The Orphanage Becomes a Hotel – One More National Disgrace By Bartholomew

source – pentapostagma.gr

Who cares about history when Turkish capital is handing out profits? The conversion of the Orphanage into a resort is the very definition of a national sellout.

Historical memory is expensive, and apparently, the coffers of those responsible conveniently came up empty.

The legendary orphanage on Prinkipo, the largest wooden building in Europe and one of the last remaining beacons of Hellenism in Constantinople, is being saved from collapse — but not without a price: it is being turned into a hotel.

The announcement, delivered by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew himself, employed a great deal of emotion and nostalgic memories from his childhood in order to sugarcoat an extremely bitter pill of absolute, cynical business realism.

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Since history brings no return on investment and sacred symbols generate no dividends, the contractors are stepping in.

In this case, a partnership between a Turkish and a Greek construction company will undertake the transformation of the historic refuge of the Nation’s orphans into a luxury tourist resort.

The fairy tale of bankruptcy and the invisible state of Athens

The Patriarchate’s central narrative regarding this transfer of use boils down to the cheap excuse: “We had no other solution.”

The Patriarch stated that all efforts to secure the funding needed to turn the building into an international center for ecology or interfaith dialogue, as originally planned, failed miserably. And this is precisely where common sense throws up its hands and institutional hypocrisy becomes glaringly obvious.

They are asking us, more or less, to swallow whole the idea that the Orthodox Church — a global mechanism with immeasurable real-estate wealth, access to international funds, tax-free flows of money, and an army of ultra-wealthy Greek-American magnates crowding the Patriarchate’s salons — was unable to find the money for the restoration.

The same powerful figures and shipowners who throw millions around for publicity spectacles and personal promotion vanished as if by magic when it came time to save a monument of world cultural heritage.

Besides them, the Greek state once again confirms its role as an extra in the background. Athens, so full of grand patriotic rhetoric, watches silently as a national symbol is commercialized, proving that its interest in Hellenism beyond its borders ends with press releases.

Sacred real estate and the cloak of Greek-Turkish friendship

To smooth over the unpleasant impressions among the faithful, this purely commercial deal was baptized, with excessive diplomatic audacity, as a “symbol of unity, cooperation, and friendship between Greece and Turkey.” It is truly remarkable how an agreement concerning sacred real estate is dressed up in the cloak of high geopolitics.

Let us call things by their proper names!

It is not an act of diplomacy to hand over a national and religious monument to Turkish tourism capital simply because your own mechanisms proved provocatively indifferent to protecting it.

The Patriarch’s invocation of his emotional memories — when, as a student at Halki, he played ball with the orphans in the courtyard — ultimately underscores the tragedy and irony of the development. Where once the Church embraced the unprotected children of Hellenism, tomorrow expensive cocktails will be served to tourists with room service and a view of the Sea of Marmara.

Of course, the market will say that it is preferable for the building to remain standing as a profitable business rather than collapse into a heap of rotten wood.

But let us not insult our intelligence by baptizing the crude commercialization of history as a “necessary blessing.” This is the ultimate capitulation to profit, carried out with the official blessings of a system that remembers patriotism only when it guarantees a positive balance at the end of the fiscal year.