Ankara unfolds Hagia Sophia card against COVID-19 crisis
Erdogan’s government has signaled it could consider turning the Hagia Sophia Museum into a mosque as part of religious messages aimed at keeping its voter base intact under the strain of economic turmoil, made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’ve been longing for it! But a little more patience. We’ll make it together,” the Turkish president’s communication chief, Fahrettin Altun, tweeted May 10. The subject of his yearning was revealed in a picture attached to the tweet: the Hagia Sophia Museum in Istanbul. And the promise of success was about a decades-old “cause” of Turkey’s Islamists — converting the Hagia Sophia into a mosque — which they have inflamed at times and damped down at others, depending on their political interests.
The Hagia Sophia — “Holy Wisdom” in Greek — was built as a church during Byzantine times in 537 and functioned as such for 916 years before the Ottomans conquered Istanbul on May 29, 1453, and converted the edifice into a mosque on the same day. Almost half a millennium later, on Nov. 24, 1934, the Hagia Sophia became a museum by a Council of Ministers decree under the modern Turkish republic.
