Turkey to cover Hagia Sophia’s Christian icons during prayers
The governing party’s statement comes days after Ankara turned the iconic monument from a museum into a mosque.
Mosaics in Istanbul’s iconic Hagia Sophia will be covered by curtains or lasers during the Muslim prayers, the spokesman for Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party (AK Party) has said.
The Christian symbols would be revealed and be available to all guests on different occasions, and affirmation would be for nothing out of pocket, the AK Party’s Omer Celik said on Monday, without clarifying further.
A Turkish court a week ago decided that the transformation of the 6th-century Byzantine site into an exhibition hall in 1934 was unlawful.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced the structure of a mosque and said the primary supplications would be held there inside about fourteen days.
The move drew universal criticism and concern, including from Greece, the United States, and Russia, just as UNESCO, which is currently assessing the structure’s World Heritage Site status.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Ankara was amazed by UNESCO’s response and would tell it of further strides to be taken with respect to Hagia Sophia, which was a Byzantine church for nine centuries before the Ottomans changed over it to a mosque.
Turkey is delicate about ensuring its authentic character, he said. “We need to secure our predecessors’ legacy. The capacity can be like this or that way – it doesn’t make a difference,” Cavusoglu told state telecaster, TRT Haber.
Turkey’s reconversion of Hagia Sophia into mosque partitions feeling (2:55)
On Monday, the pioneer of Italy’s far-right League party, Matteo Salvini, drove an exhibition outside the Turkish office in Milan to challenge the choice.
“I would stop each sort of money related guide to the Turkish system, and I would end unequivocally any theory of Turkey entering the European Union since we have given in excess of 10 billion euros to a system that changes places of worship into mosques and I think they have gone over the breaking point,” he said.
Salvini’s dissent came a day after Pope Francis said he was “very disheartened” by Turkey’s choice.
In light of the pope’s comments, Celik told a news meeting in Ankara that the greatest lack of regard to Hagia Sophia in history had been submitted by the papacy.
He said Orthodox Christians and Hagia Sophia had languished over years during a “Latin attack” drove by the papacy in the thirteenth century, when Crusaders plundered the church building.
Turkish remote service representative Hami Aksoy on Monday said Hagia Sophia is an interior issue and no nation can meddle in Turkey’s sovereign issues.
“Hagia Sophia will keep on grasping everybody with its new status, saving the normal social legacy of humankind,” he stated, as per an Anadolu Agency report.
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