It was under Ataturk that Hagia Sophia became a museum — it would have been too much to hope that it might have again become a church both for the diminishing number of Christians in Turkey and for visitors, many of whom come to Istanbul mainly to visit it and similar sites assocated wth pre-Ottoman Turkey, such as the Roman Cisterns, the Hippodrome, the Kariya Djami, as that church, its frescoes having suffered far less damage than those of the Hagia Sophia, has been renamed).
The vindictiveness, the quickness to turn a perfectly obvious remark about the behavior of Turks a century ago, are on display here.
- Like
- Digg
- Del
- Tumblr
- VKontakte
- Buffer
- Love This
- Odnoklassniki
- Meneame
- Blogger
- Amazon
- Yahoo Mail
- Gmail
- AOL
- Newsvine
- HackerNews
- Evernote
- MySpace
- Mail.ru
- Viadeo
- Line
- Comments
- Yummly
- SMS
- Viber
- Telegram
- Subscribe
- Skype
- Facebook Messenger
- Kakao
- LiveJournal
- Yammer
- Edgar
- Fintel
- Mix
- Instapaper
- Copy Link
4 Responses
An excuse to do what the new Sultan intended all along to do. Are any of us surprised? Ataturk’s experiment is over and an operetta version of the Ottomans seems to be Turkey’s future.
Let’s propose to turn the Al-Aqsa Mosque back into a Jewish temple.
BYW, a suggested improvement: the sentence should have read “… many of whom come to Constantinople …” Let’s take back the name!
Unfortunately, Kemalism is temporary; Islam is forever.
But haven’t you overlooked the quotation marks for that phrase?