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Turkey court opens way for Hagia Sophia to revert into mosque

Published : Saturday, 11 July, 2020 at 12:00 AM  Count : 711

Turkey court opens way for Hagia Sophia to revert into mosque

Turkey court opens way for Hagia Sophia to revert into mosque

ISTANBUL, July 10: A Turkish court has annulled the museum status of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, a world-famous cultural site, enabling it to be converted into a mosque.
It is a controversial move, as 1,500-year-old Hagia Sophia was founded as a cathedral. Later the Ottomans made it a mosque. In 1934 it became a museum. It is a Unesco World Heritage site. Unesco earlier urged Turkey not to change its status without discussion.
Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for the change. Islamists in Turkey have long called for it to be converted to a mosque, but secular opposition members have opposed the move. The proposal has prompted criticism, from religious and political leaders worldwide.
The head of the Eastern Orthodox Church has condemned the proposal, as has Greece - home to many millions of Orthodox followers. The decision was made unanimously. The sixth-century Istanbul building -- a magnet for tourists -- has been a museum since 1935, open to believers of all faiths thanks to a cabinet decision stamped by modern Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
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. Transforming it into a museum was a key reform of the officially secular republic.
The Hagia Sophia is of masonry construction. The structure has brick and mortar joints that are 1.5 times the width of the bricks. The mortar joints are composed of a combination of sand and minute ceramic pieces distributed evenly throughout the mortar joints. This combination of sand and ceramic pieces could be considered the contemporaneous equivalent of modern concrete.
Built as the great Cathedral of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, it was the seat of the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople until the city fell to Ottoman conquest in 1453, except between 1204 and 1261, when it was converted by the Fourth Crusaders to a Roman Catholic cathedral under the Latin Empire. The building was later converted into an Ottoman mosque from 29 May 1453 until 1931. It was then secularized and opened as a museum on 1 February 1935. It remained the world's largest cathedral for nearly a thousand years, until Seville Cathedral was completed in 1520.    -AFP









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