Last month, the government of Turkey ignored the pleadings of UNESCO and governments in the West by removing the designation of Hagia Sophia—the most popular tourist site in Istanbul—as a museum, and converting it to a mosque. The reasons for it are unsurprisingly “byzantine,” considering what Recep Erdogan has done to transform the country from a reliable democratic NATO member, into a virtual Islamic dictatorship. I’m certain that most people in this country have no clue about why this is important, but there is some serious history behind it for the players involves.
My interest in this subject began back in my much younger days when my principle pastime was reading books, and my favorite literary genre was history. I first became acquainted with the fascinating history of the Byzantine Empire, which comprised the remnants of the old Eastern Roman Empire, and how it was said to have served the old “western,” Christian portion of the empire during the Dark Ages as a bulwark against the predations of the Muslim tide, through the work of 18th Century British historian Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon, of course, did not have the benefit of modern scholarship on the subject, but his history is written in the “classical” style and is an entertaining, opinionated read for the most part. I was particularly fascinated by the emperors Justinian I, Heraclius and Basil II, but in between the modern use of the term “byzantine”—“labyrinthine deviousness”—was typical of the power plays behind the scenes.
The empire remained the most powerful in the region until its defeat at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 to the Seljuk Turks; interestingly, the Seljuks initially had no intention of occupying Anatolia (which comprised the bulk of the empire, and modern Turkey today), instead hoping for a border “deal.” But the Byzantines were so busy fighting amongst themselves that the Seljuks decided to just move in against virtually no opposition. Afterward, the empire would hang on by a thread until the final capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Other books I enjoyed reading on the subject were J.B. Bury’s History of the Later Roman Empire, George Ostrogorsky’s History of the Byzantine State (probably the best single volume history of the empire), Steven Runciman’s The Fall of Constantinople 1453, military historian Walter Kaegi’s biography on Heraclius, which is about the most “exhaustive” available given the dearth of contemporary written information on his rule and military campaigns, and John Julius Norwich’s three-volume popular history, which I still have laying around somewhere.
Now back to the issue of the Hagia Sophia. In 1934 the secular government of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk converted it into a museum, as a token to the West, since he was attempting to transform Turkey in its image. Why he would do this is obvious: built in 537 AD during the reign of Justinian, Hagia Sophia stood as the grandest Christian church in world until the conquest of Constantinople, after which the church was converted into a mosque, with its Christian iconography either removed, destroyed or painted over. This was typical of the Turkish conquests of Christian areas, where existing Christian churches were usually converted into mosques.
Before the start of World War I, Constantinople (it was not renamed Istanbul until after the fall of the sultanate) retained its cosmopolitan past, with nearly 40 percent of the city non-Muslim. Ottoman territory as a whole was 18 percent non-Muslim, the majority Orthodox Greek. Non-Muslims, mainly Greek, Armenians and Jews, were for most of the Ottoman period treated as third-class non-citizens, but permitted to practice their religions. Since the Turks were on the losing side in World War I, the Allied powers took temporary possession of parts of the country after the sultanate was abolished. British, French and Italian forces decided to assist Greece in “reclaiming” parts of the Anatolia that had large Greek populations, but the failure of the Greek army to secure a quick victory over the supposedly weak Turkish national army under the leadership of Ataturk convinced them that Greece could not win and withdrew their support, and Greece suffered a series of military disasters and was forced to abandon Anatolia, and the Greek population that was still there.
Although the Armenian genocide by the Turks receives much attention, a deliberate desire by Turkish nationalists to kill all Greeks who remained in the country led to many massacres, and the dead included Bishop Chrysostomos of Smyrna, who the French soldiers present reported that a Turkish mob “began to beat him with their fists and sticks and to spit on his face. They riddled him with stabs. " Chrysostomos was subsequently deified by the Greek Orthodox Church as a martyr. Although it is usually claimed that the dispute over Cyprus is the principle sticking point in relations between Turkey and Greece, this ignores long-standing animosities that dates back to Ottoman rule over the Greeks both in the Balkans and in Anatolia over a period of close to 500 years.
And it isn’t just Greeks, but Bulgarians too. I once worked at a warehouse that employed a husband and wife from Bulgaria; in 2002 there was the infamous traffic accident involving the wife of a Bothell police officer who crashed into a stalled vehicle on I-405 while traveling 70-75 mph (“with traffic”) and talking on her cell phone, causing it to explode into flames, killing a family of four, including two children. King County prosecutors refused to press charges because there was no “law” against driving while being inattentive using a phone. In any case, the family was identified as Bulgarian immigrants; when asked about how they felt about the tragedy, the Bulgarian couple just shrugged it off and said “who cares.” Why? Because the names of the deceased identified them as Turks—not "real" Bulgarians.
Some Muslim countries, like Egypt, know that their culture and history cannot be disentangled from the past glories of pre-People of the Book without losing something of their identity. Ancient Egypt is a valuable part of their historical legacy, probably the most valuable part. This is why when the Aswan High Dam threatened to engulf the temples of Abu Simbel and other ancient monuments, they were cut up and restored to either higher ground or moved to other countries. It is not certain to what extent Egypt’s president Nasser was actually interested in the project, or his Russian bankrollers, but UNESCO urged the saving of the sites, and Nasser allowed it since international sources were paying for it, and performing the work.
On the other hand, we have the Taliban, who for no reason save pure religious fanaticism, blew-up the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. In Turkey, the reconversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque was a deliberate political act to shore-up Erdogan’s Islamic base. According to Politico, Erdogan had initially balked at the idea, “scolding” its supporters that they should be trying to fill Istanbul’s other 3,000 mosques. But then Erdogan seems to have taken a page out of the Donald Trump playbook:
Earthly concerns may have changed his mind. Last year, during a bitterly contested mayoral election, the president reversed course and said the Hagia Sophia should be a mosque again. His party still lost the vote, the first time the secular opposition won control of the city in 25 years. Istanbul’s new mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu — a member of the secularist party founded by Atatürk — has said the Hagia Sophia should remain a museum. He called on the government to refrain from using the controversy “as a domestic political device” at a time when it should be focused on problems like the coronavirus pandemic.
The outbreak has dramatically slowed Turkey’s economy, already wobbling from a recession last year. Discontent with double-digit inflation and an unemployment rate above 13 percent have driven support for Erdoğan's ruling party down to levels it last saw when it first took power in 2002. “Erdoğan is anxious to shore up support, and his preferred strategy has been to harden his illiberal, nationalist and Islamist positions. The conversion of Ayasofya would bolster that image on the international stage and fail to win him points in Europe,” said Merve Tahiroğlu, Turkey program coordinator at the Project for Middle East Democracy in Washington.
Erdogan sought a fig leaf of judicial “legality” for the move, but observers knew the courts would provide a blank check for anything Erdogan wanted. Two weeks after a 17-minute hearing, a court in Istanbul made the bizarre ruling that Hagia Sophia was the “personal property” of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, who had conquered the city in 1453, and the 1934 law was thus “illegal.” But the sultanate has long since been abolished, and the claim that any private person “owned” Hagia Sophia was insulting on its face. Although it is being claimed that visitors can still enter the Hagia Sophia outside of prayer services, most Christian art is to be covered up. Nevertheless, the “mystified” Erdogan is correct in saying that Turkey can do whatever it wants to do in its own territory.
Other former Byzantine church museums have been “reconverted” into mosques under Erdogan’s rule. Another Hagia Sophia, in Iznik, is one of these. One local who runs a restaurant near the building offered this opinion in Eurasianet: “There are so many mosques in the city and around here. In my opinion, it was utterly unnecessary to turn the Hagia Sophia into one as well.” Another town resident, a historian named Ömer Tuncer, said “This is a question of respect. What would Muslims say if the Al-Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] was turned into a church now? The Hagia Sophia in Iznik is an important symbol in Christian faith, a place of pilgrimage. It is clear that a building like this needs to be protected as a museum.”
But as we are seeing with Trump playing to his white nationalist base, Erdogan believes that the reconversion of the Hagia Sophia and erasing Turkey’s past will shore-up his narrow Islamist base during these times of the pandemic and economic turmoil. It remains to be seen just how this unnecessary action is supposed to accomplish this, but it falls in line with Erdogan’s support of hardline Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, whose remnant he has allowed in Turkey to antagonize Egypt’s present regime, and he has been accused of “secretly” reneging on agreements to end outside military intervention in Libya, and illegally shipping arms into that country. Foreign Policy notes that Erdogan’s intervention in Libya serves no Turkish national interest, save Erdogan’s personal antagonism with Egypt’s current secular government and its regional ally, the United Arab Emirates, whose government also sees the Muslim Brotherhood as a destabilizing threat. All of these activities in recent years have shown that Turkey has chosen not to be a reliable partner in either NATO or the West’s open democratic principles.
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