Quote:The restoration of Hagia Sophia (Santa Sophia) in Istanbul as a place of Muslim worship after a gap of 85 years conveys a powerful message regionally and to the western world. For Turkey too this is a defining moment, as it overturns a decree by Kemal Ataturk designating Santa Sophia as a museum.
Europe will have no difficulty to comprehend the political message behind Erdogan’s decision to revisit a poignant chapter in the Ottoman conquest of the Byzantine Empire. Greece has expressed its “intense concern and discomfort”. But Turkish Foreign Ministry promptly rejected the Greek demarche as “unacceptable”.
After all, in the ultimate analysis, Erdogan is only restoring the status quo ante. What used to be the Byzantine church, built as an Orthodox Christian basilica by Emperor Justinian I in 537 was converted into a mosque following Sultan Ahmet II’s conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Ataturk made it a museum in 1935 and now Erdogan restores it as a mosque and an Ottoman legacy.
Nonetheless, the European countries will take Erdogan’s decision as an affront and a provocation, and it is bound to fuel further their collective antipathy toward him. In Turkey itself, though, his immense popularity will not be affected. (By the way, Erdogan is also ignoring the opposition from the “secularist” camp in Turkey to the very idea of reconsecration of the Hagia Sophia for Islam. Read a report by Newsweek, here, one year ago.