A pro-government daily in Turkey, Yeni Safak, this week again raised the specter of the Hagia Sophia being re-converted into a mosque. According to a front-page headline in the mass circulation newspaper, Turkey’s council of state is expected to rule on whether the iconic Church of the Holy Savior of Chora, part of an eponymous monastic complex during the last millennium of the Byzantine empire, can be reconverted into a mosque from its current status as a museum.
After its conversion into a mosque some 50 years after the fall of Constantinople to the Muslim Ottomans in 1453, the Church of the Holy Savior was converted into a mosque, and finally turned into a museum in 1948.
The pending case and ruling is expected to act as a precedent for other converted museums in Turkey, including the emblematic Hagia Sophia, the foremost Cathedral in Christendom for 1,000 years.
