The storied history of the Hagia Sophia

National Post, 24 July 2020

Erdogan's decision to (re)convert Hagia Sophia into a mosque raises a number of important issues.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s decision to (re)convert Hagia Sophia — which was originally designed as a Christian cathedral —into a mosque has multiple geopolitical and religious meanings.

Christendom’s most venerable cathedral — the Hagia Sophia of Constantinople — was built in 537 as the mother church of the “Second Rome.” By that time, Rome itself had fallen. The eastern Roman empire — the Byzantine Empire — would last another millennium, with Constantinople becoming the head of Greek Orthodox Christianity after it split with the Catholic Church in the 11th century. The Ottomans (Turkish Muslims) conquered the city in 1453 and converted Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) into a mosque.

It remained as such for nearly 500 years. With the fall of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, a new secular Turkey rose in its place. Kemal Ataturk wanted a progressive, industrial, secular, Western-looking Turkey to replace its traditional, agricultural, religious, Eastern-looking past. He employed state power to that end, trampling upon fundamental liberties to build his new Turkish society.

In that context, Ataturk secularized Hagia Sophia in 1934, turning it into a museum. The refrain heard in recent days that it was an act of religious pluralism, that Hagia Sophia would be a place of encounter for all faiths, is not true.

The secularization of Hagia Sophia was an anti-religious act of state power, not unlike the secularization of Sainte Chappelle in Paris. The secular French state, heir to the totalitarian revolutionaries, did not have in mind that the Gothic shrine would become a harmonious place for inter-religious dialogue. It was an act designed to suppress religion and funnel money to the exchequer. (Secular buildings don’t attract as many tourists as religious ones.)

The first significance of the (re)conversion then is that the regional attraction of state-enforced secularism is waning. The (re)conversion is more about rejecting the Ataturk of 1934 than it is about celebrating the conquest of Christians in 1453.

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