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The Halki Seminary, whose graduates include two saints, seven patriarchs, seven archbishops, and six metropolitans, has become an international bargaining chip.
ISTANBUL (RNS) — The classrooms and halls of the Halki Orthodox Seminary on the Turkish island of Heybeliada, in the Sea of Marmara south of Istanbul, look much as they did when Konstantinos Delikostantis was a student there more than 50 years ago.
Wooden chairs and black desks line the classrooms, some still bearing the graffiti (in both Turkish and Greek) of their past occupants. The chalkboards, which sit beneath portraits of Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, look as if they could use a good wash.
At 73, Delikostantis is among the youngest remaining alumni of the school, which counts among its 990 graduates at least two saints, seven patriarchs, seven archbishops, six metropolitans and countless other clergymen, authors and theologians who went on to serve as leaders of Orthodox Christianity around the world.
In its heyday Halki Seminary was a place of intense study, deep introspection and strong brotherhood, recalled Delikostantis, now an adviser to the spiritual leader of Eastern Orthodox Christians, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, a fellow graduate of Halki.
“Halki was the iron theological arm of the Ecumenical Patriarchate,” said Delikostantis, leaning back on a sofa in the office of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul’s Fener district.
The first monastery on the island, known in Greek as Halki, was founded in the ninth century by Patriarch Photius I. A second was established by Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaiologos just a few decades before Constantinople was conquered by the Ottomans in 1453.
The school itself was founded in 1844 when then-Patriarch Germanus IV converted part of Photius' monastery of the Holy Trinity into a high school and a seminary.
However, ...
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