War On Christmas 2016: German Officials Livid Over Turkish School's Decision to Stop Teaching About Christmas

The German Foreign Office expressed anger Sunday over a decision by a German-backed international school in Istanbul, Turkey, to bar teachers from talking about Christmas in classrooms this year. The Foreign Office said it will be discussing the “completely unacceptable” resolution with its diplomatic partners in Ankara.

Several of the 35 German teachers at the prestigious high school, Istanbul Lisesi, which is partially funded by the German government, said they were being reprimanded by administrators for talking about Christmas-related topics in class, the Guardian reported Monday. They said they were also instructed to remove any advent calendars they might have had in their classrooms.

A screenshot of an email sent by school leadership to the German teachers on staff last week showed they were mandated to discontinue teaching anything related to the holiday "immediately," including lessons about its traditions and the singing of Christmas carols in class, BBC News reported Monday.

Istanbul Lisesi is a Turkish bilingual state school where the students are Turkish and are taught in Turkish, but every teacher on the staff is German and paid by German taxpayers. The school’s headmaster, however, is appointed by the Education Ministry in Ankara.

“We don’t understand the surprising decision by the management of the Istanbul Lisesi,” the German Foreign Ministry said. “It is too bad that the good tradition of pre-Christmas intercultural exchanges at the school with a long German-Turkish tradition has been suspended. We are of course taking this up with our Turkish partners.”

The move comes a week after the school’s choir abruptly dropped out of the annual Christmas concert at the German Consulate General in Istanbul scheduled for Tuesday, Reuters reported Monday. School officials accused the head of the German teacher administration of canceling the event because he did not ​support “such a religious concert.

Turkey is a candidate to join the European Union. But the school’s concert cancellation and Christmas ban are being viewed by some German politicians as attacks on secular and Western values in Turkey, which is 98 percent Muslim. Julia Klöckner, a deputy chair of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party, said the school’s decision not to celebrate the Christian holiday showed Turkey was dissociating itself from its relationship with Europe and the outside world. Other politicians are calling on Berlin to summon the Turkish ambassador to complain about the ways in which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was looking to eradicate secular views from everyday life in Turkey, BBC News reported Monday.

“Those who want to restrain free thinking in this way are so ignorant, they must be capable of worse,” Klöckner said.

The school denied the Christmas ban on its website Sunday, saying media reports were inaccurate. The statement also said the school had allowed its students to perform at the Christmas concert under the supervision of the Turkish Education Ministry and with the approval of each student's parents, but the concert had been canceled by the German teachers for reasons that were unclear.

“The reports in German media about restrictions on Christmas festivities of German teachers do not reflect reality,” the school said in its statement. “A concert was canceled by the German teachers in question without explanation. There is no question of the school or its management placing an obstacle in its way or prohibiting it.”