The State Council of Turkey decided the fate of the Orthodox shrine in its own way
For just over seventeen minutes, the Turkish Council of State pretended to decide whether to convert the Roman (Byzantine) Hagia Sophia into a mosque, as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wants, or to keep it as a museum. Although, apparently, the issue has already been decided.
This was reported by Balkan media, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
The meeting of the State Council on Hagia Sophia took place early this morning. The side defending the position of the neo-Ottoman Erdogan put forward the following argument: “Hagia Sophia (as the cathedral began to be called after the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans, who turned it into a mosque - ed.) was the property of Sultan Fatih Mehmet II, who transferred it to the waqf (religious community - ed.). According to Turkish laws, the Cabinet of Ministers cannot make decisions regarding the property of the waqf. Therefore, the decision of the Cabinet of Ministers of 1934 is illegal and must be canceled.”
In turn, the State Council prosecutor emphasized that in 1934, the Ataturk regime, when deciding to transform Hagia Sophia from a mosque into a museum, relied on legislation, therefore, the Council of Ministers could make the opposite decision.
The judges of the State Council expressed their opinion that the decree of the first President of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, was and remains legal, but the current head of state, Recep Erdogan, has the authority to change the status of the religious building by decree in response. The State Council should publish its final decision within the next fifteen days, but what it will be, few doubt now.
The Greek churches opposed the return of Hagia Sophia to the status of a mosque (last of all, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who was completely dependent on the Turkish leadership, spoke out in the same spirit, who gave the tomos to the schismatic OCU, and for a long time was afraid to say a word in defense of the Roman-Greek Orthodox shrine), ROC. And also US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who fears that this issue will exacerbate already tense Greek-Turkish relations within NATO.
“When US President Trump declares Jerusalem the capital of Israel and the Golan Heights the territory of Israel, Turkey gives an appropriate response as the interim chairman of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation,” Erdogan countered external criticism, saying that the situation with Hagia Sophia is solely an internal matter of Turkey.
The seriousness of the intentions of the current Turkish government is also evidenced by the fact that this year, during the celebrations in honor of the next anniversary of the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, the convinced neo-Ottomanist Erdogan personally read the “victorious” surah of the Koran, Al-Fatih, within the walls of the Orthodox cathedral.
After the capture of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottomans converted Hagia Sophia into a mosque, adding minarets, buttresses and changing the interior of the temple. When at the beginning of the last century, the ideologist of Turkish nationalism Kemal Ataturk, who had a rather cool attitude towards religion, came to power in Turkey, under his rule in 1935 the cathedral received the status of a museum, thanks to which it was possible to partially restore its original appearance, in particular, by clearing the plaster from the frescoes Roman era.
The Turkish State Council has decided the fate of an Orthodox shrine in its own way.