ISTANBUL UNDER CHRISTIANITY, ISLAM AND SECULARISM
By Thomas Grove

Reuters, UK
Nov 29 2006

ISTANBUL (Reuters) — When Ottoman Sultan Mehmet conquered
Constantinople in 1453, his first destination was Haghia Sophia,
the towering seat of Orthodox Christianity.

In front of what was then the largest church in the world, he knelt,
sprinkled soil on his turban as a sign of humility and recited the
Muslim prayer of faith, turning the church into a mosque: "There is
no God but God, and Mohammed is His prophet."

When Pope Benedict visits on Thursday, he will enter what is now
Aya Sofya museum in the renamed city of Istanbul, reflecting the
transition from Christian to Muslim to secular.

While evidence of faith is everywhere in this city, which has been the
capital of both Christian and Muslim empires, the modern republic’s
secularism has robbed the city of its role as a religious capital.

The two empires have left behind a patchwork of faiths, with Christians
— Greek, Armenian and Syriac Orthodox and Roman, Armenian and
Chaldean Catholics — and a tiny Jewish community living among the
mostly Muslim population.

CONSTANTINOPLE

The Roman Emperor Constantine, who embraced Christianity, made the
ancient site between Europe and Asia the capital of the Roman Empire
in 330 AD and it became known as Constantinople.

Constantine imported the holiest relics, including wood said to be
from Noah’s Ark for the doors of Haghia Sophia and a piece said to
be from Christ’s cross to keep behind its altar.

When the Orthodox Church broke away from Rome over the issue of papal
authority in 1054, Constantinople became the undisputed political
and religious centre of the Greek-speaking world.

The city was sacked in 1204 by Western Catholic crusaders, cementing
the split between Catholic west and Orthodox east.

In 2004, the late Pope John Paul expressed "disgust and pain" for
the sacking of the city by the Fourth Crusade.

After 1453, the Ottomans made the city preeminent in the Muslim world
as older centres Damascus and Baghdad faded.

Their practice of bringing minorities into the capital to work as
artisans ensured a rich cultural mix, and each minority was allowed
to govern itself according to its religious laws.

"The Ottomans were masters of pragmatism and their solution for
religious minorities was to let them rule their own affairs," said
Benjamin Fortna of the University of London’s School of Oriental and
African Studies.

SECULARISM

After Turkey’s defeat in World War One and its subsequent war with
Greece, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded modern Turkey in 1923 and
established a secular republic that officially removed religion from
public life.

He dissolved the Caliphate, moved the capital to Ankara and officially
changed Constantinople’s name to Istanbul.

Aya Sofya, which had up until then served as a mosque, was closed
and reopened as a museum in 1934.

Large-scale exchanges of ethnic Greeks and Turks in the 1920s depleted
the Christian population in Istanbul, without easing tensions between
the two countries,

A two-day pogrom against Istanbul’s ethnic Greeks in 1955 drove out
even more of them, although the city remains the seat of the Christian
Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch.

Some 100,000 Christians now live in Turkey, far from the 2 million
a century ago.