Frontier evangelism

Religion | Turkey’s geopolitical desires propel a fledgling church work poised in the middle of a resurgent war on terror | Marvin Olasky

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey - When a young Turk with a long butcher knife last month invaded the new Diyarbakir Evangelical Church, it was only the latest skirmish in a city close to Iraq that has been fought over for centuries. When he was arrested without anyone being injured, it was one of the rare times that blood hasn't flowed.

Romans, Parthians, Byzantines, Muslims, and many others have attacked this city: Persians took it after a 93-day siege in a.d. 359 and were so irritated by the wait that they killed probably 80,000 locals. The Persians crowded male prisoners into an amphitheater and kept them there for weeks, until they died of hunger. They fed the women to keep them available for repeated rape.

Diyarbakir could sometimes withstand attack because of its three-mile-long, 39-foot-high wall, made of huge blocks of black basalt. Inside the wall are bazaars filled with jostling shoppers speaking Turkish, Arabic, and Kurdish and donkeys weighed down by merchandise. Three-story homes sometimes overhang twisting, eight-foot-wide alleys with drainage ditches running down the middle.