Rome Newsroom, Aug 21, 2020 / 05:30 am (CNA).- A month after the former cathedral Hagia Sophia was converted from a museum into a mosque, another Istanbul church-museum, renowned for its exquisite Byzantine mosaics, will undergo the same transformation.
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, ordered Friday that the 700-year-old Chora Church — currently the Kariye Museum — be turned into a fully functioning mosque.
The building’s history mirrors that of the famous former Byzantine cathedral Hagia Sophia.
Holy Savior in Chora is a 4th-century Greek Orthodox church whose structure was originally part of a monastery in Byzantine Constantinople.
The church’s current form, instead, dates from the early 14th century. It is highly valued for its masterful mosaics and frescoes.
After the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul in 1453, the church was taken for Muslim worship, and the wall paintings and mosaics thinly covered with dye and lime.
In 1945, the secular Turkish republic declared the building a national monument, and extensive restoration and conservation work was carried out on the former church’s artworks before it opened as a museum in 1958.
Like Hagia Sophia, the building is designated a UNESCO World Heritage site.
The Chora church in Istanbul, home to some of the most exquisite frescoes of Byzantine period, was converted to a mosque by the Ottomans in 1511. In 1958 after its frescoes were uncovered and restored it reopened as a museum. As of today it’s a full service mosque. pic.twitter.com/r7SQf9yrgX
— Amberin Zaman (@amberinzaman) August 21, 2020
In November 2019, Turkey’s top administrative court, the Council of State, ruled the structure should return to use as a mosque, on the basis that the museum was unlawful for violating the Ottoman declaration that the building be used for Muslim worship.
This ruling was used as precedent for the court’s controversial July decision to convert the former cathedral Hagia Sophia from a museum back into a mosque.
Erdoğan ordered Aug. 21 that Chora Church, a much-visited site in the Fatih district of Istanbul, be turned into a mosque and opened for Muslim worship.
Other church-museums in Turkey, including less notable Hagia Sophias in the towns of İznik and Trabzon, have also been converted back into mosques in recent years.
Historian Fabrice Monnier told French newspaper Le Figaro that he believed the situation with Chora Church was different from that of other mosque reconversions, because of the size of its paintings and mosaics.
“Its beautiful mosaics and frescoes cover almost all the church’s walls and domes,” he said. “It would be hard to imagine it being returned into a mosque without totally covering them over.”
The Hagia Sophia and Chora decisions are thought to be an effort by Erdoğan to appeal to Muslim voters after the president’s party, AK, lost the Istanbul mayoral election in 2019.
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Ah well, all of Turkey and more were once Christian, not Muslim. Not much here about converting all this back to a more original use. (Still, at the sight of today’s President Erdogan, the earlier and secularizing Ataturk is probably rolling over in his grave.)
But, what the hell, in the post-Christian and self-eviscerated West, even millions of uncounted preborn children are less than nothing until branded either one way or the other by fatwa-like Supreme Court rulings–like today the rebranding of a growing number of cathedral-museums under Turkey’s arbitrary Council of State.
Or, again in the West, we have the genocide against binary human sexual complementarity, under mandatory gender theory. Like Islamicized cathedral-wall icons, real “marriage” is whitewashed from the landscape, and St. Paul’s fully human “temples of the Holy Spirit” are redefined/vaporized as arbitrary/virtual mirages of transgenderism.
Viral Western rationalism takes God out of the civic forum, while viral Islam takes the civic forum (e.g., museums!) out of man.