Lawyers for the Armenian Church said Tuesday that they had filed a lawsuit with Turkey’s highest court seeking a return of the church’s headquarters, a sacred site in the south-central city of Kozan confiscated by the Ottoman authorities in 1915 as part of their broad repression of the Armenian Christian minority. About 1.5 million Armenians were killed during that era in what is now widely regarded as a genocide. The lawsuit, brought in the Constitutional Court of Turkey, is an unprecedented effort by the Armenian Church to use the Turkish legal system to recover property seized 100 years ago, said Payam Akhavan, a former prosecutor at The Hague and the church’s lead international counsel in the case. The suit, filed Monday, came a few days after Armenia officially commemorated the centennial of the genocide.
Source: NYtime