Erdogan plans to re-convert an Orthodox shrine into a mosque
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has submitted to the country's State Council the issue of transforming the Orthodox Hagia Sophia Cathedral from a secular museum into a mosque.
Balkan media reported this, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
The Greeks began collecting signatures on a petition to UNESCO asking them to prevent the second desecration of the Roman (Byzantine) Hagia Sophia and turning it into a Muslim mosque.
However, Turkish President Erdogan has already responded to their initiative, saying that “Turkey is a sovereign country,” and therefore “Greece should refrain from making such statements.” It is expected that the Turkish State Council will consider the issue of re-converting Hagia Sophia into a mosque on July 2.
That a positive decision can be made on this issue is evidenced by the precedent of another Roman (Byzantine) Orthodox shrine - the Church of Christ the Savior in the Fields, which by decision of the same State Council in November last year was again turned into a mosque.
It should be noted that during the previous alteration, and according to Orthodox canons - desecration of the temple, the Turks covered up the frescoes of the Palaiologan era.
The seriousness of the intentions of the current Turkish government is also evidenced by the fact that this year, during the celebrations in honor of the next anniversary of the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, the convinced neo-Ottomanist Erdogan personally read the “victorious” surah of the Koran, Al-Fatih, within the walls of the Orthodox cathedral.
It is characteristic that Greek politicians, the priesthood of the Church of Greece and even Turkish liberals actively oppose the alteration of the Hagia Sophia, but the Patriarchate of Constantinople, on whose canonical territory the Roman shrines are located, says nothing against it. Let us remember that it was the Patriarchate of Constantinople that gave the tomos to the schismatic pseudo-church formation of the OCU.
After the capture of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottomans converted Hagia Sophia into a mosque, adding minarets, buttresses and changing the interior of the temple. However, when at the beginning of the last century, the ideologist of Turkish nationalism Kemal Ataturk, who had a rather cool attitude towards religion, came to power in Turkey, then under his rule in 1935 the cathedral received the status of a museum, thanks to which it was possible to partially restore its original appearance, in particular, by clearing plaster frescoes of the Roman era.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.