Turkey’s Armenian community finally won back Camp Armen last week. The Gedikpasa Armenian Protestant Church in Istanbul now owns the deed to the former orphanage and children’s camp, offering a ray of hope to Turkish Armenians and other non-Muslim minorities. The episode, however, illustrates the many obstacles that non-Muslim foundations in Turkey must overcome to re-acquire their lost properties or buy new ones.

At one level, the story is the sort that deserves a “life is beautiful” tagline, a tale that restores one’s faith in humanity. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Tuzla children’s camp on Istanbul’s Asian side served Turkey’s Armenian community both as an orphanage and summer camp, bringing together some 1,500 children from all over the country with the aim to strengthen their cultural and communal ties.

In a beautiful and romantic twist, Camp Armen was also where Turkey’s legendary public intellectual and social activist Hrant Dink (who was killed in 2007 by an ultranationalist for advocating peace and reconciliation between Turks and Armenians) spent some of his formative years and met his wife, Rakel. Not surprisingly, many focused on the sentimental aspects of the camp’s return. While the Turkish Armenian newspaper Agos wrote that “Camp Armen belongs to the children once again,” Garo Paylan, an Armenian member of parliament with the Peoples’ Democratic Party, said the return of the camp “would please Hrant Dink’s spirit.”

In fact, Camp Armen had stood in sad solitude for too long. In the early 1980s, the Turkish state shut down the camp and turned the land over to the former owner (a Turkish Muslim) who had sold it to the Armenian foundation in 1962. Citing wrong-headed legal decisions going as far back as 1936, which curtailed non-Muslim foundations’ ability to buy, purchase and maintain property — houses of worship, buildings, schools and land — the state also claimed that Camp Armen helped to train Armenian militants who assassinated Turkish diplomats at the time. Although the owner of the land was open to selling back to Armenians, he was legally barred from doing so until the late 2000s, when the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government changed the laws that restored non-Muslim foundations’ property rights.