ERDOGAN DECLARES HAGIA SOPHIA A MOSQUE

ISTANBUL—PRESIDENT Tayyip Erdogan declared Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia a mosque on Friday with the first Muslim prayers to begin in two weeks, after a top court ruled the ancient building’s conversion to a museum was illegal.

Erdogan spoke on Friday hours after the court ruling was published, brushing aside international warnings not to change the status of the 1,500-year-old monument revered by Christians and Muslims alike.

The United States, Russia and church leaders were among those to express concern about changing the status of the Unesco World Heritage Site, a focal point of both the Christian Byzantine and Muslim Ottoman empires and now one of the most visited monuments in Turkey.

Provocation

Greece’s culture ministry described the court decision as an “open provocation” to the civilized world, while Unesco said it would now review the building’s status.

Erdogan has sought to shift Islam into the mainstream of Turkish politics in his 17 years at the helm. He has long floated restoring the mosque status of the sixth-century building, which was converted into a museum in the early days of the modern secular Turkish state under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

“With this court ruling, and with the measures we took in line with the decision, Hagia Sophia became a mosque again, after 86 years, in the way Fatih the conqueror of Istanbul had wanted it to be,” Erdogan said in a national address.

In a telling of history at times critical of the Byzantine Empire and the modern republic’s founders, Erdogan said Turkey could now leave behind “the curse of Allah, profits and angels” that Fatih—the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet Ii—said would be on anyone who converted it from a mosque.

Sultan Mehmet II captured Istanbul in 1453 and turned the then 900-year-old Greek Orthodox cathedral into a mosque.