Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday opened for worship a mosque converted from an ancient Orthodox church in Istanbul, four years after he ordered its transformation.
\nIn 2020, Erdogan ordered the building — which was a Byzantine church, then a mosque and then a museum — to be converted into a Muslim place of worship one month after a similarly controversial ruling on the UNESCO-protected Hagia Sophia.
\nIstanbul\u2019s Hagia Sophia is an ancient cathedral that was converted into a mosque and then a museum, before becoming a mosque again.
\nBut they add to Turkey\u2019s problems with prelates in both the Orthodox and Catholic churches.
\nErdogan on Monday remotely opened Kariye Mosque for worship after four years of restoration, during a ceremony at the presidential palace in the capital, Ankara.
\nThe decision in 2020 to convert it drew an angry response from neighboring Greece, which called the move \u201cyet another provocation against religious persons everywhere.\u201d
\nThe Holy Savior in Chora was a Byzantine church decorated with 14th-century frescoes of the Last Judgement that are still treasured by Christians.
\nThe church was converted into Kariye Mosque half a century after the 1453 conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks.
\nIt became the Kariye Museum after World War II, when Turkey sought to create a more secular republic from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.
\nA group of art historians from the United States helped restore the original church\u2019s mosaics and they were put on public display in 1958.
\nHagia Sophia — once the seat of Eastern Christianity — was also converted into a mosque by the Ottomans.
\nAtaturk, the founder of modern Turkey after World War I, turned the UNESCO World Heritage site into a museum in a bid to promote religious neutrality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday opened for worship a mosque converted from an ancient Orthodox church in Istanbul, four years after he ordered its transformation. In 2020, Erdogan ordered the building — which was a Byzantine church, then a mosque and then a museum — to be converted into a Muslim place of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":21012,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21008"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21044,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21008\/revisions\/21044"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}