A senior official in the Russian Orthodox Church said on Saturday that converting Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia from a museum to a mosque would be “unacceptable”, Reuters reported citing Russian news agency Interfax.
“We believe that in the current conditions this act is an unacceptable violation of religious freedom,” Metropolitan Hilarion, chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s department for external church relations, said.
Built in 537 as the seat of the Orthodox Church, Hagia Sophia is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. After Ottoman forces led by Sultan Mehmet conquered the city in 1453, it was converted into a mosque – and remained so until 1935, when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s vision for a secular Turkey led to its conversion to a museum.
There have been increasing calls for Turkey’s government to convert the symbolic structure back into a mosque to fulfil a long-standing demand by Turkey’s Islamists, especially in the wake of reports that the gunman who killed Muslim worshippers in New Zealand left a manifesto saying the Hagia Sophia should be free of minarets.
“We live in a multipolar world, we live in a multi-confessional world and we need to respect the feelings of believers,” Hilarion said.
