ICC Note: One of Turkey’s most famous landmarks is at the center of a controversy that highlights the fragile position of the country’s Christian community. Statements from Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arinç, who oversees policy towards historical buildings once owned by religious minorities, has indicated “the days of a mosque being a museum are over.” The Orthodox community has raised serious concerns about what this means for the church that for more than 900 years was Christendom’s most important church, before it was converted to a mosque following the conquering of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks. Since 1935 it has been a museum, but what it will be in the future is now unclear.
By Dorian Jones
12/05/2013 Turkey (Eurasianet) – A senior Turkish minister’s call to turn Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia from a museum back into a mosque is stoking a dispute between Turkey’s Islamist-rooted government and the country’s Orthodox Christian community.
“We do hope that the Turkish government will reconsider and have to think very seriously,” warned Metropolitan Genadios of Sassima, a senior official in the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, one of the world’s 14 autocephalous Orthodox Christian communities.
For over 900 years, Hagia Sophia (“Holy Wisdom” in Greek), built in 537, was Christendom’s most important church. But when Constantinople (as Istanbul was then called), fell to the Ottomans in 1453, it became a mosque, and for nearly 500 years it ranked among the Ottoman Empire’s grandest places of worship. In 1935, the founders of Turkey’s secular republic sought transformed Hagia Sophia into a museum.
The iconic building continues to carry important political significance. “The Islamists have always aspired for it to be a mosque,” while Turkish secularists want it to remain “a neutral place,” and Christians see it as a church, noted İştar Gözaydin, a professor of law and politics at Istanbul’s Doğuş University, and an expert on the relationship between the state and religion.
Until Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2003, the chances of Hagia Sophia reverting to a mosque were slim to none. But with the country’s Islamic heritage now experiencing a revival after decades of government-imposed secularism, the prospect is not entirely unlikely.
On a November 16 trip to Hagia Sophia, Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç, who oversees policy toward historical buildings that once belonged to religious minorities, declared to television reporters that “[t]he days of a mosque being a museum are over.”
With the country heading into an 18-month election-cycle in 2014, politics are believed to have motivated Arınc’s statements. In campaign speeches for next March’s municipal elections, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is drawing heavily on the country’s Ottoman past. The message is aimed at both religious and nationalist voters, key AKP constituencies.
The strategy could well prove a vote-winner.
“God willing, it will be a mosque,” said one teenager, leaving Hagia Sophia recently. “Fatih Sultan Mehmet wanted this. When he conquered Istanbul, the first thing he did was to convert it into a mosque. That’s why it should be a mosque again.”
Deputy Prime Minister Arınc has the reputation of a political maverick, a man prone to making incendiary statements that are not always followed up on by the government. But the fact that Arınc’s name also has been linked to the mosque-makeover of two other church-museums also named Hagia Sophia (in Iznik and Trabzon) means that even the mention of a similar fate for Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia has sparked alarm among the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul.
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