigenous tongues are spoken in the region - more than any other area in the world aside from Papua New Guinea and parts of the Amazon, where the jungles are so thick that small tribes rarely encounter one another. In the Caucasus, mountains serve the same purpose, offering small ethnicities a natural refuge against more powerful or aggressive ones.

Read the rest HERE.

International Orthodox Christian Charities Joins with Antiochian Patriarchate for Ministry In Syria

At the invitation of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East, IOCC began working in Syria in 2002 on small projects to rehabilitate schools, hospitals and orphanages.

In 2007, IOCC was awarded two grants totaling $1.98 million from the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (BPRM) to provide schooling, school supplies and other humanitarian items to Iraqi refugee children, families and disadvantaged Syrian youth.

Read more HERE.

Also, read more about their expanded programmes to Iraqi refugees HERE.

Turkish President in Ani, Ancient Armenian Capital

Turkish president to visit Armenia
Reuters, The Associated Press
Published: September 3, 2008

ANKARA: In a major diplomatic step, President Abdullah Gul of Turkey will visit Armenia this weekend for a soccer match, his office said Wednesday. The countries have no diplomatic relations and their border has been closed for years.

Hostility between the nations stems from Turkey's opposition to Armenian forces' occupation of the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan and from Armenia's insistence that the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million ethnic Armenians under Ottoman rule be recognized as genocide. Turkey strongly denies the accusation of genocide during World War I and says that both Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks died in the fighting.

The national teams of Armenia and Turkey will play in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, on Saturday in a qualifying match for the 2010 World Cup.

"We believe that this match will be instrumental in removing the barriers blocking the rapprochement between the two peoples with common history and prepare a new ground," a statement on the president's official Web site said.

"We hope that this will be an opportunity for the two peoples to understand each other better," it added.

The Armenian president, Serzh Sarksyan, invited Gul to watch the match and called for closer ties with Turkey. Armenia is sandwiched between Turkey and Azerbaijan.