VATICAN (CNS): “I think of Hagia Sophia, and I am very saddened,” Pope Francis said while commemorating the International Day of the Sea during his Sunday Angelus address on July 12, after a Turkish court ruled to revert the iconic Hagia Sophia museum into a mosque.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of Turkey, issued a decree handing over control of Hagia Sophia to the country’s Directorate of Religious Affairs after Turkey’s highest court revoked its status as a museum on July 10.
In a video message after the court ruling, Erdogan said that Hagia Sophia will remain “open to all locals, foreigners, Muslims and non-Muslims.”
The pope’s comments on the decision was the latest from world and religious leaders who criticised the ruling, including Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople.
In a homily during a June 30 divine liturgy, the patriarch warned that the decision “will push millions of Christians around the world against Islam.”
It is “absurd and harmful that Hagia Sophia, from a place that now allows the two peoples to meet and admire its greatness, can again become a reason for contrast and confrontation,” he said, according to the Fides news agency.
Echoing the patriarch’s words, Ioan Sauca, interim general secretary of the World Council of Churches, expressed his concern that the decision will “inevitably create uncertainties, suspicions and mistrust, undermining all our efforts to bring people of different faiths together at the table of dialogue and cooperation.”
In a July 11 letter to Erdogan, Sauca urged him to reverse his decision “in the interest of promoting mutual understanding, respect, dialogue and cooperation and avoiding cultivating old animosities and divisions.”
The decision was strongly condemned by Archbishop Elpidophoros of the New York-based Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, who called the decision “the worst example of religious chauvinism.”
He tweeted on July 10: “By shuttering Hagia Sophia as a monument, Turkey has shut the window that (Mustafa Kemal) Ataturk opened to the world.”
The cathedral, founded by Byzantine emperor, Justinian I, on the site of two earlier churches, was the world’s largest at its dedication in 537.
Hagia Sophia remained a cathedral for the Byzantine Empire until 1453, when it became a mosque following the Ottoman capture of Constantinople, today’s Istanbul, for nearly five centuries.
Under Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, it then became a museum in 1935.
It was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO in 1985.
Audrey Azoulay, director general of UNESCO, issued a statement on July 10 saying the decision was “regrettable” and “made without any form of dialogue or prior notice.”
Azoulay said, “UNESCO calls upon the Turkish authorities to initiate dialogue without delay, in order to prevent any detrimental effect on the universal value of this exceptional heritage, the state of conservation of which will be examined by the World Heritage Committee at its next session.”
Critics also accused Erdogan’s government of using the decision to boost support for his governing Justice and Development party amid economic hardships exacerbated by the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.
