MARIA ANTONIA DI CASOLA

I rapporti tra Turchia e Santa Sede. Condizionamenti interni e scenario internazionale

N. 207

Summary - The paper draws almost entirely on the unpublished diplomatic documents that are in the Italian Historical Archives at the Foreign Affaires Ministry. The paper aims at reconstructing the almost ten-years long phase (1952-1960) during which Turkish and Vatican diplomacies  tought  to  create  official diplomatic relationships. The reciprocal recognition was considered beneficial from both parties and was discreetly supported by the Italian diplomacy. However, it was also hindered by difficulties on the Turkish domestic scene  and by conditionings from the international scenario.  Turkey became a NATO member in 1952, was always deeply involved in the Western attempts o create defensive institutions  in  the  Middle  East  (Baghdad Pact).  She always considered the establishment of relationship with the Holy Seat — which was also extremely hostile to Communism - as a natural and useful additional  signal  of her accomplished membership of the group of Western nations. At the same time, the then in charge  Democratic Party was dealing with the reviving religious fundamentalism, thorugh increasingly anti-democratic laws  (the « Public Health Laws »). The religious fundamentalism, used to win the 1950 elections, was then threatening the  lay status of the Kemalist state and the  establishment of relationship with that religious emblem that the "State of the  Pope" represented.   Official and informal contacts, intertwined with silence, characterized the inquiries between Ankara and the Holy Seat. The latter was also interested in solving the recognition of Turkey and at  the same time the “vexata quaestio”  ot the re-establishment of the relationship  with Greece, where, during the violence  committed in Instanbul against the Greeks unleashed by the question over Cyprus,   the Pope had seemed very distant from the orthodox Patriarchate, that had been  accepted in Turkish territory during the   Lausanne agreement in response to the  positive attitude that the Holy Seat had   showed towards Kemalism.    After the problem over Cyprus was settled with the 1959 Treaty, the appropriate political time for the establishment ot  official relations  came in  1960,  during  the pontificate of John XXIII that, for ten   years,  between  1935  and  1945,  had    served as Apostolic Delegate "on the   flowering shores of the Bosphorus and on the immense Anatolian plateau".