Constantinople's Last Stand · Constantinople’sLastStand ByWhitneyMason ISTANBUL-Theseconddayof theschoolyearinIstanbulwas agoodonetobeinside.Theair wascool withoutbeing fresh...

Constantinople’s Last StandBy Whitney Mason

ISTANBUL-The second day ofthe school year in Istanbul wasa good one to be inside. The airwas cool without being freshand the leaden skies threatenedrain. And surely no school, Ithought, could look more im-pressive than the one where Ihad an appointment with theheadmaster that morning. TheSpecial "Rum" (the Turkish.word for a Greek of Turkishcitizenship, literally meaning"Roman") High School was apalatial edifice of red brickdrawn up steeply against thehills of Istanbul’s Fener districtoverlooking the Golden Horn.The front gatewas painted fireengine red. Inside, the pastelson the molded ceiling and pil-lars looked as fresh as thecheeks of a turn-of-the-centuryLevantine bride. The foyer had The Special Rum High School, just up the hillfromthe proportions of a fancy ho- the Ecumenical Patriarchate, rises grandly above the

tel lobby. In an office big and concrete blocks oflstanbul’s Fener district, which hasbecome a slum inhabited exclusively by poor Muslimelegant enough for a govern-

ment minister, the bright-eyed immigrantsfrom the countryside.

headmaster looked smart in a.sport coat and tie as he chatted with equally bright-eyed teachers. At around 11 I heard a little commotion and poked my head intothe main hall. A half-dozen boys and girls in uniforms were talking quietly. Therewas no sound of excited young voices, no tardy boys tearing around corners. Allthe students were at their appointed places all 62 of them.

The Great School, of which the current state-governed institution is a directcontinuation, was probably founded in the mid-16th Century some say even asearly as 1456. For centuries it was the training ground for the sons of the wealthyand powerful Phanariot Greeks. Originally merchants and ship owners, these fami-lies dominated the international trade that made Istanbul one of the most cosmo-politan cities in the world until the First World War. The Phanariots also suppliedthe princes of Moldavia and Wallachia, senior officials at the Ottoman court andthe Ecumenical Patriarch, who was entrusted with both the spiritual and worldlyguidance of the Ottoman Empire’s Orthodox Christian subjects. Even amid theslow collapse of the empire from economic torpor and secessionist violence in theBalkans, the Phanariots were still wealthy enough to fund construction of the cur-rent building in 1881. In the 1930s some 400 Greek boys still studied there.

In 1987 the boys’ school merged with its equally diminished sister school. The

and students paid tuition, it used to be thebest in the city, but that under state controlit’s become mediocre. Yet for unknown rea-sons it has what surely mustbe one of the bestteacher-student ratios in the world, with 15teachers for its 62 pupils. Many of the teach-ers are former graduates. A young teacher ofGreek literature who showed me around hadgraduated in the mid-’80s. The current head-master had been his biology teacher. Yet as ifto kill the school with kindness, the state man-dates that students recognize all Turkish holi-days and all Greek ones. In one semester thisadds up to over 30 days off.

Immaculately maintained by the Patriarchate, since 1971 theschool has been shut by order of the Turkish government.

current institution, where children rattle around this relicof a disappeared world, is a sad monument to the prideand stubbornness ofboth the Greeks and the Turks. SomeGreeks have told me that when the school was private

Today the school looks like a citadelwhose outer perimeter has already been over-run by the enemy while the defenders haveretreated to the innermost keep. The magnifi-cent foyer on the ground floor is dominatedby a shrine to Kemal Ataturk, with pictures,quotations and a table covered in books byand about the manwho drove the Greeks intothe sea and modeled the Turkish Republic onthe ethnically homogenous nation states ofwestern Europe. Against another wall is a col-lection of creations from the school’s home-economics class, including a plate paintedwith a child’s vision of a city in paradiselabeled "Athens" in Greek. Upstairs, devoidof students, the floor is covered with a mo-saic of two Greek words meaning "Knowyourself." On the top floor is an auditoriumwhose ceiling is graced by darkened oil paint-ings of saints of the Orthodox Church. Justoutside the window, a small cross faces a for-est of mosques and minarets bristling like

spears. And rising above the top floor is a tower with atelescope and a window in the rounded ceiling throughwhich young Greeks could gaze toward the heavens,where, their leaders told them, lay their reward for pre-

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could be an invaluable ally in the battle againstreligious nationalism of the sort that has rav-aged the Balkans for the past ten years and asa bridge to Greece and the wider world of Or-thodox Christianity. And so at this point thescenario that looks far more likely is that inthe next few years, after well over two millen-nia of unbroken residence along the shores ofthe Bosphorous, the Greeks will finally disap-pear from the city they made great. The Turk-ish nationalists will then have realized theirdream of turning this storied conurbation,where for centuries travelers marveled at thekaleidoscope of costumes and languages, intoa docile and drab monoculture even as theold nation states of western Europe cultivateand celebrate their own cultural diversity.

Inside the entrance of the Patriarch’s House,. a mural depicts Mehmetthe Conqueror installing Gennadios as Patriarch and giving him

authority over all the empire’s Christian subjects.

serving the True Faith amid the indignities of the Turk-ish Yoke.

Today, the two-to-three thousand Greeks of Istanbul,most of them in their dotage, are headed quickly towardone of two almost equally hard to imagine futures. Onepossibility is that somehow, despite its terminal appear-ance, the community will perdure If there is any chanceof this happening, it will require the Turkish governmentto relax its death grip on the heart and head of the Greekcommunity in Istanbul and the senior prelate in theOrthodox world- the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

But perhaps because for centuries now Turks havefelt themselves under siege by hostile foreign powers,Ankara doesn’t seem to recognize that the Patriarchate

The march toward this bleak end beganwith the Ottoman conquest of the city onMay29, 1453, but it has been far from slow andsteady. Though the streets in those first daysran with blood and the conquering Turks de-filed Greek daughters and sons alike, SultanMehmet II soon restored the office of Patri-arch and gave to its new occupant- a priestnamed Gennadius who had led oppositionagainst compromise with the Vatican au-

thority over all his Orthodox subjects. Underthe Ottomans, the Greeks of Istanbul not onlysurvived but prospered. Their destruction, thedestruction of the human legacy of the east-ern Roman Empire and of Istanbul as a havenfor people of diverse creeds and tongues, be-longs almost entirely to the bloody twentiethcentury.

Three watershed events drove huge num-bers of Greeks to abandon their beloved city.The first of these began in 1919 when Turkey

lay prostrate following defeat in the First World War, andGreece, with the encouragement of the Hellenophile Brit-ish Prime Minister Lloyd George, invaded Anatolia. In1922 Turkish armies under the command of MustafaKemal Ataturk routed the Greeks, an event known to theGreeks simply as the "Katastroph."1 The triumphantTurks burned much of the largely Greek city of Smyrna,now renamed Izmir, and unumbered Greeks died tryingto escape the Turks’ wrath.

The Treaty of Lausanne, negotiated following thisTurkish victory included an unprecedented, epoch-mark-ing provision: an exchange between Greece and Turkeyof all Muslim and Orthodox nationalsexcept the Greeksof Istanbul and Muslims of eastern Thrace. About onemillion Greeks were expelled from Anatolia and 400,000

Greek lamentation over this devastating defeat seldom acknowledges that it never would have happened if the Greeksthemselves hadn’t attempted to conquer the Turks. Or, as a U.S. Marine Corps gunnery sergeant rather bluntly wrote in thevisitors’ book at the peace memorial in Hiroshima: "Don’t start a war if you can’t take a joke."Institute of Current World Affairs

Muslims from Thrace. Though not required to leave bythe treaty, immediately after it was signed some 90,000Greeks, out of a population of 200,000, left Istanbul. Thismassive ethnic-cleansing operation, reluctantly endorsedby the international community, was designed to removea fifth column the Turkish nationalists reasonablyblamedfor bringing down the Ottoman empire. The Greek inva-sion was itself endorsed by the Ecumenical Patriarchateof the time as well as a Greek population drunk on dreamsof restoring Byzantine greatness.

However understandable in political terms, whetherthe expulsion served the interests of most Turks is dubi-ous. Kemal Ataturk wanted to turn Turkey into a Euro-pean country: his first step was to throw out most of theEuropean population. The Greeks were, moreover, evenmore important than their sheer numbers would suggest.It is a striking fact that in their long history as an impor-tant power, the Turks have never been creators either ofnew art, scientific or philosophical breakthroughs or evenmanufacturers of consumer goods. The Turks were in-stead peasant farmers and soldiers, replacing the Romansas custodians of the physical infrastructure and social dis-cipline of the empire, while the Greeks played the roleof, well, Greeks supplying, along with the Armeniansand Jews and assorted Europeans, the entire class of mer-chants, manufacturers and professionals.

Besides leaving Turkey with a tiny number of peopletrained in critical occupations, the forcible deportationto strange lands of the Anatolian Greeks and ThracianMuslims caused enormous suffering. Turkey was as-

signed most of the blame even though, according to

Conservative Muslim women infull length charshafscontrast sharply with the Greek school’s exuberant red gate.4

This dilapidated Greek mansion in Fener isreminiscent ofDoctor Zhivago.

Arnold Toynbee, it was the Greek Prime MinisterEleutherios Venizelos who first conceived the idea of ex-changing the Christian population of Anatolia for theMuslims of western Thrace.

Whoever may claim paternity, there is no doubt thatTurkish nationalists relished the Greek exodus and lookedforward happily to the day when their coreligionists inIstanbul could be persuaded to follow suit. The Turkishgeneral in charge of Istanbul in 1922, Refet Pasha, hadsaid: "The Greeks, if they were not actually expelled,would be well advised to leave, as in future in a newTurkey they would be unable to make a living here."

The state took a brutal step toward realizing thisprophecy in 1941. Aneutral in World War II, Turkey nev-ertheless joined in the Axis spiritof persecuting minori-ties by imposing the ruinous varlik vergisi, a capital taxon the property of Armenians (232%), Jews (184%) andGreeks (159%). Besides giving the state a pretext for ex-propriating most of the country’s profitable businessesand redistributing them to Muslims minus the per-sonnel who had made them successful the tax led tothousands of bankrupted Christians and Jews being im-prisone&

Despite this persecution, in 1950 Istanbul still con-tained over 100,000 Greeks. Then, on September 5,1955,following reports of attacks by Greek nationalists onTurks in Cyprus, Turkish students and laborers went ona well-organized rampage through Greek neighborhoods,smashing and looting businesses and houses and destroy-ing most of the city’s 80 or so Greek Orthodox churches.

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The abbot of the monastery ofIveron has a soft spotfor "holyfools" drunk on the love of God.Ian Fleming, in town to cover a conference, reported that"hatred ran through the streets like lava."2 Several fea-tures of the violence revealed the hand of the state. Onlyone Greek was killed. The Patriarchate, the best-knownGreek institution in the city, was untouched. Though gov-ernment ministers would usually have been in the city atthis time of year, none was in Istanbul during the riots.At first the government tried to blame the riots on "com-munists," but soon acknowledged that they had been or-ganizedby the government of PresidentAdnanMendereswho was hanged in 1960, partly for his role in orchestrat-ing the pogrom.

My contact at the Patriarchate had warned me thatthe Greek community in Istanbul is very shy. "They’veall gone through the ugly period from the fifties to theseventies when after talking with a reporter the policewould drop by for a chat," he said. But at the age of 80,with his health failing and virtually all his friends gone,Dr. Yorgo Adosoglu may feel he has nothing left to lose. Imet Dr. Adosoglu, a medical doctor and publisher ofIstanbul’s only surviving Greek newspaper, Evening, inthe overheated and sour-smelling apartment he shareswith his older sister in the heart of the European quarterof Beyoglu. Dr. Adosoglu’s father was an engineer andsculptor whose speciality was mermaids. Unable to paythe capital tax in 194,1, he was interred for a year in acamp near the Georgian border. Dr. Adosoglu was inPhanar during the riots and remembers glass, clothes andfurniture all over the streets of what until then had still

The one institution that continues to make Fener im-portant not only for Greeks but for all Orthodox Chris-tians is the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the Orthodox world’sclosest equivalent to the Vatican. Physically, it is a verymodest second-best to the Holy See. The tightly packedwalled compound of ten buildings sits on a charmingstretch of cobbled street just half a block back from thebusy road running along the Golden Horn, which on

been one of Istanbul’s most fashionable quarters. Afterthe riots, most Greeks wo could, left quickly. Dr.Adosoglu was at a loss to explain why he and his sisterwere among the few Greeks who’d chosen to stay. Saidhe: "We were born here. We grew up here. We loveIstanbul."

It’s hard to understand why. The old neighborhoodof Phanar, which the Turks call Fener ("Lighthouse"), hasbeen cleansed of Greeks and turned into a slum. Tradi-tional Muslimwomen in headscarves or evenblack sheetscovering their entire body now stare suspiciously atstrangers as they walk Fener’s streets among the wrecksof once elegant homes. The place reminds me of the scenein Doctor Zhivago: when Omar Sharif returns to his Mos-cow mansion to find that it’s been taken over by peas-ants. Like the Soviets, the poor Turks who moved intothe quarters abandoned by Greek Istanbulus lacked thesophistication to maintain what they had won.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate

Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire by Philip Mansel, page 425.

Institute of Current World Affairs

FatherTarasios, the

grandarchdeaconand the righthand man of

His AllHoliness theEcumenicalPatriarch

Bartholomew,began life asGeorge Antonin St. Louis.

warm days reeks of sewage. Middle-aged men, who arenot overly rigorous about checking guests, man the guardbox next to the stone steps leading to a gate in the brickwall. Past a metal detector that doesn’t seem to work isthe unremarkable 18th-Century Church of St. George. Tothe right is the Patriarch’s residence and main office build-ing, an immaculatenew Ottoman-style building ofmaple-colored wood that was op6ned in 1989. [The previousheadquarters building had burned down in 1941 and fordecades the government wouldn’t give the Patriarchatepermission to rebuild.] The foyer is decorated with a mu-ral improbably depicting Mehmet the Conqueror andGennadius, the first Patriarch after the Conquest, stand-ing together in an attitude of equals and allies.

I have paid many visits to the Patriarchate to meetwith a Greek American now named Father Tarasios. Forten years, Father Tarasios raised in St. Louis, Mo., asGeorge Anton has served as Grand Archdeacon, thePatriarch’s right-hand man. His boss and bishop, His AllHoliness Patriarch Bartholomew, is the 270th occupant ofthe throne of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in the erstwhileConstantinople. The Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul,whom the Turkish government insists on calling merelythe "Patriarch of Fener," is the most senior of all the Or-thodox patriarchs. But among the Orthodox he is primusinter pares, first among equals: his seniority, unlike theunchallengeable authority of the Pope in the CatholicChurch, is honorary. "The authority of the Patriarchatehas been questioned because under the Ottomans it hadno power," explains Tarasios. "The Moscow Patriarchateand others want to retain the prerogatives they’ve en-

joyed for the past five hundred years, whereas the Ecu-menical Patriarch argues hat he simply wants to returnto the state of relations before the Ottoman conquest."But the individual patriarchs of the other sees the an-cient ones of Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem and the"new" ones of the Balkans and Russia guard their ter-

ritory and independence jealously. A few years ago, Pa-triarch Alexy of Moscow, whose flock is six times the sizeof Bartholomew’s, was angered by Bartholomew’s rec-ognition of independence by Orthodox churches in Esto-nia. In retaliation Alexy pointedly failed to includeBartholomew’s name on a list, known as a dyptychs, ofpatriarchs with whom he was in agreement on theologi-cal doctrine. (A bigger showdown looms over the Ortho-dox in the Ukraine, which is courting Bartholomew’s sup-port for autocephaly.)

The flock under the Ecumenical Patriarch’s direct ju-risdiction has been shrinking for centuries. After the Con-quest, the greatest blow to his power came in 1833 with adeclaration of autocephaly, the canonical term for inde-pendence, by the bishop of the newly independentGreece. The Ecumenical Patriarch withheld recognitionof the independent Greek church until 1852. Today Patri-arch Bartholomew presides over a motley congregationof about six million souls including all Orthodox of thediaspora, three million of whom live in North America;the Orthodox Church in Finland; those in Istanbul, Creteand the Dodecanese islands in the Aegean; and what isvariously considered the spiritual heart of Orthodoxy ora citadel of dogmatism, the "Monks’ Republic" of MountAthos in Greece.

This geographical diffusion has a positive side thatgives the Ecumenical Patriarch the potential to be an enor-mous force for good. "Ecumenical" means universal.Uniquely among Orthodox patriarchs, the EcumenicalPatriarch is governed not by the interests of a single na-tional community, but by the universal aspirations of aChurch that the Orthodox regard as the custodian of theone true faith not just for Greeks or for Russians but forall mankind. This perspective predisposes the occupantof the Patriarchal Throne in Istanbul to be an enemy ofthat heresy that continues to ravage the Balkans, theCaucasus and the Middle East: phyletism or religious na-tionalism. The Ecumenical Patriarch first condemnedphyletism as a heresy in his Encyclical of 1872 when itwas beginning its terrible career in the Balkans.

Phyletism has emerged as the great curse of Ortho-doxy. The explanation isn’t that complicated. While theVatican conducted the liturgy in Latin, Orthodox Chris-tians, from the days when the Byzantine monks Cyril andMethodius began proselytizing among the Slavs, cel-ebrated the liturgy in something close to their own lan-guage. In the first centuries of Christianity all bishopswere considered equals, and under the peaceful condi-tions of the Byzantine Empire there was no impetus tochange this by concentrating authority, as there was inthe west under the pressure of the barbarian invasions.From the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantinein 320, Christianity was a state religion. The egalitarian-ism of the episcopate set the stage for various nationalchurches hiving off from the Mother Church inConstantinople. After the Ottoman conquest of all theOrthodox lands save Russia, the churches became their

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peoples’ main repository of tradition and national con-sciousness. And for the past thousand years the Ortho-dox have been fighting a losing battle against Muslimsto the south and east and Catholics and their Protestantprogeny to the west.

I have witnessed this battle, in different forms, first-hand. My first visit to an Orthodox Church was in 1992in Siberia along with an American friend and our bestRussian friend and co-editor of an English-languagenewspaper we were editing, Sergei. When we arrived itwas snowing lightly and a crowd was trying to press intothe rather homely, onion-domed church where Russiansnewly awakened to their religious heritage were goingthrough the unfamiliar motions of lighting candles andgenuflecting before icons. The priests arrived, carryingmore icons and censing the crowd, then disappeared be-hind the iconostasis. Sergei was as lost as we were. Butwhenwe camehome and started warming ourselves withvodka, Sergei launched into a tirade against a colleaguewho had just written a fine article on the Jewish Autono-mous Region of Birabidjan in the Russian Far East. Withan ugly scowl on his face that we’d never seen before,Sergei said he was sick of reading negative things aboutRussians. To our dismay, Sergei spat out that our col-league would only write such things because he wasn’treally a Russian. He was, according to Sergei, a Catholic.After that Easter service, Sergei always retained a traceof that anger and there was always a barrier between us.

A couple of years later, on the morning of OrthodoxChristmas, January 5, in the Bosnian Serb capital of Pale,I waylaid the Bosnian Serbs’ president and indicted warcriminal Radovan Karadzhic as he made his way into anOrthodox Church. Karadzhic was proud of having ledthe Serbs in a war against their Muslim neighbors thattook some 200,000 lives. As a father and his young sonlet off celebratory machine gun rounds on a nearby bal-cony, Karadzhic shamelessly sent Christmas greetings tofellow Christians around the world and repeated that allhe had done was to defend Europe against hordes of fa-natical Islamists. In other Serb-held areas I met Ortho-dox priests in camouflage fatigues who advocated kill-ing Bosnian Muslims, whom nationalist Serbs called"Turks," as an act of piety, and volunteer Greek sniperswho’d come to Bosnia to pay their devotions.

Against this picture of bigotry, PatriarchBartholomew has been a leading proponent of dialoguewith other faiths. He was a founding member of theWorld Council of Churches. He participates in regular"International Theological Dialogues" with Catholics,Lutherans, Anglicans and Methodists to which eachchurch sends two representatives. He also meets regu-larly with representatives of the other monotheistic faiths,Judaism and Islam. For years he has been unsuccessfullytrying to persuade other Patriarchs to participate in anEcumenical Council that could address major doctrinalissues, including those dividing Orthodox from Catho-lics. Bartholomew’s ecumenism is a delicate business.Institute of Current World Affairs

Once I said something to Tarasios about the Patriarch’s"campaign against religious nationalism." Tarasiosquickly emphasized that "campaigning against" was anegative way to describe positive efforts to encouragehis fellow Orthodox to be open-minded.

Openness to the views of other Christians has notbeen a hallmark of the Orthodox, Before the Ottoman con-quest, the population and most of the church leaders de-clared that they’d rather be ruled by the turban of theTurks than the mitre of the Pope. "Today," says Tarasios,"monks on Athos say that if the Anglicans are ordainingwomen bishops, why bother talking to them? The an-swer, of course, is that the Patriarch hopes he will have apositive influence on the Anglicans’ thinking." Make nomistake: Bartholomew, an expert in canonical law, is noradical reformer; his attitude toward women in theChurch and toward ecclesiastical authority would beanathema to most Americans. But to me, as a non-be-liever in either Christianity or nationalism, the Ecumeni-cal Patriarch’s supranationalism is reason enough to wishhim well.

In addition to his opposition to religious bigotry,Bartholomew has become a vocal proponent on anothersubject with which Turkey can use all the help it can get:responsible stewardship of the natural environment. "Ba-sil of Caesaria has lots to say about man and the environ-ment," said Tarasios. "Orthodox have always lived

In the shadow ofthe school, the grave ofan alum andformerEcumenical Patriarch with the Byzantine double eagle.

mostly in agricultural countries. In looking back, wefound that we had a lot to offer on the subject." The Pa-triarchate hosted the first of several ecological symposiabringing together theologians and scientists on theAegean island of Patmos in 1987. In 1989 PatriarchDemetrios made September I each year a "Day for Prayerand Protection of the Natural Environment."

Until recently most Turks regarded the prelate’s head-quarters as a den of enemy spies. Tarasios says that whenhe arrived in Istanbul ten years ago articles about the Pa-triarchate in the Turkish press were always negative, of-ten viciously so. In 1994 terrorists calling themselves the"Fighters of Light" planted a hugebombby the front gate.After it was defused, police found a note from the mili-tants vowing they’d battle "until this place, which foryears has contrived Byzantine intrigues against the Mus-lim peoples of the East, is exterminated." In 1997 anotherbomb bounced off the Church of St. George before ex-ploding and injuring a monk so seriously that one of hisarms remains paralyzed.

The Patriarchate’s progressive activities seem to haveimproved its image. It has also benefited by improvedrelations between Greece and Turkey, particularly aftereach country extended generous aid to the other afterboth of them were struck by catastrophic earthquakes inthe summer of 1999. Visiting Greek dignitaries alwayscall at the Patriarchate, as did President Clinton when hecame to Istanbul for the summit of the Organization forSecurity and Cooperation in Europe last November.About 30 big businessmen are reliable supporters of thePatiarchate. Rahmi Koc, the richest man in Turkey, hasattended an Easter service in the Church of St. Georgeand sat in the front pew, holding a candle.

Despite its cachet among some members of Turkey’selite, state policy toward the Orthodox administration stillmakes life difficult. According to the terms of theLausanne Treaty, the Patriarch must be a Turkish citizenwho has completed his military service. Bartholomewwas elected in 1991 and is now only 60, so he could breakthe longevity record of 27 years. The staff and support-ers of the Patriarchate can only hope that by the time hedies, Turkey would have changed its law on citizenship.

Turkeynow has 20 Bishops, all Turkish citizens. Only12, plus the Patriarch as chairman, are needed for a synod.If the Turkish government changed its law, their episco-pate could be drawn from all over its jurisdiction, whichincludes North America, Australia and Asia. Patriarchsneedn’t evenbe priests before election: Saints Photias andTarasios, the Arch Deacon’s namesake, were elected aslaymen from deacon to priest to Patriarch in three days.

But despite the Turkish government’s heavy hintsthat it would not be sorry to see the Patriarchate leaveforever, Father Tarasios remains optimistic that the insti-tution will endure. His first reason for optimism whichmust be as obligatory as American presidential candi-

dates maintaining the Bible as their favorite book ishis faith in God. The second reason is that the Patriarchate has weathered much more hostile periods than thepresent the 1920s during the expulsion of Greeks fromAnatolia, the anti-Greek riots of the 1950s and even theintimidation of the 1980s. Not only the Patriarch but allemployees of the Patriarchate must be Turkish citizens,and the Turkish government refuses to facilitate the em-ployment of non-Turks by granting them citizenship.There are ways around this restriction, said Tarasios,when there’s good will. In the 1940s, PatriarchAthenagoras flew over on Truman’s private plane andthe Turkish ambassador gave him his newly issued Turk-ish passport at the airport in Switzerland, so that by thetime he landed in Turkey for the first time he was withinthe law.

When good will is wanting, the prelates employmorecreative survival strategies. Though he has worked in a

high-profile position at the Patriarchate for ten years nowand is a well-known figure around the city, Tarasios him-sell for instance, is a "volunteer." Says Tarasios, allud-ing to the US military’s policy on gays: "It’s basically a’don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy toward the five foreignersworking at the Patriarchate."

According to Tarasios, the best thing the Turkish gov-ernment could do for the Patriarchate would be to allowthe reopening of the Orthodox seminary on the island ofHeybeliada Halki in Greek an hour-and-a-half ferryride from the Patriarchate in the Sea of Marmara. In 1971Turkey passed a law prohibiting minorities from operat-ing university-level faculties. In order to use the law toclose the seminary, the authorities designated the Theo-logical School at Halki a university. Today it is a ghostschool. While the state won’t allow the school to operate,it does allow Greeks to keep it in perfect condition.

I visited one sunny afternoon in May, without anyprior arrangement. There are no cars on Halki. From theferry landing you reach the Theological School on top ofthe pine-covered hill by foot or a horse-drawn carriagecalled a phaeton. I pushed a buzzer next to the main gate,next to a sign declaring the school to be under the au,

thority of the Turkish Republic. A young man, a Greekfrom Istanbul, let me in and showed me around alongwith a couple of Turks.

After the original building was destroyed by earth-quake, the current stone edifice was built by a Greekbanker at the end of the nineteenth century. Like theGreek high school in Fener, it is both impressive andattractive. And also like the high school, it lookscleaner and better maintained than almost any Turk-ish building. The tile and linoleum floors are buffed.The spotless toilets smell of disinfectant. In the refectory,the benches are arranged around the table in a neat horse-shoe shape. In the cavernous library, not a single leather-bound tome is out of place. The surrounding gardens con-tain rows of vegetables, planters bursting with flowers, a

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The Theological School on Halki, known in Turkish as Heybeliada.

few lambs and a donkey, and the graves of several Greeknotables, including a Patriarch. All that’s missing isstudents.

There maybe no other facility in the world suspendedso evenly between life and death. If the Greeks had beenconquered by any people other than the Turks, with theirOttoman heritage of tolerance, the school would almostcertainly have been razed. If the Greeks were any peopleother than the Greeks, they almost certainly would haveabandoned the moribund school. And if the Turks wereless stubborn, they would by now have succumbed topressure from President Clinton, among others, to allowthe school to reopen.

Most bishops in Europe are graduates of Halki andall recent Patriarchs have been drawn from its alumni.Says Tarasios: "Halki is the bloodline of the Patriarchate.The school would guarantee that the spirit and vision ofthe Ecumenical Patriarchate as protector of the Ortho-dox would endure. Being ecumenical and being based ina Muslim country gives the Ecumenical Patriarchate auniquely supranational perspective that Turkey shouldvalue and this perspective can only be inculcated in itsown seminary. WithoUt this school, the vision of the Pa-triarchate can’t contue. Yet this wider vision is essen-tial to the universal mission of Orthodoxy."

As if his travails in Turkey weren’t enough, Patri-arch Bartholomew is facing simmering rebellionsamong the two most influential parts of his flock:Institute of Current World Affairs

North Americans who say he is too conservative, andmonks on Mount Athos who say he’s too worldly.

Recalcitrant Americans

In 1994 Bartholomew caught wind of a move in theAmerican Orthodox Church to discuss autonomy. ThePatriarch respondedby retiring the legendaryArchbishopIakovos, who had been head of the Orthodox Church inAmerica for 37 years. Said Tarasios. "He knew the powerbrokers on Capitol Hill. He marched with [Martin Luther]King." But Bartholomew believed he had colluded withGreek ideas intent on pushing for independence for theAmerican church.

In his place Bartholomew appointed a bishop namedSpyridon, the first American-born bishop ever to holdthe post. In making the appointment Bartholomew wasclear about his intentions: "You bear many qualifications,[but] the crowning qualification.., is your unlimited fi-delity and devotion to this venerable EcumenicalThrone... It was to this last virtue of yours over all othersthat the Mother Church looked when reaching her deci-sion. For even if one of her hierarchs has every talent,every qualification, and all other virtues, but does nothave unlimited devotion and blind loyalty and lifelonggratitude, he is nothing, nothing is gained, he is nothingbut a noisy gong, or a clanging cymbal."

Unfortunately, loyalty seems to have been Spyridon’sonly strong suit. During his three-year tenure, his authori-

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tarian style and financial scandals angered and alienatedGreek Americans and caused an unprecedented crisis inthe American church.

Tarasios told me that the Patriarch had had highhopes that Spyridon’s American roots would make hima natural for the job. "But after high school Spyridon hadgone to Europe and by the time Bartholomew ap-pointed him, he’d come to look down on Ameri-cans as inferior. He also had an autocratic style,which went out with hoop skirts. Nowadays youhave to be a pastor, a shepherd." Even his Englishwas stuck in a time warp. "He used to say things were’groovy’ and he called his enemies’goons’." In short, saidTarasios, "he bombed."

Hostility toward Spyridon galvanized a group of ar-ticulate and well-heeled Greek Americans who formed agroup called the Orthodox Christian Laity to push forthe archbishop’s removal. Bartholomew removedSpyridon in 1999. By then, though, the Americans’ cri-tique had become more radical: that the authoritarian,state-oriented ethos of the Ecumenical Patriarchate wasalien to Americans. The president of the Orthodox Chris-tian Laity wrote: "Developing the church within the cul-tural norms of the democratic, pluralistic society in whichwe live respects fair play, parliamentary procedure, dueprocess, the separation of church and state. It is withinthis dynamic that Orthodox Christianity in America hasdeveloped and flourished."

Father Tarasios gave me the Patriarchate’s argumentagainst it. [I’m relating his remarks in detail because,given his evident charm and capability, Tarasios seemsto stand a very good chance of one day becoming theArchbishop of North America. As he told me with ill-concealed delight, grand archdeacons, the Patriarch’sright-hand men, skip over parish priesthood straight tothe episcopate.] Says Tarasios: "The Church in the US istoo young and too divided to be autocephalous. Theirconnection with the Ecumenical Patriarchate gives theOrthodox Church in America authenticity, history andtradition.

The Ecumenical Patriarch helps it keep its bearingsin the New World. Its connection to Istanbul is an an-chor. Without it, it will become assimilated. Some Ortho-dox in the US, for instance, have talked about wanting tohave a bride walk down an aisle in the church to thesound of organ music."

Tarasios argues that an independent Americanchurch would also be ravaged by fractious politics."The Orthodox Church in America is urging peopleto feel Orthodox over Greek, but other Orthodoxcommunities in the US who are still animated by oldfashioned nationalist agendas will profit by this dis-unity. For now he Greek-American community hasto stay strong under the Ecumenical Patriarch, whohas no nationalist or political agenda and can share the10

benefit of his experience with the Church in America."

Censorious Monks

While the American Orthodox contemplate an un-

precedented insurrection, the Patriarch’s other most un-ruly spiritual children, the monks of Mount Athos, arefollowing a long tradition of holding their bishop to thestraight Orthodox line. "Monks are always conservative,"said Tarasios. "They see themselves as watchdogs. Theyplay a valuable role in anticipating the long-term conse-quences of leaders’ actions that might be rash or reck-less."

This doesn’t mean, according to Tarasios, that theirconcerns about Bartholomew are necessarily justified."Patriarch Bartholomew has always said fanaticism iswrong and pursued dialogue with other Christians.Monks don’t like ecumenicism. They say canon law isclear: you don’t pray with heretics. In their minds thisseems to leave no room for dialogue. If the Patriarch ar-

gues that other faiths have things to offer, the monks sayhe’s weak. The monks seem to be afraid that someonealong the line some patriarch will be duped."

Despite their seclusion, says Tarasios, the monks arenot naifs. "Athos has a degree of independence whichthey see as being greater than it is. But they have to dealwith the world and they have proven themselves goodpoliticians- too good."

I had wanted to see Mount Athos, the mysterious,mystical and uncompromisingly conservative heart ofOrthodoxy, for years. I set off in late April Lent for theOrthodox and the week before my wedding to AmandaWilson along with a close Greek-American friend,Yianni Doulis, and my cousin Bill Hinkle, a conservativeRepublican commissioner of a rural county in the Cas-cade mountains of Washington state who had recentlyconverted to Orthodoxy from Evangelical Protestantism.Tarasios had given me a letter from the Patriarch himselfasking in impressive Greek calligraphy for the three ofus two Orthodox and "a friend of the Church" tobe admitted to the Holy Mountain. From the smile onTarasios’s face when he handed it to me, I gathered thatthe monks’ reaction would be an interesting test of howloyal they were feeling toward their bishop.

Bill, Yianni and I landed at Thessaloniki airport fairlylate on Sunday night and caught a taxi into town. Find-ing the air in the car stuffy, I asked the taxi driver, whomI was sitting behind, to roll down my window. He re-fused. Bywayofexplanationhe clapped his hand onthebackof his neck. Like many in the region, his notions about healthcame not from science but from generations of folklore, ac,

cordingtowhichthere is nothingmore dangerousthana draftontheback. ThoughIwas famih’arwith this belief, his bluntrefusal came as a bit of a shock. In dozens of cab rides inTurkey in which I’d asked for a window to be rolleddown, the driver not to smoke or the radio to be turned

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down, no driver had ever even hesitated to oblige.

The driver asked where we were coming from andwe said Turkey. "Acch, Turkey very dirty country," washis response. "The Muslims, they are fanatics," he con-tinued without encouragement. I thought about all theTurks who had told me that Greeks were fine people andculturally very close to themselves. The problems be-tween Athens and Ankara, Turks always say, are a gameamong politicians and no reflection on their respectivepeoples. After a few more minutes the driver decided toentertain us with a light anecdote about some recent pas-sengers from Israel. It seems that when they reached theirhotel and had paid their fare of some thousands ofdrachmas, the Israelis had waited for the change, whichamounted to pennies. "So you see how the Jews are," thedriver pronounced triumphantly, looking at us with theleer of a playground bully who’s found a new victim.

Walking around Thessaloniki the next day I saw acouple of magazine covers oriented toward readers likeour driven One showed Greek soldiers looking towardTurkey’s Aegean coast through a telescopic rifle sight.Another carried a portrait of a older man labeled as "theTurk," his lecherous, decadent-looking, elaborately made-up face a parody of demonization.

That afternoon we took a three-hour bus ride to thetown of Ouranopolis, the jumping off point for theMonks’ Republic. Early the next morning we made ourway to the pilgrims’ office wherewe hoped the letter fromthe Patriarch would get us an official permit to enter thestrictly regulated peninsula. Because it was Holy Week,the office was overflowing with 850 men looking likeAmericans heading out for a weekend of drum beating

At St. Gregoriou monastery, one of20 on Mount Athos, over 70 monks work towardthe Orthodox goal ofdeification in this life while worrying aboutfeatures ofglobalized

modernity that they read as portents that the Apocalypse may be near.Institute of Current World Affairs

in the woods, only pushier. Almost all the men wereGreek and had made their reservations months aheadthrough local offices. WhenYianni and I finally managedto push our way through to the counter, the reaction toBartholomew’s letter was interesting. Looking flummoxedbecause we hadn’t called ahead, the clerk got up and showedtheletter to acolleague.YianniandIsawtheir eyebrows raisedand heard them utter "Patriarch" in a wondering tone asthey regarded the Byzantine laissez-passer. Without fur-ther hesitation, the official issued us three permits thatwould allow us to board the ferry that would take usbeyond the boundary that women haven’t been allowedto cross for 900 years and along the south coast of thepeninsula. There were few old-timers on the boat. AsYianni put it, most of the men were middle-aged, "at thatstage in life where they’re questioning things and theycan’t buy a Ferrari so they come here." And it was throughthousands of pilgrims like these who came to Athos torenewtheir sense ofpurposethatthemonkswouldexert theirgreat influence on Greece and, indirectly, Turkey.

There were 20 monasteries on MountAthos, some ofwhichwere especially popular and required reservations.We sailed past the onion domes of the Russian monas-tery of Panteleimon and, after stopping at the ferry hubof Daphne, caught another boat to a monastery calledGregoriou that had a friendly reputation and a beautifulsite on a rock jutting into the sea. Founded only in the14th century, it ranks seventeenth in the Athonite hierar-chy. Some 70 monks call Gregoriou home and, like mostmonasteries on the mountain since the collapse of theSoviet block and Yugoslavia, it is growing fast.

Our schedule, as at all the monasteries, was domi-nated by a round of church services, each one following

a centuries-old pattern to com-memorate another step towardthe apex of the liturgical year,Easter. The most important ser-vices were held in the middle ofthe night. In ancient stone cham-bers illuminated by hundreds ofcandles, bearded monks dressedin black robes would come andgo according to inscrutable pat-terns, while their brotherschanted and sometimes per-formed the mystery of turningbread and wine into the bodyand blood of Christ behind therichly decorated barrier calledthe iconostasis. Monks whoweren’t chanting would gener-ally prop themselves up in oneof the wooden stalls along thewalls and stare into the middledistance, sometimes swayingback and forth. The faithful laitywere most active when they firstentered the church, genuflecting,

and venerating the icons of saints by kissing the picturesand lighting candles before them. The faithless mejust watched and struggled to stay awake.

After a while I noticed that everyone else looked ex-hausted too. The monks never talked about "going tobed"; they merely "took a little rest." Sleep deprivation, Irealized, is an integral part of the monks’ routine; sincetheir goal is to transcend rational thought and see visions,it made sense. Considering that for Lent they were eat-ing just one small vegetarian meal a day thoughwashed down with home-made wine and spendingprobably 12 hours a day or more chanting by candlelight,the monks were doing everything possible to give them-selves a natural high.

At Gregoriou I had interesting conversations with ayoung monk named Damianos. The son of Greek Cypri,ots, Damianos had grown up in a rough section of Lon-don. For ten years after graduating from high school he’dlived hard and fast. He’d become a monk when experi-ences of altered states of consciousness convinced himthat there was more to reality that what we saw with oursober, worldly eyes.

Damianos believed that even saying something asstraightforward as "I believe in the Bible" is a mislead-ing attempt to limit the supralogical reality of the worldbased on a God beyond human understanding. "TheBible is the word of God, yet it is not," he said, looking atme rather feverishly. For Damianos and probably mostof the other monks, only the apophatic approach inwhich one underscores God’s illimitability by describ-ing what He is not makes sense.

Damianos was prepared to be assertive about onetopic: Turkey. "We Orthodox were enslaved by Turks forfive hundred years and stabbed in the back by the Lat-ins," Damianos said when I asked whether he was opti-mistic about warming ties between Greece and Turkey."This history doesn’t bode well for the future. Mostmonks see Turkey as an American puppet."

Like everymonkwe met onAthos, Damianos referredto the 500-year Ottoman period as the "Turkish Yoke." Use ofthis term testified to the triumph of myth over history In factmost construction on Athos seems to date from this periodand manypriceless decorations had come to the HolyMoun-tain as gifts from the Ottoman Sultan himself.

What the monks on Athos are most worried aboutthese days is a move to introduce identity cards in Greecethat conform to the European Union standard by not re-ferring to the citizen’s religion. In Greece the OrthodoxChurch has.always been a department of state and mem-bership in it a pillar of national identity. The monks, alongwith the Orthodox Church of Greece, see the introduc-tion of the creediess cards as the first step on a slipperyslope leading to separation of Church and State. If theywere separated, it would be the first time since the adop-

tion of Christianity by the Roman Emperor Constantinein 320. But the monks, said Damianos, also had anotherconcern: the fact that all EU cardholders will be assigneda number not as a member of their respective countriesbut as Europeans. I thought I understood the concern andsuggested to Damianos that the Church saw the numera-tion of people in a huge pool as a landmark on the marchtoward a crisis of alienation. But that wasn’t quite it. Itwas like the bar codes on items in grocery stores, saidDamianos. "All the bar codes end in ’666’" said Damianos."How do you explain that?"

My cousin Bill, with his background in fire-and-brim-stone Protestantism, was ready with an answer. "It’s thesign of the beast," Bill said, referring to the Biblical au-gurs of the Apocalypse.

"Exactly," said Damianos.

Despite his rather morbid contemplation of the "EndTimes," Damianos was a gentle person. Unlike the Catho-lics, he said, the Orthodox Church, had never endorsedviolence. While this may be true of official Church doc-trine, monks from Athos had left the Holy Mountain tofight for Greek independence, and Orthodox prelates hadencouraged violent rebellions against the Ottomans andtheir Muslim descendents in the Balkans ever since.

This encouragement over the centuries has left itsmark on the Orthodox faithful. Sergei was a Russianformer theology student who had come to Athos withtypically Orthodox pragmatism to spend six monthsmourning the death of his mother. During a break fromone midnight service, Sergei recounted his fanciful un-derstanding of how and why a certain Scandinavian ad-venturer hadbecome the first king of Russia. "There werebarbarians from the east who were threatening to con-quer the Slavs so Rurik came from Scandinavia to helpthem," explainedSergei.Whenhesawmylookofratherpainedskepticism he said, "You know, these people from the east,they were dark, bad. Rurik, he came from the west tohelp." And then he’d stayed and made himself king. Withfavors like this, I thought, who needs conquest?

We heard similar echoes of the nationalist edge ofOrthodoxy at the Vatopedi, a huge monastery that hadbeen home to some of Orthdoxy’s greatest theologians,where we stayed for our third and final night. FatherMatthew, whose rolling gait revealed his Californian rootseven after 20 years on the Mountain, gave us a tour in-cluding the holy relics that the faithful venerate by kiss-ing, believing that the objects can perform miracles, or atleast bring good luck. Vatopedi’s collection was especiallyrich and included the skull of one of the greatest Ortho-dox theologians, John Crysostom. Attached to the side ofthe skull is a shriveled brown nub that Father Matthewassured us is the saint’s ear preserved because St. Paulwhispered into it Another of Vatopedi’s treasures was abit of wood, encased in glass, that was supposed to be apiece of the holy cross. The prized relic hadbeen donated

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by Prince Lazarus of Serbia. Parroting the favorite mythof Serb nationalists, Father Matthew told us that PrinceLazarus had "acquiesced to suffer defeat by the Turksrather than betray his faith."

Daniel, a bright, passionate young student from theUniversity of California at Berkeley who had come toVatopedi to study in preparation for confirmation as anOrthodox, told us that the monks were repeatedly chas-tising him about America’s supposed "anti-Orthodoxconspiracy." Said Daniel: "The monks condemn theNATO bombing of Serbia as cruel and immoral and askwhy the US didn’t bomb Turkey when it invaded Cy-prus in 1974."

Amid these psychological wilds, stalked by the spec-ters of mythic nationalism and paranoia, the Patriarch-ate back in Istanbul came to look like an oasis of modera-tion. The Patriarch did, moreover, obviously commandsome degree of respect. When we gave Bartholomew’sletter to the young monk who received us at Vatopedi,another Cypriot, he joked: "What are you going to giveme next a letter from Bill Clinton?" [From his friendlyexpression it was clear that he was not implying that thePatriarch and Clinton were co-conspirators.]

But I also saw that the Patriarch himselfhad to main-tain a delicate balancing act.

A couple of years ago he had officiated over the firststages of a Eucharistic service along with the Pope.Though he had stopped short of performing the sacra-ments over which Orthodox and Catholics have theologi-cal disagreements, the monks were scandalized.Damianos told me: "If the Patriarch had gone any fur-ther with the Pope, we would have been in schism."

Back in Istanbul, I told Tarasios what the monk had

said. "The monks are letting the world know that there’sa system of checks and balances," Tarasios repliedserenely.

I also told Tarasios about an explanation one monkhad offered for their preoccupation with doctrinal pu-rity. Unlike Catholics and Protestants, who believe in sal-vation only after death, the Orthodox aspire to "becomeGod" in this world. Those who accomplish this are saints.But of course, the monk explained, the distance betweenthe normal human condition and deification* is enor-mous: if you’re on ajourney of a thousand miles you wantto be very sure of your compass readings before you be-gin. I found the metaphor interesting, but it didn’t workfor Tarasios: "To me that means there’s only one way toapproach God, that those outside Orthodoxy- includ-ing those who’ve never even been exposed to it aredamned," he said. "I can’t believe that."

Bordered by Orthodox countries to its north and west,Turkey faces perhaps no greater long-term externalthreat than phyletism, which often takes the form ofhatred of Turks and their historic kin. If an enemyof your enemy is your friend, then Turkey shouldregard the Ecumenical,Patriarch as a good friend in-deed. But Turkish policy makers seem not to haverecognized the unique value of the gray-bearded,blue-eyed polyglot Istanbulu in Fener. Indeed, evenwhile Turkey supports NATO actions in the Balkansto halt ethnic cleansing, it continues to quietlystrangle its age-old rivals, the Greeks. If either enlight-ened self-interest or international pressure or a suddenburst of magnanimity does not soon prompt Turkey toallow Halki to reopen and the Patriarchate to employ non-Turks up to the office of the Patriarch himself, the slow-motion extinction of the Greeks of Istanbul will soon becomplete. That would be as great a tragedy for Turks asfor Greeks. GI

*"It is extremely daring for someone to talk about deification, without having witnessed it himself. Through the mercy ofAlmighty God and our Saviour Jesus Christ, we have dared that which is above our power.

We have to do this so as not to hide from our Orthodox Christian brethren the highest and final purpose of our life, theone for which we were created.

We have to do this so as to make clear that the only Orthodox pastorial teaching is that of deification and not of man’smoral perfection, without God’s Grace, accordinig to Western standards.

We have to do this so as to make us all long for the best things and thereby struggle for the noblest and the only onescapable of totally quenching the soul’s thirst for the Absolute, Triune God.

We have to do this so as to be filled to overflowing with gratitude towards our Maker and Creator for His great gift-our deification by Grace.

We have to do this so as to feel the irreplaceable nature of our Holy Church, as the only earthly communion of deifica-tion. We have to do this so as to testify to the magnifigence and truth of our Orthodox faith, the only faith that teaches andprovides deification to its members.

And finally, we hove dared to do this so as to console our souls which, no matter how much they have been poisonedand confused by sin, crave after the light of Christ.

Merciful Lord, tale pleasure in Thy infinite love, so as to make us worthy to enter the path of deification before wedepart from the present ephemeral world. Merciful Lord, in their search for deification guide our Orthodox brethren who donot rejoice because th4y ignore the magnificence of their vocation, as been called by You to become god’s by Grace.

Merciful Lord, guide the steps of the heterodox Christians towards acquaintance with your Truth, so that they are notleft out of Your Bridechamber, deprived of the Grace of deification."

Institute of Current World AffairsPreface to a book published in 1997 by the abbot of St. Gregoriou, Archimandrite George.

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EUROPE/RUSSIA

Gregory Feifer--RussiaWith fluent Russian and a Master’s from Harvard, Gregory worked in Moscow as political editor for Agence France-

Presse and the weekly Russia Journal in 1998-9. Greg sees Russia’s latest failures at economic and political reform as acontinuation of failed attempts at Westernization that began with Peter the Great failures that a long succession ofbehind-the-scenes elites have used to run Russia behind a mythic facade of "strong rulers" for centuries. He plans toassess the continuation of these cultural underpinnings of Russian governance in the wake of the Gorbachev/Yeltsinsuccession.

Whitney Mason--TurkeyA freelance print and television journalist, Whit began his career by founding a newspaper called The Siberian Review

in Novosibirsk in 1991, then worked as an editor of the Vladivostok News and wrote for Asiaweekmagazine in Hong Kong.In 1995 he switched to radio- and video-journalism, working in Bosnia and Korea for CBS. As an ICWA Fellow, he isstudying and writing about Turkey’s role as nexus between East and West, and between traditional and secular Islam.

Jean Benoit Nadeau---FranceA French-Canadian journalist and playwright, Jean Benoit studied drama at the National Theater School in Montreal,

then received a B.A, from McGill University in Political Science and History. The holder of several Canadian magazine andinvestigative-journalism awards, he is spending his ICWA-fellowship years in France studying "the resistance of the Frenchto the trend of economic and cultural globalization."

SOUTH ASIA

Shelly Renae Browning--AustraliaA surgeon specializing in ears and hearing, Dr. Browning is studying the approaches of traditional healers among the

Aborigines of Australia and the indigenous peoples of Vanuatu to hearing loss and ear problems. She won her B.S. inChemistry at the University of the South, studied physician relationships in China and Australia on a Thomas J.Watson Fellowship and won her M.D. at Emory University in Atlanta. Before her ICWA fellowship, she was a Fellow in Skull-Base Surgery in Montreal at McGill University’s Department of Otolaryngology.

THE AMERICAS

Wendy Call---MexicoA "Healthy Societies" Fellow, Wendy is spending two years in Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec, immersed in contra-

dictory trends: an attempt to industrialize and "develop" land along a proposed Caribbean-to-Pacific containerized railway,and the desire of indigenous peoples to preserve their way of life and some of Mexico’s last remaining old-growth forests.With a B.A. in Biology from Oberlin, Wendy has worked as a communications coordinator for Grassroots International andnational campaign director for Infact, a corporate accountability organization.

Peter Keller--ChilePublic affairs officer at Redwood National Park and a park planner at Yosemite National Park before his fellowship,

Peter holds a B.S. in Recreation Resource Management from the University of Montana and a Masters in EnvironmentalLaw from the Vermont Law School. As a John Miller Musser Memorial Forest & Society Fellow, he is spending two years inChile and Argentina comparing the operations of parks and forest reserves controlled by the Chilean and Argentine govern-ments to those controlled by private persons and non-governmental organizations.

Susan Sterner--BrazilA staff photographer for the Associated Press in Los Angeles, Susan received her B.A. in International Studies and

Cultural Anthropology at Emory University and a Master’s in Latin American Studies at Vanderbilt. AP gave her a wide-ranging beat, with assignments in Haiti, Mexico and along the U.S.-Mexican border. Her fellowship topic: the lives andstatus of Brazilian women.

Tyrone Turner’--BrazilA photojournalist (Black Star) whose work has appeared in many U.S. newspapers and magazines, Tyrone holds a

Master’s degree in Government and Latin American politics from Georgetown University and has produced photo-essayson youth violence in New Orleans, genocide in Rwanda and mining in Indonesia. As an Institute Fellow he is photographingand writing about Brazilian youth from S.o Paulo in the industrial South to Recife and Salvador in the Northeast.

Institute of Current World Affairs 15

Institute of Current World AffairsTHE CRANE-ROGERS FOUNDATIONFour West Wheelock StreetHanover, New Hampshire 03755 USA