ON A tiny island in the middle of Lake Van, on the far eastern edge of Turkey, a team of architects is working feverishly to restore one of the most beautiful religious buildings in the world.

Holy Cross Church, on Akdamar island, was built by the Armenian King Gagik in AD921 and was once the spiritual focus for more than a million Armenian Christians.

Today there is no one left to worship in it. The entire Armenian population here was killed or driven away by Turks and Kurdish militias during the First World War, in what Armenians claim was the first genocide of the 20th century — a charge vigorously denied by the Turkish State.

For 90 years the church was left to rot. Its frescoes disintegrated as the rainwater seeped in, and its delightful carvings were used for target practice by local gun-toting shepherds.

In the run-up to planned EU accession talks next week, however, Turkey has come under intense pressure to acknowledge its bloody past and improve its treatment of minorities.

Four months ago the restoration work finally began, and today Muslim stonemasons are busily rebuilding this church without a congregation. The scaffolding-clad church is proof that attitudes are changing, but it is also a poignant symbol of how much work — economic, political, cultural and historical — still needs to be completed.

The membership negotiations are expected to take ten years or more, and there is no guarantee that Turkey will ever enter this hitherto white, Christian club, for the idea faces widespread public hostility within Europe. For many, this poor, populous and overwhelmingly Muslim country is simply a different culture, separated from, if not actually inimical to, Europe.

Nowhere in Turkey feels less European than Lake Van, the starkly blue inland body of water on the country’s volcanic eastern edge. At dusk the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer, barefoot Kurdish children herd ragged sheep, and a pair of women, ageless and faceless in the all-enveloping burka, trudge through the dust to their mud-brick home.

An hour to the east is Iran; to the south is blood-soaked Iraq, and to the north, beyond Mount Ararat, lie Armenia and Georgia. Ancient, biblical and Middle Eastern, this is the land of Noah; but if Turkey gains admittance to the EU, it will mark Europe’s eastern border.

For many Europeans, that is a step too far. “No to Turkey”, rallies in France cried before the EU constitution was roundly rejected this year. On the shore at Copenhagen, the famous naked Little Mermaid was draped in an Islamic headscarf with a sign reading “Turkey in the EU?” Turkey’s supporters are quick to point out that Europe is not a race or a religion, but an idea. Yet the image of Turkey as an alien power is deeply embedded in European history.

Indeed, the very concept of Europe was to some extent born out of Christendom’s common cause against the great Muslim empire to the east.

Gladstone, as Prime Minister, expressed the common prejudice against a corrupt and violent Turkey threatening Europe’s very existence: “From the black day they entered Europe, the one great anti- human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went a broad line of blood marked the track behind them.”

As archaic and racist as those ideas seem today, they still have some currency, most notably in those parts of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire that remember, with an inherited shudder, the Ottoman Janissaries at the gates of Vienna.

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