ABTTF President: “It is quite normal for our country to protect the Greek Orthodox minorities living abroad as a motherland. However, we expect Minister Pierrakakis to show the same sensitivity towards the issues faced by the Turkish community in Western Thrace whom are Greek citizens and who share the same fate with the Greek Orthodox minority in our motherland Türkiye, in the field of education. We hope and wish that at the meeting of the High Level Cooperation Council in Athens on 7 December, he will make suprise statements about our rightful demands with respect to the minority education of our community which will satisfy us’’.
Our country Greece’s Minister of Education, Religious Affairs and Sports, Kyriakos Pierrakakis, paid a working visit to Istanbul to obtain information about the situation of the Greek Orthodox minority’s schools and to discuss the issues faced by Greek education and the most appropriate solutions to improve them.
Pierrakakis met with the principals of schools belonging to the Greek Orthodox minority in Istanbul, as well as representatives of associations and organisations that support education in these schools, and noted that he had the opportunity to learn many issues during his visit, and that the Ministry of Education, Religious Affairs and Sports will continue to support the educational needs of Greek kin communities. During his visit to Istanbul, Pierrakakis also had a private meeting with Fener Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew.
“Pierrakakis, our country’s Minister of Education, Religious Affairs and Sports, is doing what needs to be done. It is quite normal for our country to protect the Greek Orthodox minorities living abroad as a motherland. However, we expect Minister Pierrakakis to show the same sensitivity towards the issues faced by the Turkish community in Western Thrace whom are Greek citizens and who share the same fate with the Greek Orthodox minority in our motherland Türkiye, in the field of education. President of our motherland, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, will be in Athens on 7 December with a large delegation for the 5th High Level Cooperation Council meeting. In this meeting, the educational issues of our community and our demands will also be brought to the agenda. We demand the restoration of our educational autonomy, which was guaranteed by the Treaty of Lausanne but is not implemented in practice today due to various laws and practices. We demand that the competent authorities respond positively to our request to build a new school building at the Xanthi Turkish Minority Secondary and High School, as the existing classrooms are insufficient, and to open bilingual Turkish minority kindergartens in Western Thrace. We hope that Minister Pierrakakis will make surprise statements about our rightful demands with respect to the minority education of our community which will satisfy us at the meeting in Athens’’, said Halit Habip Oğlu, President of the Federation of Western Thrace Turks in Europe (ABTTF).
