When Hagia Sophia is formally reverted to a mosque later this month, it will be yet another manifestation of Erdogan’s vision for a conquering Islamist Turkey. by Arielle Del Turco One of the architectural wonders of the world, the Hagia Sophia cathedral was conquered once before. It was converted into a mosque by its Ottoman conquerors; minarets were added, and its ancient Byzantine mosaics were whitewashed. More recently, it has functioned as a museum for decades. Now, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has decreed that the historic Hagia Sophia church should be reverted into a mosque once again.
This aggressive move is about much more than a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It reveals Erdogan’s agenda to assert his vision for an expansionist Islamist Turkey, endangering Christians and other religious minorities in Turkey and throughout the Middle East. Built as a cathedral by the Emperor Justinian I in 537, Hagia Sophia is still central to Orthodox Christianity. Upon the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans, it was converted to a mosque in 1453 as a sign of the Ottoman’s triumph and domination of the Christian population. Centuries later in 1934, the secular founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, turned Hagia Sophia into a museum open to all. It had remained a museum until now. The recent change back into a mosque has upset Christian leaders around the globe who remember the Ottoman Empire’s brutal treatment of Christians. Some from the Orthodox tradition find the move traumatic. When courts affirmed the validity of Erdogan’s plan for the cathedral, he declared, “Hagia Sophia became a mosque again, after eighty-six years, in the way Fatih the conqueror of Istanbul had wanted it to be.” Erdogan has long fantasized about resurrecting a neo-Ottoman state. This swing back toward the time of Ottoman sultan Fatih Sultan Mehmet (known as Mehmed the Conqueror) rightly alarms Christian communities throughout the Middle East because they stand in the way of Erdogan’s vision of a new empire.
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