Hagia Sophia

• Turkey’s highest court allowed for the conversion of the nearly 1,500 year-old Hagia Sophia from a museum into a mosque.

About:

• The centuries-old structure, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, was originally a cathedral in the Byzantine empire before it was turned into a mosque in 1453, when Constantinople fell to Sultan Mehmet II’s Ottoman forces.

• In the 1930s, however, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, shut down the mosque and turned it into a museum in an attempt to make the country more secular.

• Turkey’s Council of State had declared in its ruling that the conversion of the Hagia Sophia from a mosque into the museum by the country’s founder was illegal.

• The decision was in line with the Turkish president’s calls to turn the hugely symbolic world heritage site into a mosque despite widespread international criticism, including from UNESCO, the United States and Orthodox Christian leaders.

What does this mean for secularism in Turkey?

• Researchers believe that Erdogan has systematically eroded the secular ideals of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk on which the modern Turkish republic was founded. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AK Party’s dominance over Turkey’s political sphere for close to two decades has slowly pushed it from a constitutionally secular country to a more religious and conservative nation.

• On the surface, the AK Party has claimed to be secular but as witnessed in the case of the Hagia Sophia, it appears that the party will not hesitate to alter Ataturk’s secular legacy to achieve its own political goals.