Last month the Dish noted efforts afoot in Turkey to turn the Hagia Sophia – formerly a Christian basilica, then a mosque, and currently a museum – back into a place of Muslim worship. Kaya Genc ponders a possible third way:
Although most people take an either/or stance, some have proposed opening Hagia
Sophia to both Islamic and Christian services. This is a welcome prospect to Christians, who have made a number of attempts to organize religious rituals. On one such occasion, in 2010, Turkey’s director of religious affairs said, “Turkey would not be a Christian country just because Christians performed their religious duties in a few churches.”
There’s precedent for such a hybrid, too. I came across numerous articles about the so-called church-mosques of Anatolia. Pazaryeri Camii, in the coastal city of Izmir, is one example: built for Christian service in 1874, it was repurposed as a mosque once Turkey became a republic. During the building’s renovation, the experts found Christian icons and decided to install a curtain system to cover them during Islamic prayers. Another church-mosque, in the Çardak village of Göreme, has been used by both Orthodox Christians and Muslims. Indeed, a Turkish columnist recommended a similar solution for Hagia Sophia: “We should allow Aya Sofya to become all three things at the same time!” she wrote. “Let’s keep it as a museum from Monday to Thursday, turn it into a mosque on Friday, close it for holiday on Saturday and use it as a church on Sunday. We can cover the floor with a carpet on Thursday nights and place chairs on Saturday nights.”
(Image of interior of Hagia Sophia via Flickr user MiGowa)
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