Trump asks Erdoğan to reopen theological school after Bartholomew meeting

During the 40-minute meeting, the Ecumenical Patriarch raised other issues including the protection of Middle East Christians and the likely trip of Pope Leo to Iznik in Turkey next month.

US President Donald Ttump raised the reopening of the Greek Orthodox theological school in Halki during a meeting with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last week.

This followed Trump’s meeting in Washington, DC on 15 September with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I, who asked him for support. Referring to that conversation, Trump told Erdoğan: “The Greek Orthodox Church was here and they would really like some help, and I said I would bring it up.”

Erdogan said he would discuss the issue directly with Bartholomew in Istanbul, reassuring Trump: “We are ready to do whatever we can that falls on our part.”

The seminary, founded in 1844, served as a key centre for training Orthodox clergy near Istanbul on the island of Heybeliada. The Turkish authorities closed it in 1971 during a wave of nationalisation of educational institutions, and its status has remained a point of contention between Turkey and Greece ever since. 

Bartholomew’s visit to the US was a closely watched event by the Orthodox world. During the 40-minute meeting with Trump, he raised other pressing issues including the protection of Middle East Christians and the likely trip of Pope Leo to Iznik in Turkey for joint celebrations for the anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea.

Speaking after his meeting with Trump, Patriarch Bartholomew defended his 2019 decision to grant autocephaly (church independence) to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in 2019, creating a hierarchy for Ukrainian Orthodoxy independent of Russia.

“They had repeatedly asked us for it, we were convinced that it was their right to have this ecclesiastical independence from Moscow, which, as we all know, has proven to be an enemy of the Ukrainian people,” he said, according to the Greek daily Kathimerini.

Bartholomew was invited to speak at the influential Council on Foreign Relations event in New York, where he described the war in Ukraine as an “unnecessary tragedy” costing “more than a million lives”.

“The tragedy also has a spiritual dimension,” he said. “The Orthodox Church of Russia has given its ringing endorsement to the invasion of Ukraine and the murder of fellow Orthodox Christians by the Putin regime. It has done so in service to an outdated and outlandish imperial doctrine of Rússkiy Mir.”

The focal point of the Patriarch’s 12-day visit to the US was the New York ceremony where he received the Templeton Prize, awarded to him in April in recognition of his environmental leadership.

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