Protests rise as Turkish renovation work turns church into mosque

Istanbul - Restoration work that would result in an historic Greek Orthodox church being recognized as a mosque has caused uproar in Turkey, reported the daily Milliyet newspaper on Tuesday.

At issue is the 178-year-old St Dimitrios church in the northern Turkish village of Silivri.

The village was once a Greek settlement but, after the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, ethnic Greek residents had to leave in a forced resettlement that swapped 1.5 million ethnic Greeks from Turkey for 600,000 ethnic Turks living in northern Greece. After the resettlement, the church was briefly used for prayers while work was underway to build a mosque for the new Muslim residents. A minaret was attached to the building, but its cross was never removed.

Later, the church was used for storage and as a stall. However, current work on the church is being billed as 'restoration of the Ortakoy Mosque,' causing an uproar.

'There is no doubt that this structure is a church. It's a church even if it was briefly used as a mosque,' said Turkish architect and college instructor Oktay Ekinci.

Adding to the grievances is the fact that the renovation work was approved by local leaders of the AKP Justice and Development Party, which runs the government at the national level. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said in the past that protecting minority rights is a priority in Turkey.

Israeli Navy to partake in Turkish exercise

In a sign that tension between Jerusalem and Ankara has cooled down, two Israeli Navy missile ships will sail to Turkey next week to participate in the annual Reliant Mermaid search-and-rescue naval exercise.

The maneuvers will be held in the Mediterranean Sea together with the Turkish and American forces. The exercise, the first joint one with Turkish forces since relations with Ankara grew tense during Operation Cast Lead, will begin on August 17.

Several months after the January war, OC Ground Forces Command Maj.-Gen. Avi Mizrachi said in a lecture that Prime Minister Recep Erdogan needed to "look in a mirror" - and see the Armenian genocide and Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus - before criticizing Israel.

Mizrachi's comments were negatively received in Ankara, particularly by the Turkish military, which is a strategic partner to the IDF. Since Operation Cast Lead, the IAF - which regularly flew over Turkey for training - has yet to deploy there and even sat out of a large-scale aerial exercise called Anatalian Eagle, which was held in June, and which it had attended in previous years.

The Reliant Mermaid exercise is aimed at improving coordination between the Israeli, US and Turkish navies. Part of the challenge is for all three navies to communicate in joint search-and-rescue operations that could arise in the future.

A Close Look at Turkish Ceramics

Lovers of colorful ceramics will be captivated by “Dance of Fire,” an exhibit of the famed İznik pottery, tiles and other objects dating from the 15th to 17th centuries.

But the show, at the cozy Sadberk Hanim Museum in Sariyer, a sector of Istanbul on the European shore of the Bosporus, is more than a look back at a colorful art form, it’s a lesson in economics that resonates even today.

İznik, formerly known as Nicea, site of the ancient Greeks’ Council of Nicea, has historically been an important center for ceramics production. Some of its workshops’ best work can still be seen on the walls of Topkapi Palace in the Sultanahmet neighborhood, or inside the challenging-to-locate Rustem Pasha mosque in Eminonu.

But Sadberk Hanim is the place to go for an intriguing overview of the rise and fall of İznik tile empire, a lesson in supply and demand gone awry.

More than 300 pieces of the highly collectible tiles have been assembled and put on display together for the first time in this jewel of a museum, housed in several rooms of a restored Ottoman-era yali, or river house, that was later used as the summer home of the prominent Koc family.

Visitors learn from the well-written explanations in English and Turkish all about the early, traditional designs (carnations, tulips) and color palates (mainly blues and white) of İznik ware. (Potters, for example, didn’t include turquoise until around 1520, and it took another hundred or so years for them to expand into purples, olives and black.)

The quality of tile production peaked during the second half of the 16th century under the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent when large orders were placed by royal edict.

As production expanded, so did artistry. Designs grew more stylized and the types of objects produced expanded beyond plates and tiles to lidded bowls, water flasks and more.

But at the start of the 17th century, an economic crisis struck. Low-cost porcelain imports from China led Ottoman producers to try to compete and the quality was sacrificed to try to regain market share.

Classic Iznik production essentially ended in 1719, the exhibit says, when one of the last workshops was moved to Istanbul but did not survive for long.