Turkey’s increasingly Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, continued his provocations this week by again threatening to reconvert the Hagia Sophia into a mosque, nearly nine decades after a secular Turkish government turned the greatest of all cathedrals of eastern Christendom into a widely-visited museum.
Taking to Turkey’s state-run radio-television network on Monday evening, Erdogan also claimed that official Greece has been interfering in Turkey’s internal affairs.
Athens did, in fact, criticize a proposal to reconvert the UNESCO world heritage site back into a mosque.
Playing mostly to a domestic audience, Erdogan said “…Greece is not the one administrating this land, so it should avoid making such remarks,” while adding, in characteristic bluster, that “…If Greece does not know its place, Turkey knows how to answer.”
Moreover, the mass Turkish daily Yeni Safak on Tuesday regurgitated the issue of a forged signature of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish state, in a 1934 ministerial decision turning the Hagia Sophia into a museum.
Threats to turn the iconic cathedral-cum museum into a mosque comes after stepped up agitation by extremist elements in Turkey, with current government officials often using the matter for domestic consumption.
With the Erdogan-dominated government in Turkey facing an economic downturn, repercussions from the pandemic and geopolitical challenges, most of whom are the product of Ankara’s own aggressiveness and interference, one way to apparently re-invigorate the ruling party’s grass roots is to utilize provocations against non-Muslims and the West.