Hagia Sophia

Subject: IR

Context:

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

Concept:

• The centuries-old structure is a UNESCO World Heritage site.
• It 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.
• Council of State had unanimously cancelled a 1934 cabinet decision concerning the status of the monument and stated that the Hagia Sophia had been registered as a mosque in its property deeds.