Converting the Istanbul Hagia Sophia monument from a museum to a mosque would be “unacceptable,” a senior official of the Russian Orthodox Church said Saturday.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has proposed restoring the status of the mosque to the World Heritage site recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization – a 6th century building in the heart of the Byzantine Christian and Ottoman Muslim empires and now one of the most visited monuments in Turkey.
“We cannot go back to the Middle Ages now,” Metropolitan Hilarion, president of the foreign affairs department of the Moscow Patriarchate Church, said on state television.
“We live in a multi-polar world, we live in a multi-faith world, and we need to respect the feelings of believers.”
He said that the Russian Orthodox Church did not understand the reason for Hagia Sophia’s conversion and that it believed that internal politics was behind the measure.
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Hagia Sophia from Turkey and the battle to turn it into a mosque |
“We believe that under current conditions, this act is an unacceptable violation of religious freedom,” said Hilarion.
A Turkish court earlier this week heard a case aimed at turning the building back into a mosque and will announce its verdict later this month.
The court case, brought by an NGO to preserve historical monuments, questions the legality of a decision in 1934, in the early days of the modern Turkish secular state under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, to convert Hagia Sophia, known in Turkish as Ayasofya, from a Mosque in a museum.
The proposal has been criticized by other religious and political leaders.
Ecumenical patriarch Bartholomew, based in Istanbul and spiritual leader of some 300 million Orthodox Christians worldwide, said that turning Hagia Sophia into a mosque would disappoint Christians and “fracture” the East and West.
United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the Greek government have also urged Turkey to keep the building as a museum.
Erdogan described foreign criticism of the proposal as an attack on Turkey’s sovereignty.
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