👹 Hundreds of worshippers filled the narrow streets of Istanbul’s Fatih district on Friday to hear the sounds of Friday prayers ringing out from the newly inaugurated Kariye Mosque. 🕌
♱ Once known as the Chora Church, the site spent the last 79 years as a museum. But it is now the latest structure to be converted back into a mosque by the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, following the conversion of Hagia Sophia in 2020. While viewed as a triumph by many Turkish Muslims, the Greek Orthodox Church has decried it as an “ill-advised decision” that “makes a mockery of the Turkish government’s commitment to religious tolerance and religious freedom.”
Chora’s conversion was announced shortly after Hagia Sophia’s, but its opening for prayer was delayed by years of restoration work.
The showing for the first Friday prayers at Kariye was relatively quiet compared to Hagia Sophia, which drew hundreds of thousands who filled the streets with prayer rugs for blocks and blocks away from the building. By contrast, the crowd on Friday was relatively average for a mosque in one of Istanbul’s more religiously conservative neighborhoods, where Friday worshippers frequently spill out onto the streets.
Both the Chora Church and Hagia Sophia are 4th-century Byzantine constructions. They spent nearly a millennium as Christian holy sites before being converted to mosques by the Ottomans after their conquest of Constantinople in the 15th century. Despite their conversions, they remained revered by Orthodox Christians. After the founding of a secular Turkish Republic in the early 20th century, the decision was made for both to be neither mosque nor church but simply museums.
“Both Hagia Sophia and Chora embodied Byzantine and Ottoman pasts, and they became symbols of co-existence and multi-faith living practices. Their conversion fundamentally implies a hierarchy, prioritizing the Islamic past over all other layers, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Jewish, Syriac, et al,” Özgür Kaymak, a lecturer and researcher on minority rights at Istanbul’s MEF University, said in an email.
Rededicating the sites as mosques is more than just a status change. According to Islamic tradition, artwork of human figures are forbidden in places of prayer, while in Orthodox Churches, icons of Christ, saints, and other biblical figures are a defining feature.
In Hagia Sophia, the mosaics of Jesus and Mary have been covered with curtains since the conversion. While ErdoÄźan promised Hagia Sophia would remain fully accessible and free to all visitors, Turkey reneged on that earlier this year, reimposing an entrance fee on tourists and relegating them to the upper level, while the main floor is exclusive to Muslim worshippers.
Observers have also criticized the Turkish Directorate of Religion’s caretaking of the site, noting damage that did not exist when it was under the purview of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
