The Turkish Ministry of Defense strongly condemned the move of the Greeks to burn the flag of its country in the city of Thessaloniki in northern Greece, in order to protest against the establishment of the first Friday prayer in the Great Hagia Sophia Mosque in Istanbul the day before yesterday, after the Turkish judiciary's decision to cancel the decision to convert it from a mosque to a museum.
The Turkish Defense Ministry said in a tweet on Twitter that the Greek authorities should "put an immediate end to such provocations."
Yesterday, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said that Greece's protest against the opening of the Hagia Sophia to worship "once again demonstrated its hostility to Islam and Turkey," and the ministry strongly condemned the hostile statements of the Greek government and parliament, and allowing the Turkish flag to be burned openly in Thessaloniki.
#Greece continues to delirium ..
After having flipped its flags sadly over the return of #Aya_Sofia .. Some of its citizens burned the flag of Turkey ..
Burn knowledge because prayer in Hagia Sophia has burned their hearts full of hatred against Islam and Muslims .. pic.twitter.com/r6LYX82veM
Towards Freedom (@hureyaksa) July 25, 2020
Sadness and denunciation
The churches of Greece were ringing bells of sadness in the middle of last Friday, and special mourning rituals were held in them, and flags were flagged, coinciding with the establishment of the first Friday prayer in the Hagia Sophia mosque in the presence of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Commenting on the conversion of the Hagia Sophia to a mosque, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in a statement last Friday that "what is happening today is not a show of strength but a sign of weakness," adding, "For us Christians, the Hagia Sophia is today in our hearts more than ever before." ".
The head of the Greek Orthodox Church and Archbishop of Athens, Patriarch Jerome, said that converting the Hagia Sophia to a mosque was "an unholy work of desecration" of the former cathedral.
And Hagia Sophia is one of the most prominent artistic and architectural monuments in the Middle East, and it was a mosque for praying during the Ottoman Empire for 481 years, then it turned into a museum in 1934 during the rule of the founder of modern Turkey, Muhammad Kemal Ataturk.
The Hagia Sophia file will be added to a number of issues of straining relations between Ankara and Athens for a long time, although both countries are members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and among the files mentioned are irregular migration, the Cyprus island file, and oil and gas exploration in the eastern Mediterranean.