Daybreak in Turkey / Second Edition

by James L. Barton

While this condition of affairs prevailed at the capital the mission was pushing its advanced posts into the interior of the country where considerable numbers were found eager to procure copies of the Bible. Ecclesiastical warnings sent from Constantinople to the Armenians remote from the capital were given little heed. Violence had so subsided at Constantinople that the evangelical movement again began to accumulate momentum and force. A boarding-school for boys was opened in November, 1840, at Bebek upon the Bosporus, some five miles above Constantinople. This was under the superintendence of Cyrus Hamlin, against whom and his school all the fury of the papists and the Greek patriarch was directed, the Armenian patriarch refusing to join them. The demand for books increased. By 1841 it was evident that a great reform movement was in progress which was destined to spread over the empire. Some of the leading persecutors were astute enough to see that an invisible but irresistible force was moving the Armenian nation. The spirit of reform swept over the country, awakening intellects, arousing consciences, and demanding intellectual freedom.

This continued for five or six years, during which time there was no separation of the “Evangelicals,” as they were called, from the old Church. The missionaries always urged them to remain, exerting their influence not against the Church but against its abuses and superstitions. For the most part they attended public services in the old Church, and were recognized as members in good standing. The missionaries had no thought of changing these conditions, had they imagined it was in their power to do so. Hitherto the movement had been one towards reform within the Armenian Church and largely led by Armenians who were themselves loyal members. In persecuting, the Church was doing violence to its own.

In the beginning of 1846 the patriarch, alarmed at the extent as well as the power of the reform movement, inaugurated more coercive measures. On Sunday morning, January 25, at the close of the regular service in the Patriarchal Church, darkening the house and drawing a great veil in front of the main altar, a bull of excision was read against Priest Vartanes, an evangelical, and all of the followers of the “modern sectaries.” Heaping every conceivable epithet of condemnation upon him he was expelled from the Church and forbidden as “a devil and the child of the devil to enter into the company of believers.” All the faithful were forbidden to admit him into their dwellings or to receive his salutation or to look upon his face.

A wild spirit of fanaticism reigned. This most thorough and fanatical persecution began to search out the evangelicals, who were ordered to repair to the patriarchate and recant, or be forever cast out from society, from every social privilege, and from the Church. On the following Sabbath, with passions still more inflamed, a second anathema was read in all the churches, accompanied by the most violent denunciations by the patriarch, the bishop and the vartabeds. All of the evangelicals were pronounced “accursed, and excommunicated, and anathematized by God, and by all his saints, and by Matteos Patriarch.” The patriarch not only cursed those who were readers of the Bible and believers in its teachings, but grave malediction was hurled against all who should harbor them or communicate with them. Printed copies of the last two anathemas were sent to every part of Turkey to be read in all the churches. Even to this point the evangelical Armenians had made no move to form a community separate from the old Church.

On the 21st of June, 1846, a day of solemn festival in the Church, the patriarch issued a new bull of excommunication and anathema against all who remained firm to their evangelical principles, decreeing that it should be publicly read at each annual return of this festival in all the Armenian churches throughout the Ottoman empire. By this act the Protestant or evangelical Armenians were completely cut off from any lot or part in the Gregorian Church. There was no hope of their being received back again except by their repudiating every principle of reform. This, of course, they could not do.

These excommunicated brethren immediately requested help from the missionaries. A meeting was held in Constantinople, made up of delegates from the different mission stations in Turkey, at which Dr. Pomeroy, later one of the secretaries of the American Board, was present. At that meeting, plans were drawn up for an organization among the evangelical Armenians of Constantinople. Consequently, on the first day of July, 1846, they came together and were organized into the First Evangelical Armenian Church. The church numbered forty members, of which thirty-seven were men. One week later an Armenian pastor, a former student in the school of Pashtimaljian, was ordained over the church. A pamphlet in Armenian was issued, containing their confession of faith and setting forth the reasons why, through the compulsory measures of the patriarch, they had been compelled to organize themselves into a separate body.

During the same summer, similar Armenian churches were formed in Nicomedia, Adabazar and Trebizond. The Mohammedans showed themselves sympathetic. A Moslem judge before whom some of the evangelicals had been hauled, said, “We cannot interfere to protect you from excommunication, but so long as you abide by the declaration you have made we will protect you civilly. Your goods shall be as our goods; your houses as our houses; and your persons as our persons. Go in peace.”

All subjects of the Turkish empire were registered as members of some recognized religious community. Each various Christian community like the Armenian, the Greek, and the Roman Catholic, had its recognized head at the Porte and through this head individual rights were protected. Every non-Moslem was compelled to claim his rights at the hand of his religious political head. If his claim were there denied, he had no redress. The Armenian patriarch was the recognized political superior of the Armenians. He had violently excluded all evangelicals from the Church and from all their inherited rights as Armenians. He no longer recognized such as members of his race, and not only refused to protect them and secure for them justice but he devised methods to direct a bitter persecution against them. These excommunicated “Protestants,” as they were sometimes called, were the legal possessors of no rights or privileges in the empire that any one was bound to respect.

Conditions became intolerable, when through the intervention of the British legation the grand vizier issued in November, 1847, a firman recognizing the separate Protestant community with all the rights and privileges belonging to others in the empire, and declaring that “no interference whatever shall be permitted in their temporal and spiritual concerns on the part of the patriarch, monks, or priests of other sects.” This firman protected the evangelical Greeks and Jews as well as the Armenians. As this charter was only ministerial in its scope and authority, in 1850 a new charter was granted the Protestants by Sultan Abdul Medjid, “completing and confirming their distinct organization as a civil community, etc.”

This phase of mission work in Turkey has been dwelt upon at length in order to correct the impression which prevails in many quarters that the missionaries in Turkey aimed to divide the old Churches there and to separate out therefrom a body of Protestants. History makes it clear that every effort was made to prevent separation, and only after this had taken place, by the repeated and official action of the highest ecclesiastical authority, were any steps taken to organize a separate community, and even then this was done primarily to secure protection for the excommunicated Christians.