Trabzon, Turkey - The controversy over cartoons of the prophet Muhammad was at a full roar on the Sunday morning that a bullet pierced the Rev. Andrea Santoro's heart, so the 61-year-old Catholic priest was initially counted as a casualty of a moment, an especially volatile one between two faiths talking loudly past each other.
Two months later, many here are still operating under that assumption. According to witnesses, after shooting the Italian priest in the back, his killer shouted, "Allahu akbar!" or "God is great," a common utterance in Muslim worship that can double as a battle cry.
But among residents of this small city overlooking the Black Sea, another explanation took firm hold in the weeks that followed the Feb. 5 killing near the altar of the only church within a hundred miles. The priest was a missionary, residents whispered to one another, and his death resulted from a dispute over the money Turks have long believed missionaries pay to Muslims they are trying to convert.
"Everybody says he was paying a lot of youngsters -- college students -- 100 euros per month to convert them," said Recep Hickorkmiz, who drives one of the white minivan taxis that crowd the city's steep streets.
"I heard it, too," said a woman on an apartment balcony overlooking the church, where she said she heard Santoro arguing with a group of young men the day before the shooting, but not what they were arguing about. "They say the boy told his friend the priest gave him 100 for registering here, and that if he goes, in he would get the same."
The talk appears to be only that. Mahya Usta, the attorney for the Turkish teenager accused in the murder, said missionary work "has nothing to do with my case." And leaders of Turkey's tiny, embattled Christian community said the ancient rumor of people paying for converts was an especially bad fit for Santoro.
"We have no money," said Bishop Luigi Padovese, vicar apostolic of Anatolia. "I gave Andrea 300 euros a month. If he gave 100 to each person. . . ."
But if the local version of events appears to have scant grounding in fact, it is anchored in a deep-seated mistrust of Christianity in Turkey, a nominally secular republic that U.S. officials frequently cite as a democratic model for the Muslim world.
"Actually, the state might be secular, but it's not making that distinction in its activities," said Isa Karatas, spokesman for Turkey's perhaps 80 evangelical Protestant churches.
Until religious minorities succeeded in changing the law, Turkey required Christians and Jews to study Islam in the religion classes that are compulsory in Turkish schools from the fourth grade. The state has confiscated hundreds of church properties, only recently returning portions under pressure from the European Union, which Turkey is trying to join.
With perhaps 100,000 Christians in a population of 70 million, Turkey officially tolerates and protects faiths other than Islam. Unlike Afghanistan, which last month threatened to execute a Christian convert, the country has no laws barring Muslims from leaving the faith or against attempts to lure them away.
Yet Turkish police charged 293 people with "missionary activity" from 1998 to 2001, a state minister told parliament recently. People who place calls to Christian groups operating inside Turkey are warned against uttering the word "missionary" on an open phone line.
"Lots of my friends say 'the M word,' " one receptionist said.
The tension dates at least to the 13th century, when Christian Crusaders sacked what is today Istanbul.
"Missionaries and the Crusades are related," Turkey's Directorate of Religious Affairs declared in a pamphlet published last June. The directorate, which exercises control over all Turkish mosques, distributed a sermon for Friday prayers nationwide a year ago. Imams warned worshipers that missionaries were involved in a plot to "steal the beliefs of our young people and children."
The warning reflected a hard fact masked by Turkey's official embrace of secular rule and Western modernity. Seven hundred years after the Crusades and eight decades after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, which claimed to unite the world's Muslims in a caliphate, modern Turkish identity is an emphatic blend of patriotism and faith.
"Praise the Lord, I am Turkish and Muslim!" goes a slogan still used by the old-timers. The identity is rooted partly in the politics of the 1920s, when European powers backed the territorial ambitions of Turkey's Christian neighbors, especially Greece. The specific antipathy toward missionaries dates to the previous century, when a crumbling Ottoman Empire used religion to guard its flanks.
But today, the surge in antipathy Turkish Christians describe also carries grave implications for Western powers. Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Muslims regard the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as an assault on Islam. In Turkey, a NATO ally often described as a bridge between civilizations, anti-American sentiment is at an all-time high.
Karatas, the Protestant spokesman, said fellow Turks often ask him: " 'If there is a war, whose side are you going to fight on?' I just couldn't get them to understand that even though I'm a Christian, my feeling for my country is the same. They just don't understand this."
Behnan Konutgan, an official with the Bible Society in Turkey who has said every Christian is obliged to spread the Good Word, has been arrested repeatedly. "When I am preaching," he said, "people think I'm an enemy of the country."
The patriotic element may have figured in Santoro's killing. Trabzon, a port city, has no great reputation for religious fundamentalism. But it is known for its nationalist extremists.
"We are thinking it's not only the problem of religion, but also of nationalism -- the two things together," said Padovese, the bishop. He said Santoro reported being confronted regularly by angry young men accusing him of missionary activities that Padovese said the church is careful not to promote.
"This is like before elections, they always say the parties give money in the villages," said Abdullah Yurduseven, a tailor whose last name means "the one who loves his country." "You never know if it's true or not."
A month before the shooting, a foreign missionary was beaten badly and driven out of town after receiving death threats, Karatas said. "Trabzon is a little chaotic," he said.
Little is known about the 16-year-old suspect awaiting trial in the Santoro case. He was expelled from a nearby high school for nonattendance, and his lawyer confirmed that he had seen a psychologist.
"He wasn't a kid who had friends," said Cahit Kose, whose bookstore adjoins the apartment where the accused lived with his mother, who has been in seclusion. "I mean, imagine, every day he passed by this window and I never noticed him."
"Here's That Kid," screamed the headline in Karadeniz, a local newspaper, after the arrest of a suspect whose face the local paper blurred. "First Testimony: He Asked for $500. He Couldn't Get It."