CLEARLY a labour of love and born of a passion for recording and celebrating women who have lived the Christian life in Asia Minor and what is now Turkey over two millennia, Rosamund Wilkinson’s information-crammed book is absorbing and just a little frustrating.
She found a reference, in a somewhat lyrical passage in Gregory Dix’s The Shape of the Liturgy, to “a little ill-spelled ill-carved rustic epitaph of the fourth century from Asia Minor: — ‘Here sleeps the blessed Chione, who has found Jerusalem, for she prayed much’.” Wilkinson, an Anglican priest and teacher who has lived for many years in Turkey, responds strongly to obscure or lowly Christian lives faithfully lived, as well as to the biographies and hagiographies of the famous and the officially saintly. More than 50 women are showcased, from Lydia of Thyatira (Acts 16) to Sister Meryem NDS (born Zübeyde Ismet Faik Topuz, Istanbul, 1901, died near Marseilles, 1991).
Her title allows for treatment of foreign Christian women who came to Asia Minor and Turkey, such as Florence Nightingale, and those like Sister Meryem who left it, as well as the many who were born and died within its vast geography. St Helena, Constantine’s mother, probably born in Bithynia, takes her place, of course, as one of the many great (and occasionally good) empresses or near-empresses. So does St Nino, revered as the Enlightener of Georgia and Equal-to-the-Apostles, who is said to have travelled from Cappadocia in the early 300s with a burning desire to bring the faith to the ancient land of (Caucasian) Iberia.
Wilkinson’s scope is generously ecumenical, and she is unafraid to note that some of the women she records would be looked at askance or as heretics by their sisters of earlier or later ages. Mary Fisher of Pontefract (1623-98) was a Quaker who arrived at Adrianople with a conviction that she must deliver enlightenment to the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet IV. He “received her graciously and cordially”. Movingly, Wilkinson tells the story of Araxie Jebejian, a 30-year-old Armenian “Bible woman” and teacher trained in Birmingham who was murdered in the Armenian Genocide of 1916.
My slight frustration was that, even though Wilkinson says that her book is not a church history for the region, it would have been helpful to emphasise to readers the depth of the traumas, for the historic Christian population, of 1453 (and preceding earlier Ottoman attrition of the Christian Byzantine Empire) and, after the Armenian Genocide, of the Turkish War of Independence of 1919 to 1923. That said, my only quibbles with this affecting book are the lack of an index despite several appendices, and the slip that has the empresses Irene (c.750-803) and Theodora (c.815-c.867) as iconoclasts rather than iconodules.
The Rt Revd Michael Lewis is a former Bishop in Cyprus & the Gulf and Primate of the Province of the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East.
Christian Women in Turkey — A history: A survey of notable Christian women in Asia Minor and Anatolia from 33CE to 2021
Rosamund Wilkinson
Egeria Press £19.99
(978-1-3999-0464-3)
Church Times Bookshop £17.99
