This project aims to determine the current legal position and status of the Latin Catholic Church in Turkey while contextualising it through an historical lens in which Church–state relations from the post-Tanẓimāt period (post-1876) into the Turkish Republican era are explored through case studies of church confiscation and conversion.
Since the Ottoman conquests, Latin Catholic ecclesiastical properties have been vulnerable to expropriation and conversion into Islamic places of worship and religious spaces. These policies took place within the framework of Ottoman law (ḳānūn and şeriʿat) and were influenced by other variables which were not mutually exclusive, including diplomatic tensions in European-Ottoman relations and internal socioreligious tendencies. The expropriation and conversion of Latin Catholic church properties continued into the period of the Turkish Republic and will be examined through case studies of two churches constructed shortly before the foundation of the Republic in 1923 and transformed into mosques during subsequent decades.
The topic of the expropriation of churches for their conversion into mosques and secular spaces is a significant one insofar as it sheds light on issues relating to the status of ecclesiastical properties, the preservation and continuation of religious missions, as well as to the political and social dynamics of the post-Tanẓīmāt and Republican eras. The recent reconversion of Istanbul’s magnificent Byzantine monument, Hagia Sophia, from a secular space into a place of worship has brought such debates on relations between the Turkish state and religious minorities into the foreground.
Vanessa R. de Obaldía is an Ottomanist for the ERC Starting Grant MAMEMS project at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. She holds a BA in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from the University of Cambridge, an MA in Islamic Law from Marmara University, and a Graduate Diploma in Law from BPP University. She was awarded a PhD in History by Aix-Marseille University in December 2018 for her thesis titled “A Legal and Historical Study of Latin Catholic Church Properties in Istanbul from the Ottoman Conquest of 1453 until 1740.” Her areas of research include doctrine and practice in Islamic law, historical and contemporary charitable endowments, Muslim-Christian relations, and religious minorities and missionaries in the Ottoman Empire with a particular focus on the Latin Catholic Church.
