CENTRAL NEWS
Recep Tayyip Erdogan has, in a global outrage, turned 1,483 year-old Hagia Sophia church located in Istanbul into a mosque. The Hagia Sophia mosque, very much like the 12,000 year-old city of Hasankeyf, was home to very important historical and religious artifacts before being irrevocably corrupted. Again, Erdogan tested his policies in Kurdistan and applied them to the world, refreshing our memories of his expensive ISIS adventures.
A majority of the Christian world is angry at Turkey’s jihadist dictator Erdogan, who has caused permanent damage to the joint history of humanity, for votes in an election and a subliminal message of anti-western sentiment to his beloved friends Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan with whom he formed the Taliban to fight against the USA. The gains of the jihadist dictator are clear: he would manage his popularity within the country after the economic downturn, the deterioration of law and order, the curtailment of freedoms, ideological splits within current allies, internal political rifts, the collapse of the lira, and the failure of diplomacy in the foreign domain that was manifest in his defeats in Kurdistan, Syria, Iraq and Libya!
Not to mention the difference between the translations of Erdogan’s statements in relation to the church-mosque-museum in the Arabic and English language, where the texts are modified to address the Arabs and West differently! In his statement to the Arabs, he said: “The conversion of Hagia Sophia is similar to that of Al-Aqsa Mosque, and now it is returned back to the Muslims and the Ottoman civilization.” However, in his statement to the West, he said that the mosque would remain open to Muslims and non-Muslims and that the decision is related to his country’s sovereign and legal rights.
Hagia Sophia, a UNESCO world heritage site which was used as an Orthodox Christian cathedral for 916 years and a mosque for 481 years until it was turned into a museum in 1934, was none-theless converted
despite many radical (barely) messages of disagreement by world leaders such as Trump.
The timing of the announcement of the conversion of the Hagia Sophia Museum, which is known for its Christian shrines and murals and is considered as one of the most important Roman architectural masterpieces in the history of the Middle East, is not just a provocation to the world. Also in the example of Hasankeyf, the Turkish state is increasingly unveiling its projects of Neo-Ottamanism by altering history to suit the fascist Turkish narrative of it being the strongest, most fearsome ethnicity. As Mike Pompeo very inadvertently pointed out, Erdogan “is isolating Turkey culturally and pushing his country back six centuries.”
A dam was built on the ancient city of Hasankeyf, a project which was planned in 1954 and initiated in 2006, to conceal that the soils on which Turkey prides itself are occupied lands belonging to the regional people, namely the Kurds. Hagia Sophia suffered a similar fate, becoming a symbol of Erdogan’s enmity to the Christians of the world.
Hasankeyf was a world gem, meeting 9 out of 10 criteria to belong to UNESCO’s World Heritage. Archaeological findings of the first human traces date back hundreds of years. A case was brought to the European Court of Human Rights to save it. But as stated in the NYT, it was lost because “none of the plaintiffs were residents of Hasankeyf.” Today the city is submerged and 70,000 people are displaced, victims of Erdogan’s ambitions for more time on the throne.
