Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Monday opened for worship a mosque converted from an ancient Greek Orthodox church in İstanbul, four years after he ordered its transformation, Agence France-Presse reported.
In 2020 Erdoğan ordered the building — Chora Church, 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.
İstanbul’s Hagia Sophia is an ancient cathedral that was converted into a mosque and then a museum, before becoming a mosque again.
Both changes show Erdoğan’s efforts to galvanize his more conservative and nationalist supporters.
But they add to Turkey’s problems with prelates in both the Orthodox and Catholic churches.
Erdoğan on Monday remotely opened the Kariye Mosque, located in İstanbul’s conservative Fatih neighborhood, for worship after four years of restoration, during a ceremony at the presidential palace in the capital of Ankara.
The decision in 2020 to convert it drew an angry response from neighboring Greece, which called the move “yet another provocation against religious persons everywhere.”
The Holy Saviour in Chora was a Byzantine church decorated with 14th-century frescoes of the Last Judgement that are still treasured by Christians.
A priest (L) and a woman visit the Chora or Kariye Museum, formally the Church of the Holy Saviour, a medieval Byzantine Greek Orthodox church, on August 21, 2020, in the Fatih district in İstanbul. (Photo by BULENT KILIC / AFP)
The church was converted into the Kariye Mosque half a century after the 1453 conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks.
It was designated as a museum by the Turkish government in 1945.
A group of art historians from the United States helped restore the original church’s mosaics and they were put on public display in 1958.
Hagia Sophia — once the seat of Eastern Christianity — was also converted into a mosque by the Ottomans.
Atatürk, 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.
Nearly 100 years later, Erdoğan, whose ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has Islamic roots, turned it back into a Muslim place of worship.