Russian Orthodox Church against attempts of changing the status of St. Sophia in Istanbul
The Russian Orthodox Church official hopes that current museum status of St. Sophia Cathedral won’t be changed and the church won’t be turned in a mosque again.
On May 29, when the anniversary of Constantinople fall is celebrated, the Koran was read in St. Sophia. A week after, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan asked the central committee of the governing Justice and Development Party to consider a possibility of turning St. Sophia in a mosque.
“Any attempts to change the museum status of St. Sophia Cathedral will lead to changing and violating fragile inter-confessional balances, existing today,” head of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate Metropolitan Hilarion said on air Church and the World program on Rossiya-24.
He added that he would like to hope that this church would remain a museum with open access and such incidents would not provoke interreligious tensions.
The St. Sophia Cathedral was given a museum status in 1934 by first Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. It has been included in UNESCO world heritage list in 1985. “This church is a symbol of Byzantium and a symbol of Orthodoxy for millions of Christians all around the world, especially for Orthodox believers,” the metropolitan stressed.
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