All articles in category Turkey
By Ann Winch
September 2009
Turkey
Missionary Spotlight – A great work in retirement
A great work in retirement While serving Christ as missionaries with European Missionary Fellowship (EMF) in Turkey, in spring 1975, David and I were privileged to be the hosts to a retired Greek pastor from Piraeus, Athens. Stavros Delianides had been invited to preach to the few remaining Greek Protestants in Istanbul over the Easter period. Seated around the kitchen table in our flat on the European side of the city, this dear gentleman, then in his mid-70s, told us his life story. Stavros, ethnically Greek, had been born in Urdu on the Black Sea coast of Turkey, into a Greek Orthodox...
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June 2007
Turkey
Martyrs for Christ
Martyrs for Christ Three evangelical Christians have been murdered in Malatya, eastern Turkey, as they met for Bible study at the offices of a small Christian publishing company. The victims, a German missionary and two Turkish converts, were tortured before being killed. Ten Muslim religious students, all aged 19 or 20, have been arrested. The victims were Tilman Geske, husband and father of three from Germany; Necati Aydin, a local church pastor and father of two; and Ugur Yuksel, a young convert only recently engaged to be married. On Wednesday morning 18 April the men left their respective homes to gather at the premises of...
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By Ann Winch
April 2007
Turkey
Missionary Spotlight – Gospel seed in southeast Turkey
We arrived in the early 1970s in Aintep (or Gaziantep) – Turkey’s eighth largest commercial city and a centre for the cotton industry. It was not long before we experienced its spiritual darkness. In Istanbul, the minority Christian population had substantially influenced the culture, so here it was a shock to see superstitious and occult practices mixed with Islam. Poverty was rife and many (both Kurds and Turks) struggled to survive, while a tiny minority, including our landlord, enjoyed great wealth. My husband David had secured a teaching post in the Super Lise School which this man had established for the elite. This enabled us...
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By Ann Winch
April 2007
Turkey
Missionary Spotlight – Gospel seed in southeast Turkey
We arrived in the early 1970s in Aintep (or Gaziantep) – Turkey’s eighth largest commercial city and a centre for the cotton industry. It was not long before we experienced its spiritual darkness. In Istanbul, the minority Christian population had substantially influenced the culture, so here it was a shock to see superstitious and occult practices mixed with Islam. Poverty was rife and many (both Kurds and Turks) struggled to survive, while a tiny minority, including our landlord, enjoyed great wealth. My husband David had secured a teaching post in the Super Lise School which this man had established for the elite. This enabled us...
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By Ann Winch
November 2005
Turkey
Missionary Spotlight – A storm in Turkey
Beside one of the beautiful Bosphorus bays in Istanbul lies the Bebek Park, where one can sit and watch large ships passing to and from the Black Sea. In the spring, steep wooded hills are ablaze with the red blossom of ‘Judas’ trees — which symbolise to Armenians the blood of the traitor Judas. In 1967, only a few months after we arrived in Turkey as missionaries, we befriended a poor family who lived in a small shed in this park. Each evening I visited them and was welcomed into their hovel, lit by an oil lamp. After tea served in tiny tea glasses and...
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By Ann Winch
March 2004
Turkey
Missionary Spotlight – Women of Turkey
Millions of Turkey’s city-dwellers live in apartments. The doorman or kapiciis the caretaker of an apartment block, and every block employs one. He and his family usually live rent-free in a dark basement apartment, close to the central-heating boiler room. His wife is responsible for cleaning the staircases and getting up early to buy bread, water and newspapers for all the families, on all the floors. To supplement their meagre income, she usually takes on cleaning jobs for the better-off. These kapici and their families are often uneducated villagers. They are low on the social scale, where scales are all-important. Affection The...
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By Ann Winch
October 2003
Turkey
Missionary Spotlight – Turkish memories
Life was never boring when my husband David and I were living in Turkey. Difficult, eventful, yes — but never boring! Waiting on the railway platform at Izmir, returning from my weekly visit supporting expatriate children being home-schooled, a friendly village woman chatted to me about the impossibility of her buying local high-priced meat and cheese. I felt a pang of guilt when, as the train approached, she slipped a bag of parsley into my hand. How often I had experienced the generosity of the poor. Train journeys But then to board the train! The second-hand rolling stock purchased from Italy did not...
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By Trinitarian Bible Society
October 2003
Turkey
Missionary Spotlight – Scriptures for Turkey, Armenia and Lithuania
Turkey, Armenia and Lithuania are three countries which today seem to have very little in common. However, as with so many parts of the world, these places are in dire need of sound and accurate editions of the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make their inhabitants ‘wise unto salvation’ (2 Timothy 3:15). The Trinitarian Bible Society has therefore been pleased recently to publish the Turkish Gospel of John, the Armenian Gospel of John, and the Lithuanian Gospel of Mark — with the prayer that the Lord will bless their distribution to the various peoples of these nations. Turkey The Turkish Gospel of John was...
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By David Winch
January 2002
Turkey
A Bible for modern Turkey
The date is 6 October 2001 and there is great rejoicing in a church in Istanbul. One lady puts it like this: ‘I have cried a lot today. Today the Bible is in my hands’. She expresses the feeling of the other Turkish believers when she says, ‘We are very happy … more than happy, we are proud. Today I feel myself closer to God in my own language, in my own being. For this is my language. The Lord speaks to me in my own language’. Lampstand removed This lady’s excitement is like that of those who heard the apostle Peter on the day...
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By Ann Winch
January 1999
Turkey
MISSIONARY SPOTLIGHT-Istanbul
The ancient capital of the eastern Roman Empire, Constantinople, occupied a comparatively small area of land, protected on three sides by water. In this area, on the European side of the Bosphorus, are Istanbul’s covered market and university. In 1966, when we first lived in Istanbul (no longer a capital city), the population was three million. Today it has reached seventeen million, with many migrants from the east of Turkey, and now the city covers a large area. High-rise flats and minarets dominate the landscape. The air pollution has to be seen to be believed. Overwhelming suffering It is impossible to be indifferent to suffering,...
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December 1998
Turkey
A summer holiday- with a difference
One summer’s morning, in the early hours, a small group of us arrived, bleary-eyed and a little bewildered, at the airport in Turkey. Our Bible studies during our stay in Turkey were to be in the book of Esther, when, morning by morning, we were reminded of God’s hand of providence in the lives of his people, in Shushan and the king’s provinces. By big and seemingly small events, by placing the right people in the right place at the right time, by overturning events completely, God works out his eternal purposes. The seven-hour bus ride that followed was awful, as we hurtled down...
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