BusinessEnglish1: Religion in Turkey

Hi everyone!

We visited Istanbul this week! It was a really beautiful city, especially the mosques are impressive. There are some amazing buildings over there.

Religion has always been a touchy subject, it still is! So I decided to post something about the religion in Turkey.

Turkey is a secular state with no official state religion; the Turkish Constitution provides for freedom of religion and conscience. There are three main religions in Turkey: Muslim, Judaism and Christianity.

Acording to latest data 71.1 million people in Turkey are Muslims or 98% of the total population. The majority of the Muslims are Sunni (85–90%) and a large minority is Alevi (10–15%). The highest Islamic religious authority is the Presidency of Religious Affairs, it interprets the Hanafi school of law, and is responsible for regulating the operation of the country's 75,000 registered mosques and employing local and provincial imams.

There are less than 100,000 minorities which follow other religions, mainly Christians, mostly Armenian Apostolic, Assyrian Church of the East and Greek Orthodox and Jews, mainly Sephardi.

It’s always a good idea to check out Turkey’s and Istanbul’s official, public, national, regional and religious holidays before planning a trip or a sightseeing excursion. You don’t want to be stuck in a religious holiday when nothing is open and the traffic is horrific. You have to pay special attention to the religious holidays because they change yearly. I looked up the different holidays for our week but there was no need for panic! We avoided any hectic situations.

Here are this year’s religious holidays:

· Saturday, 18 August: Sugar Feast’s Eve (Ramazan Bayramı Arifesi) – Religious Holiday – ½ day
· Sunday, 19 – Tuesday, 21 August: Sugar Feast (Ramazan Bayramı) – Religious Holidays – Three-day festival to celebrate the end of fasting (Ramadan) where plenty of sweets are eaten.
· Wednesday, 24 October: Feast of the Sacrifice’s Eve (Kurban Bayramı Arifesi) – Religious Holiday – ½ day
· Thursday, 25 – Sunday, 28 October: Feast of the Sacrifice (Kurban Bayramı) – Religious Holidays – Four-day festival where sheep are sacrificed/slaughtered and their meat is distributed to the poor

Lucky for us we weren’t there for any of them. I heard that things can get a little crazy during religious holidays. On the Feast of the Sacrifice, traffic intensifies dramatically. This is because during these holidays Turks visit their relatives all over the country.

This was a very interesting city both in a religious and cultural way.

To end my post i would like to share this video with you of a mosque we visited.

Blue Mosque