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a few mostly personal thoughts on the news concerning the Hagia Sophia: my feelings are rather mixed, tbh. Part of me is glad that somebody at least gets to publicly pray there. I would rather see the Divine Liturgy being once again celebrated within her, but that's not an option
On the other hand, I, and no doubt some of you both Muslim and Christian, have prayed, surreptitiously, within the Hagia Sophia; as such, it has long been a sort of crypto-shared space akin to many that once existed in the Ottoman world and elsewhere. That is effectively ended.
For Orthodox Christians, the loss of the Hagia Sophia remains a tragedy; it would be akin for Muslims to al-'Aqṣā being turned into a church (or museum). But I also recognize that particularly for many Turkish Muslims Aya Sofya has long held deep connotations and emotional force
and that the 'museumification ' of Aya Sofya/Hagia Sophia has long been a bitter symbol of imposed 'secularization' and all the still mostly hidden or obscured wounds of 20th c. Turkish history. To walk the streets of Istanbul is to encounter multiple conquests and erasures:
converted or ruined tekkes, medieval Byzantine churches turned into mosques and now going to ruin, beautiful old wooden houses falling to pieces. No community has escaped the tragedies of history in those streets, and there is no easy way to reconcile it all.
Indeed, where secularization and all the rest of Turkish state-building meant erasure and discontinuities and worse for many, for communities like the Alevi and Bektaşi it offered a potent opportunity in some places and times at least.
It would not make me happy for Turkish Muslims to decide they must hate their own past; I would get no pleasure out of Mehmed Fetih being 'canceled.' But I would also hope that the tragedies and losses and violence of Ottoman and then Turkish republican history were recognized.
It need not be a choice between simplistic triumphalism, on the one hand, and self-flagellation and erasure, on the other, though that is how things are too often presented in our day and age. As a white Southern American I'm still trying to navigate these things- it's not easy!
Anyway at the very least I hope that my fellow Orthodox Christians can understand, if not sympathize or agree with, why 'our' Hagia Sophia also resonates deeply and powerfully for many Muslims, and not just as a symbol of triumph; its form echoing through mosques across the world
And for Muslims I hope, again, that there would be a stronger appreciation of the place of Hagia Sophia in Orthodox history, imagination, and ritual and spiritual life. For all of us, I pray that she not be a cause for further anger and hatred and bitter contention.
