11 July 2024

According to statistics in the public domain, Turkey hosts more than four million refugees. Most of them are Syrian but a large minority also come from Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. Shockingly, the largest group of refugees in Turkey are the 400,000 Syrian children aged between  5 and 9 years old!

There is so much negativity surrounding refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. When Constantinople, the ancient capital of the Byzantine Empire, fell to the Sultan Mehmed II on 29 May 1453, it had been besieged for fifty-five days. The Empire had shrunk enormously. After a thousand years, the Roman Empire was finally over!

The night before the city was sacked, there was a final service in the magnificent and most beautiful Hagia Sophia. Interestingly, despite the fractured state of the Church between East and West, this was an ecumenical act of worship with representatives of both the Greek and the Latin churches.

The next day, the Sultan succeeded in sacking the city. His army was given free reign to loot, rape, destroy. The Sultan, for his part, entered the Hagia Sophia and immediately turned it into a mosque. It is still a mosque to this day although for a period of time it was a museum.

Those who fled the city included several scholars. They took with them their Greek language and texts. Some fled to Italy and taught Greek in the universities and opened the ancient histories, books of philosophy and theological writings of the Greek Fathers. They had a profound impact on the Renaissance.

One of the consequences was a renewed interest in the Greek text of the Bible. This new learning had a powerful effect on the Reformation and the desire to translate the text from original sources into the vernacular. A tragedy of enormous proportions bore fruit in a cultural and theological revolution stimulated by  refugees from Turkey!

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