Russian Orthodox Church against attempts of changing the status of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople

Constantinople - Sainte-Sophia - Russian Orthodox Church against attempts of changing the status of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople

Russian Orthodox Church against attempts of changing the status of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople

Jun 09, 2020 | in Patriarchate of Moscow:

Constantinople – Sainte-Sophia – Russian Orthodox Church against attempts of changing the status of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople

The Russian Orthodox Church official hopes that the current museum status of Hagia Sophia Cathedral will not be changed and the church will not be turned into a mosque again.

On May 29, when the fall of Constantinople is commemorated, the Quran was read in Hagia Sophia. A week after, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan asked the central committee of the governing Justice and Development Party to consider a possibility of turning Hagia Sophia in a mosque.

“Any attempts to change the museum status of Hagia Sophia Cathedral will lead to changing and violating fragile inter-confessional balances, existing today,” the head of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Hilarion, said on Church and the World program on Rossiya-24.

He added that he would like to hope that this church would remain a museum with open access and such incidents would not provoke interreligious tensions.

The Hagia Sophia Cathedral was given a museum status in 1934 by first Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. It has been included in the UNESCO world heritage list in 1985. “This church is a symbol of Byzantium and a symbol of Orthodoxy for millions of Christians all around the world, especially for Orthodox believers,” the Metropolitan stressed.

Constantinople – Sainte-Sophia – Russian Orthodox Church against attempts of changing the status of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople

Source: Interfax Religion

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