Pontiff says his ‘thoughts go to Istanbul’ after
decision to convert Byzantine-era monument
Agence
France-Presse in Vatican City
Sun 12 Jul
2020 13.17 BSTLast modified on Sun 12 Jul 2020 20.15 BST
Pope
Francis has said he was “very distressed” over Turkey’s decision to convert the
Byzantine-era monument Hagia Sophia back into a mosque.
“My
thoughts go to Istanbul. I’m thinking about Hagia Sophia. I am very
distressed,” the pontiff said in the Vatican’s first reaction to a decision
that has drawn international criticism.
On Saturday
the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano carried reaction from various
countries to Friday’s decision, without making any comment.
A magnet
for tourists worldwide, the Hagia Sophia was first constructed as a cathedral
in the Christian Byzantine empire but was converted into a mosque after the
Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.
Turkey’s
president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, announced on Friday that Muslim prayers would
begin on 24 July at the Unesco world heritage site.
In the
past, he has repeatedly called for the building to be redesignated as a mosque,
and in 2018 he recited a verse from the Qur’an at Hagia Sophia.
Erdoğan’s
announcement came after a court cancelled a 1934 cabinet decision under modern
Turkey’s secularising founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, to preserve the
church-turned-mosque as a museum.
Hagia Sophia is too complex for Erdoğan's
cleansing
Kenan Malik
The president’s decision to turn Istanbul’s Byzantine
cathedral back into a mosque seeks to erase the past
Published
onSun 12 Jul 2020 06.30 BST
“Solomon, I
have outdone thee.” So remarked Justinian, the Roman emperor who commissioned
Hagia Sophia, the great cathedral at the heart of Constantinople, now Istanbul.
Throughout its history it has been a source of wonder and debate. Now, the
decision by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to turn it back into a
mosque has reawakened many of the historical and religious ghosts that haunt
its sublime spaces.
Completed
in 537, Hagia Sophia was at once the culminating architectural achievement of
late antiquity and the first Byzantine masterpiece. Most remarkable was the
huge dome at the heart of the building. “It seems not to be founded on solid
masonry, but to be suspended from heaven,” wrote the great historian Procopius.
A millennium later, the Ottoman historian Tursun Beg was equally awestruck:
“What a dome, that vies in rank with the nine spheres of heaven!”
Beneath the
dome are 40 windows through which sunlight suffuses the interior, illuminating
gold mosaics and conjuring, for believers and non-believers alike, a sense of
ineffable mystery.
Hagia
Sophia was the seat of the Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople, and the
spiritual heart of Byzantium. After the city was captured by the Ottomans, in
1453, Constantinople became Istanbul and Hagia Sofia a mosque, Ayasofya. In
1935, under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, it was turned into a museum.
The stones,
pillars and mosaics of Hagia Sophia embody the complexity of Turkish and
European history, of the Christian and Islamic traditions. Its very existence
is a rebuke to Erdoğan’s attempt to cleanse history of that complexity, and to
conjure a singular, mythical past.
• Kenan
Malik is an Observer columnist
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