Turkey’s repeal of a 1934 decision forbidding prayers in the Hagia Sofia and converting it from mosque to museum is a vindication for religious freedoms
On Friday July 10, Turkey’s highest court has repealed a previous decision that saw the 1934 conversion of the Hagia Sophia from a mosque into a museum, and put restrictions on prayers being performed at the site.
“Early modern Turkey cracked down on the practice of faith, wearing of religious garb and expression of religion, and one of the policies they enacted was to deny its religious Muslim community a place that for served as a deeply symbolic place of prayer for nearly five centuries,” he says. “Hagia Sophia’s status is not an international matter but a matter of national sovereignty for Turkey,” Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said earlier Thursday.
“Many mosques were outright destroyed or converted into Churches. By the same token, when the Spanish went to the New World, they also changed places of worship into churches. The Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral is built on the ruins of an Aztec temple,” he adds.“The Church of Prophet Elija in Thessaloniki, Greece was a former mosque. In Bulgaria, the Sveti Sedmochislenitsi Church of Sofia was converted from a Mosque into a church.
Shortly after his conquest of Constantinople and renaming of the city to Istanbul, the Sultan performed his first Friday prayers there. Apocrypha tells a story of a young Sultan who is said to have fallen to his knees in prayers of gratitude upon entering the ancient cathedral. At the time, the Hagia Sophia was already 900 years old, and had suffered at least two fires and three earthquakes, one of which caused the entire dome to collapse. It had also been ransacked and desecrated during the Fourth Crusade by Crusaders.With Istanbul’s conquest, Hagia Sophia quickly became a cultural icon, bearing deep heritage to Turkey today.
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