Churches across Turkey, which are devoid of their congregants due to continued Christian persecution, are systematically desecrated by the government and many citizens of the country, Jihad Watch reports.
One of the latest victims is the Assyrian/Syriac Mor Aday Church. It is being used as a stable by local villagers in a district in southeast Turkey.
The Mor Aday Church, a place of worship of Assyrians, is used as a barn by the villagers since it is left without a congregation and neglected [by authorities] in the Idil district of the province of Sirnak in southeast Turkey.
The Mor Aday Church is estimated to have been built in 620 A.D. Although the walls of the church, which has a history of 1,400 years, are mostly standing, it resembles a ruin because it is not a protected site.
Turkey’s Armenian, Greek and Assyrian (or Syriac) communities disappeared as a result of a staggered campaign of genocide beginning in 1894, perpetrated against them by their Muslim neighbors. By 1924, the Christian communities of Turkey and its adjacent territories had been destroyed.
The culmination of Christian persecution in Ottoman Turkey was the 1913-23 Genocide, during which Assyrians, Armenians, and Greeks were targeted.
Along with the hundreds of thousands of homes, shops, farms, orchards, factories, warehouses, and mines belonging to the Armenians, the church and school buildings also disappeared or were converted to other uses. If not burnt and destroyed outright in 1915 or left to deteriorate by neglect, they became converted buildings for banks, radio stations, mosques, state schools, or state monopoly warehouses for tobacco, tea, sugar, etc., or simply private houses and stables for the Turks and Kurds.
