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On Wednesday, Turkey’s President Erdogan declared that Hagia Sophia will be transformed from a museum to a mosque. A thread on heritage, shifting international and domestic politics 1/
As most news coverage notes, Hagia Sophia is part of UNESCO’s World Heritage List, along with other monumental structures in Istanbul’s old city. 2/
It helps to start with a key insight of heritage studies: heritage is not primarily about the past. It is, rather, adjudicated from the present. Based on a particular vision of the present, heritage draws selectively on the past, and projects this vision into the future. 3/
Heritage is political, in both its universal-cosmopolitan and populist-nationalist versions. Calling it political is not to diminish its normative, ideational substance and import. To the contrary, it is to acknowledge such importance and open it up to critical scrutiny. 4/
What then is the present from which the status of Hagia Sophia is re-adjudicated? This present is both national and international. 5/
The 1985 expert opinion, which endorsed the inscription of Historic Areas of Istanbul on the List noted that the nomination illustrated the “political will to safeguard a number of privileged sites with the aid of the international community.” 6/
Turkey nominated a series of sites, including Hagia Sophia, for world heritage status at a time that the country was oriented towards a Western-led international order, which was itself not under the normative-institutional challenges it faces currently 7/
Conversely, the status change is pushed through at a time when the kind of reconciliatory universal value espoused by UNESCO’s World Heritage Regime is under strain. 8/
In its statement, UNESCO emphasized the need to continue protecting the site’s universal value, “as a powerful symbol of dialogue” between Europe and Asia. And yet, such symbolism is only possible by sidelining multiple histories of contestation, conquest and hierarchy. 9/
This universalism has also come under strain by multiple pushes for the recognition of local and regional value as the proper grounds of heritage valuation and preservation. 10/
[Pause for shameless self-promotion: For the elisions of universal value see: https://academic.oup.com/ips/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/ips/olaa004/5762964. For the assertions of local value at the world heritage regime see: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108754613.014] 11/
But the turn away from the international and the universal is not so simple. Erdogan declared: “Hagia Sophia, the common heritage of humanity, will go forward to embrace everyone with its new status in a much more sincere and much more unique way” 12/
At stake is an international present where multiple actors, including Turkey, refuse to take part in the universal values espoused by the institutions of a post-WWII order. Such refusal, however, comes with alternative values, in this case, a counter-articulation of humanity. 13/
The domestic present is one of economic distress and snap elections, and a long-running shift away from the socio-political vision for Turkey as a secular, modernizing, Western-oriented Republic. 14/
The status change of Hagia Sophia seeks to reassure Erdogan’s supporters, who might be disillusioned by the economic downturn, that the country is still moving towards a desirable future rather than being mired in an undesirable present 15/
It links this domestic posturing with a similarly long-standing international one that Turkey will take part in international politics, while also challenging its existing normative-ideational contours. 16/
Structurally, this is not unlike the early Republican decision to turn Hagia Sophia from a mosque into a museum. 17/
The early Republican decision was a similarly top-down one at the intersection of a domestic vision (a secular, modernizing republic) and an international one (orientation to the Western-led order) for the present and future. 18/
Friday’s decision demonstrates and reproduces key domestic and international political shifts. The best way to think about the shifts is to approach heritage as inextricably political, and to scrutinize the political visions and communities at stake in its different iterations.19
