Political move: Turkey’s Council of State decided to turn former cathedral-turned-mosque-turned-museum Hagia Sophia back into a Muslim house of worship. — AFP
HUMAN history is replete with instances of places of worship being repurposed by rival faiths in the wake of conquests or other cataclysms. It’s no longer a common phenomenon, yet it’s hard not to see the recent reversion of Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia from museum to mosque as a throwback to that trend.
The young Turkish republic under Kemal Pasha Ataturk turned the mosque into a museum back in 1934-35 as part of its commitment to secularism, given the eloquent structure has been constructed as a church in what was then known as Constantinople 537AD, and remained so for more than 900 years, serving for centuries as the Orthodox equivalent of the Vatican.
