• Massacre Christchurch. Erdogan shows the killer again. Premier New Zealand: we will reply

Share

28 March 2019 "Hagia Sophia will no longer be a museum. Its status will change. We will call it a mosque". This was said by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, three days after the administrative elections across Turkey. "Those who remain silent when the al-Aqsa mosque (in Jerusalem) is attacked, trampled on, its windows are broken, cannot tell us what to do with the status of Hagia Sophia," he added in a TV interview.

Built in the 6th century, after having been a Christian basilica for almost a millennium, Hagia Sophia - one of the symbolic monuments of Istanbul - became a mosque with the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. After the creation of the Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1935 it turned into a museum that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. 

It is not the first time that Erdogan has launched this proposal. In the past, he had already used the promise before difficult electoral rounds, without ever taking any concrete action to bring Hagia Sophia back to the status of an Islamic place of worship.