The Washington Post recently ran this
informative feature on the Turkish government’s plan to convert Hagia Sophia to
a mosque, and the race against time of those who want to see the venerable church
preserved as a museum open to people of all faiths. The Order of Saint Andrew
the Apostle, Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, is gratified to see this
issue receiving media attention, and hopes this will help spur active efforts
to protect Hagia Sophia.
Why Istanbul’s historic Hagia Sophia could be in a fight against time
Turkish police officers wearing face masks,
with the Byzantine-era monument of Hagia Sophia, now a museum, in the
background, patrol at Sultanahmet Square following the coronavirus outbreak in
Istanbul on June 5. (Murad Sezer/Reuters)
June 24, 2020
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of
Constantinople lowered his voice in exasperation. “What can I say as a
Christian clergyman and the Greek patriarch in Istanbul? Instead of uniting, a
1,500-year-old heritage is dividing us. I am saddened and shaken.”
The 80-year-old spiritual leader of 300 million Orthodox Christians worldwide was
referring to the Turkish government’s plans to convert
Hagia Sophia, a 6th-century Byzantine cathedral and one of the most precious
architectural wonders of the world, into a mosque. For centuries, the
terra-cotta-colored building served as the largest church in the Christian
world. When Ottomans conquered Istanbul in 1453, they carefully covered the
mosaics and turned it into a mosque. In 1934, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder
of the modern Turkish state, turned it into a museum — both as a testament to
the country’s new secular principles, but also as a signal of its desire to be
anchored to the Western world.
Not surprisingly, Turkish President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan now wants to turn it back into a mosque and has instructed aides
to find a legal formula. Hagia Sophia has long been a coveted symbol for
Islamists who resented Ataturk’s desire for a West-leaning and secular society,
but no Turkish government had so far touched his legacy. Erdogan’s move this
time is partly driven by a populist desire to consolidate conservative Muslims
at a time of declining votes for his party.
But what is particularly troubling about the
Hagia Sophia debate is the toxic language, which echoes centuries of religious
rivalry in this part of the world. In late May, Erdogan participated by video
in a Koranic reading
of the “Conquest” verse (“surah”) at Hagia Sophia, “We will
leave behind a Turkey befitting of our ancestor Fatih [the Conqueror],”
referring to the Ottoman sultan who captured Istanbul in 1453.
Under Erdogan’s resurgent Turkey, “conquest”
is a useful theme to rally nationalist sentiments. Before each incursion into
Syria by the Turkish military, Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs
instructs mosques to read the “conquest” verse from the Koran. The ministry of
culture and Istanbul municipality have been celebrating the
“conquest of Istanbul” each May 30, with greater and greater
ferocity over the past decade. Erdogan’s nationalist ally, Devlet Bahceli,
has called the opening of Hagia Sophia as a mosque “the gain of the sword.”
“But who is this conquest against?” asked a
Greek Orthodox friend of mine from Istanbul. Turks have been running Istanbul
for nearly six centuries, and the handful of Christians left in the country
pose neither a cultural nor a political challenge to anyone. Out of a
population of 82 million, there are less
than 90,000 non-Muslims living in Turkey at the moment —
including Armenians, Jews, Assyrians and a few thousand Greeks — and in the
words of Hrant Dink, a journalist of Armenian descent assassinated by a
nationalist in 2007, most live “with
the trepidations of a dove.”
Christians in the Middle East, with the
exception of Lebanon, have every reason to have trepidations. Their experience
for the past century is marked by pogroms, property confiscations and
discrimination. Secular Turkey has not been that different. While the Ottoman
Empire practiced religious tolerance, the modern republic was founded after a
war of liberation against an invasion from Greece and Western powers at the end
of World War I — and the regime suspected Christians of disloyalty. There were
population exchanges between Turkey and Greece and a deliberate effort to
reduce the role of non-Muslims in bureaucracy and business. Thousands of
churches across Anatolia were deserted and eventually
destroyed. In 1955, a pogrom in Istanbul led to the
exodus of the remaining Christians.
Ironically, it was Erdogan himself who pushed
back against some of these oppressive policies early in his tenure. He brought
non-Muslim leaders into the state protocol, showed
flexibility to faith-based foundations, returned some of
their confiscated properties and, during a honeymoon with Europe,
even entertained the
idea of opening the Greek Orthodox seminary in Istanbul closed
by the Turkish state in 1974. But in reality, Erdogan and other Turkish
politicians have little use for old churches and aging priests, other than as a
tourist attraction and a token of diversity.
All of that makes the Hagia Sophia debate sad
— a fight against time. With a handful of Greeks left in Turkey, how long can
empty churches survive?
Patriarch Bartholomew believes forever. “We
survived for 17 centuries and we will stay here forever, as God wants us to,”
he said when I visited him last week.
I hope he is right, but fear that in the long
run this is fighting a losing battle — at least on Hagia Sophia. Turkey’s
Christian community is vanishing, and with it the diverse fabric of our country.
Turkey will be immeasurably poorer if that heritage is lost. Converting Hagia
Sophia into a mosque would also feed anti-Muslim sentiments among the far right
in Europe and the United States. I hope Turkish leaders can acknowledge that —
and pause the Hagia Sophia debate.
When Ottomans came to Istanbul, which they
called Konstantiniyye after the name of its Byzantium founder, there was no
mosque here. Today, there are almost 3,500. Let this
remain a monument to our rich history.
