The Hagia Sophia has been in the news lately.

What is Hagia Sophia and why is it significant?
Hagia Sophia (Greek), known in Turkish as Ayasofya, in Latin as Sancta Sophia, in English as Holy Wisdom or Divine Wisdom, is a cathedral built in Constantinople around the year 537 AD, that is, about 1,500 years ago by the Byzantine, Eastern Roman Emperor, Justinian.
It’s regarded as one of the oldest and most impressive ancient church architectural structures in the world. It houses some of the oldest surviving mosaic murals of Christ Pantokrator (All powerful Saviour) and Mary Theotokos (Holy Spirit bearer)
It also houses countless other treasures of art and sacred reliquaries.
An architectural wonder, it consists of a central dome resting on 40 arched windows, which at particular times of the day gives the illusion of the dome being suspended mid air. It has a giant nave and several other smaller domes and semi domes.
At the rime it was built, there had been none other such architectural wonder, involving extremely complex mathematical calculations and complicated engineering innovations. Its dimensions remain incredibly amazing for a structure that is not built with steel.
Around the mid 1400s, Constantinople fell and was captured by Moslem forces of the Ottoman Empire. Hagia Sophia was looted and ordered turned into a mosque. Several minarets were added over the centuries and adaptations made in the interior to accommodate Moslem worship.
In 1935, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk the great field marshal, revolutionary, statesman and founding father of the modern Republic of Turkey, serving as its 1st President from 1923, decided to turn it to a secular space as a museum and a symbol of peaceful religious coexistence.
This was a concession to the country’s great dual heritages of Christianity and Islam. It ultimately became a UNESCO world heritage site.
President Tayyip Erdogan, in search of an extremist populist gesture decided to reconvert it into a mosque. This reconversion on July 24, popular with some of of the Moslem majority in the country, has been condemned in various parts of the world.
Christian leaders like Pope Francis as well as The Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomeu of Constantinople in Istanbul have also condemned it. It has also led to the reopening of the age old antagonism between Turkey & Greece.
Inevitably the US has had to take a position on account of the fact that it is home to majority of the Greek Orthodox Christian diaspora.
This act by Erdogan puts to a temporary end, the 86 years that Hagia Sophia enjoyed as a secular space & began another chapter in its chequered history that has seen it oscillate from a Christian basilica to a mosque, then a museum of religious antiquity and now back to a mosque.
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