Muslim-majority Turkey is not “a hostile environment” for Christians even as their population has been drastically reduced over the past decades, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople said Friday.
The country, once seen as the cradle of Christianity and home to Apostolic Churches, is currently hosting Pope Leo XIV on his first overseas trip as pontiff.
The patriarch told AFP in an interview Christians have nothing to fear in the country.
“It is simplistic to see adversaries everywhere and to imagine the pope’s visit as taking sides in a hostile environment,” said Patriarch Bartholomew I, leader of the world’s 260 million Orthodox Christians.
President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (L) greets Pope Leo XIV (R) during a welcome ceremony at the Presidential Palace on November 27, 2025 in Ankara, Turkey. Pope Leo XIV is making his first foreign trip on a six-day visit to Turkey and Lebanon. (Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
Bartholomew joins Leo for celebrations in Iznik on Friday around two hours from Istanbul, to mark 1,700 years since the First Council of Nicaea, a key early Church gathering that resulted in a statement of faith still central to Christianity, the AFP report notes.
After arriving in Ankara on Thursday and meeting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom critics have accused of wanting to Islamise society, the pope described Turkey as a “crossroads of sensibilities” that was richer for its “internal diversity”.
Bartholomew said living in a Muslim country had its advantages.
“Living in a predominantly Muslim country is a blessing in disguise because it sustains and strengthens the essential feature of the Ecumenical Patriarchate… open and honest dialogue with all people in all places, irrespective of race and religion,” he said.
Turkey has a population of 86 million but only about 100,000 Christians.
Numbers were slashed by the bloody Armenian genocide during the Ottoman Empire and the population exchanges and pogroms since that saw many Greek Orthodox leave in the early 20th century.
Under Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish government has aggressively targeted its Christian minority community and attempted to erase Christian heritage in the country.
Erdogan’s most prominent attempt to erase the Christian history of Turkey occurred in 2020 when he converted the Hagia Sophia, one of Byzantine Christianity’s most important architectural facilities, into a mosque.
The conversion process involved removing or covering up priceless Christian art in the former basilica.
Read more from the AFP interview here
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