Panorama, Armenia
Aug 21 2020
Politics 18:04 21/08/2020Region
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday ordered another ancient Orthodox church that became a mosque and then a popular Istanbul museum to be turned back into a place of Muslim worship, AFP reported.
The decision to transform the Kariye Museum into a mosque came just a month after a similarly controversial conversion for the UNESCO World Heritage-recognised Hagia Sophia, the source reminded.
Both changes reflect Erdogan's efforts to galvanise his more conservative and nationalist supporters at a time when Turkey is suffering a new spell of inflation and economic uncertainty caused by the coronavirus.
But they have added to Turkey's tensions with Greece and its Orthodox Church.
The Greek foreign ministry called the decision "yet another provocation against religious persons everywhere" by the Turkish government.
It is noted that the 1,000-year-old building's history closely mirrors that of the Hagia Sophia — its bigger neighbour on the historic western bank of the Golden Horn estuary on the European side of Istanbul. The Holy Saviour in Chora was a medieval Byzantine church decorated with 14th-century frescoes of the Last Judgement that remain treasured in the Christian world.
