Erdoğan Orders Halki Seminary Talks Before Trump's Ankara Visit
By Bosphorus News Geopolitics Desk
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has ordered Turkish officials to continue talks on reopening the Halki Seminary near Istanbul, moving the Orthodox Christian education file back into formal negotiations before U.S. President Donald Trump's expected visit to Ankara for the July NATO summit.
The instruction puts the seminary, closed since 1971, back on the Türkiye-U.S. and Türkiye-Greece diplomatic agenda after Trump raised the issue with Erdoğan last year and Orthodox Church officials pressed for a legal path that would allow the school to operate again.
Reuters reported on June 21 that Erdoğan gave the order to Türkiye's Council of Higher Education (YÖK) to continue discussions with a committee from the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The report said there is still no timetable for reopening the school, with renovation work and the legal-educational model still unresolved.
The Turkish official record remains narrower. Anadolu Agency said Erdoğan received Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew at the Presidential Complex in Ankara on June 16, but gave no public detail on the substance of the closed meeting.
The Patriarchate-linked Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate said Bartholomew attended the meeting with Metropolitan Emmanuel of Chalcedon and Bishop Kassianos of Aravissos, the abbot of the Holy Trinity Monastery of Halki. The discussion focused on the prospect of reopening the theological school, with the file now moving through talks involving Türkiye's Education Ministry, YÖK and the Patriarchate.
Halki Seminary, founded in 1844 on Heybeliada in the Princes' Islands, served as the main theological school of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and trained generations of Orthodox clergy, including Bartholomew. It was closed after a 1971 Constitutional Court ruling required private higher education institutions to operate under state supervision, a model the Patriarchate did not accept.
The current talks do not mean the school has been cleared to resume teaching. The question is whether Türkiye and the Patriarchate can agree on a structure that satisfies state education rules while allowing Orthodox theological training to restart after more than five decades.
Bosphorus News reported in May that Bartholomew had pointed to a possible September inauguration for the restored building, while Patriarchate officials later narrowed that reading and said there were no immediate plans to restart teaching. The distinction remains central to the file: the building may be restored and inaugurated before the legal status of the school is settled.
The issue has gained weight because Trump is expected to attend the NATO summit in Ankara on July 7-8. The seminary has long been followed by the United States, Greece and European institutions as part of Türkiye's non-Muslim minority rights record, while Ankara has often linked the Halki file to the treatment of the Turkish minority in Western Thrace and other religious-rights issues in Greece.
Bartholomew placed the issue inside that wider minority-rights debate earlier this month, saying Greeks in Türkiye and Turks in Greece should not be treated as extensions of their respective states. "No one should turn us into hostages of political conflicts and calculations," he said, in remarks covered by Bosphorus News.
For the Patriarchate, reopening the school would restore the institutional base for training clergy in Istanbul. For Türkiye, the decision would carry domestic legal, nationalist and foreign-policy consequences, especially if the model is seen as creating a special status outside the ordinary higher education system.
Metropolitan Emmanuel has described the latest stage as a new phase after years of stalled discussions. The next step is not a public ceremony at the restored building, but an agreement among Ankara, YÖK and the Patriarchate on licence, supervision and teaching authority.
Sources: Reuters, Anadolu Agency, Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, Bosphorus News review and reporting.