was established in Gemlik. The Laz community successfully lobbied Turkey's Education Ministry to offer Laz-language instruction in schools around the Black Sea region. In 2013, the Education Ministry added Laz as a four-year elective course for secondary students, beginning in the fifth grade. Language Lazuri is a complex and morphologically rich tongue belonging to the South Caucasian language family whose other members are Mingrelian, Svan and Georgian. N. Marr regarded Laz and Megrelian, two dialects of "linguistically one" language, as two languages. The Laz language does not have a written history, thus Turkish and Georgian serve as the main literary languages for the Laz people. Their folk literature has been transmitted orally and has not been systematically recorded. The first attempts at establishing a distinct Laz cultural identity and creating a literary language based on the Arabic alphabet was made by Faik Efendisi in the 1870s, but he was soon imprisoned by the Ottoman authorities, while most of his works were destroyed. During a relative cultural autonomy granted to the minorities in the 1930s, the written Laz literature—based on the Laz script—emerged in Soviet Georgia, strongly dominated by Soviet ideology. The poet Mustafa Baniṣi spearheaded this short-lived movement, but an official standard form of the tongue was never established. Since then, several attempts have been made to render the pieces of native literature in the Turkish and Georgian alphabets. A few native poets in Turkey such as Raşid Hilmi and Pehlivanoğlu have appeared later in the 20th century. Religion Andrew the Apostle after traveling from Trebizond into Lazica in the first century AD, built a church here. The significance of the apostle's activities was that he introduced the principle of Christian faith and thereby paved the way for later missionary activities. The Lazes were converted to Christianity in the 5th century by the first Christian king, Gubazes I of Lazica, who declared Christianity as a state religion of Lazica. After the introduction of Christianity, Phasis was the see of a Greek diocese, one of whose bishops, Cyrus, became a Patriarch of Alexandria between AD 630 and 641. Trebizond became the metropolitan see of Lazica when the ancient metropolis, Phasis, was lost by the Byzantine Empire. Trebizond, which was the only diocese established far in the past, Cerasous and Rizaion, both formed as upgraded bishoprics. All three dioceses survived the Ottoman conquest (1461) and generally operated until the 17th century, when