The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said in a tv interview that the museum Hagia Sophia in Istanbul can perhaps be made into a mosque.
His opinion come up to the local elections in Turkey on Sunday, where Erdogan’s AKP party is the pressure in the opinion polls.
There have recently been calls to transform the famous Hagia Sophia to a mosque, because the 28-year-old australian, who has recently killed 50 muslims in New Zealand, is alleged to have written in a manifesto, that Hagia Sophia should “be free of minarets”.
Hagia Sophia was a cathedral in the byzantine era, but The Ottoman Empire conquered Istanbul in 1453 and made the cathedral into a mosque.
In 1935, made the then secular regime in Turkey, the Hagia Sophia into a museum.
In Turkey’s neighbouring country, Greece, warns secretary of state George Katrougalos to make the building into a mosque.
– It is not only a large christian temple – the largest in many centuries. It also belongs to humanity. It is recognized by Unesco as a global heritage, he says, referring to the UN organization for culture.
– So the question of whether this status is not only an insult to the christian feelings, it is an insult to the international community and international law, considers the minister of foreign affairs in Greece.
Photo: AP
