Hagia Sophia

Overview

Hagia Sophia, whose name means “Church of Holy Wisdom,” is a monumental building in Istanbul, Turkey. Byzantine emperor Justinian I built the present structure as a Christian cathedral in Constantinople in 537. It served as a central expression of Byzantine power and Greek Orthodox worship. Following Sultan Mehmed II’s conquest of the city in 1453, it became a mosque of the Ottoman Empire. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s government designated it a museum in 1934. In July 2020, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan restored its mosque status after Turkey’s Council of State voided the museum decision. Each change joined the building’s religious use to a wider account of state authority and national history.

The present Hagia Sophia was the third church erected on its site. Its sixth-century construction made it one of the Byzantine Empire’s defining monuments, and it remained the world’s largest church for roughly a thousand years. Its place in Greek Orthodox history gives it enduring importance to Christians and Greeks, including those for whom its Ottoman conversion marked the loss of Constantinople as a Byzantine capital. Hagia Sophia forms part of the Historic Areas of Istanbul, a UNESCO World Heritage property. Its continued prominence as an architectural landmark does not erase the distinct religious meanings attached to its successive uses.

The 2020 conversion was a political event as well as a change in worship. It reversed a defining decision of Atatürk’s secular republic and fulfilled a longstanding demand of Turkish religious conservatives. Erdoğan presented the move as an assertion of Turkish sovereignty and associated it with the Ottoman conquest. Christian leaders and Greece objected. Responses among Sunni Arabs differed sharply: critics opposed the decision and Erdoğan’s regional course, while spokesmen for the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, a terrorist organization, welcomed it. The dispute made Hagia Sophia a prominent symbol of Turkey’s changing relationship between religion and state.

Background

Justinian I commissioned Hagia Sophia in sixth-century Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Completed in 537, the cathedral stood at the heart of the empire’s religious and ceremonial life. Its scale gave physical form to imperial ambition, while its Christian purpose made it a major site in the history of the Greek Orthodox Church. The structure that survives was built after two earlier churches had occupied the same site. Its long life across successive governments has made the building both a record of architectural achievement and a place where political rulers have expressed their authority through religion.

For Greeks and Orthodox Christians, Hagia Sophia’s meaning extends beyond its age or appearance. It was built for Christian worship in the Byzantine capital and became a symbol of an empire closely associated with Greek Orthodox tradition. Its conversion in later centuries did not remove that history. The continuing importance of the cathedral explains why decisions about its status have drawn responses far beyond Istanbul. When Turkey considered another change in 2020, Christian objections concerned a building understood as part of a living religious heritage, even though it had not functioned as a church during the republican museum period.

Mehmed II conquered Constantinople in 1453, ending Byzantine control of the city, and made it a capital of the Ottoman Empire. Hagia Sophia then became a mosque. The change placed the former cathedral within Ottoman religious and political life and connected it permanently with the memory of the conquest. Its Christian origin remained part of the building’s history, while its use as a mosque acquired its own centuries-long history. Those two inheritances became central to later arguments over what the Turkish state should do with a monument claimed as significant by different communities.

Following the end of the Ottoman Empire, Atatürk founded a republic committed to a secular transformation of Turkish public life. His government designated Hagia Sophia a museum in 1934. Opening the former cathedral and mosque to visitors of all backgrounds was intended to reinforce that transformation. The decision also placed a monument closely tied to Ottoman religious authority under a new public purpose. Museum status did not settle every question about the building’s past, but it made Atatürk’s approach visible in one of Istanbul’s best-known sites.

The museum decision became an important point of disagreement within Turkish politics. For religious conservatives, restoring Hagia Sophia’s mosque status grew into a major symbolic cause. The demand invoked Mehmed II and the Ottoman conquest, while opposition to the demand often reflected support for the secular settlement associated with Atatürk. The argument therefore reached beyond access to a single building. It asked which parts of Turkey’s past should guide the republic’s present public identity and how much authority state religious institutions should exercise over a monument shared in the historical memory of Christians and Muslims.

Under Erdoğan, the Directorate of Religious Affairs supported the campaign to restore mosque status. From 2016, it periodically held Koran readings at Hagia Sophia that Turkish state media broadcast. These events kept religious use of the building in public view while it remained a museum. In 2019, Erdoğan called the decision to make Hagia Sophia a museum a major mistake. His position joined a cause long advanced by religious conservatives to the presidency itself. It also sharpened the contrast between Atatürk’s use of the monument to express secular republican change and Erdoğan’s use of it to express a stronger state role for Islam.

The campaign had substantial public support, although that support did not make views within Turkey uniform. A June 2020 survey commissioned by the pro-government newspaper Yeni Safak found roughly 73 percent of respondents in favor of converting Hagia Sophia into a mosque. Support was particularly strong among voters of Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party. The survey showed the strength of the cause among the government’s supporters as the decision approached. It did not resolve the objections of Christians, Greeks, or Turks who valued the museum as part of the republic’s secular legacy.

Outcome

In July 2020, Turkey’s Council of State, its highest administrative court, voided the 1934 cabinet decision designating Hagia Sophia a museum. A 2010 constitutional amendment had enabled Erdoğan to appoint a majority of the Council of State judges serving at the time of the ruling. The judgment cleared the way for the government to change the building’s status. Immediately afterward, Erdoğan signed an order permitting prayers from July 24 and transferred authority over Hagia Sophia to the Directorate of Religious Affairs. The rapid sequence linked the court’s decision, presidential action, and religious administration in a single change of public use.

Hagia Sophia opened for Muslim prayers on July 24, 2020. The return of worship to the main building fulfilled a demand that Turkish religious conservatives had pursued for decades. Erdoğan described the museum decision as an error being corrected and cast the conversion as a restoration connected to the Ottoman inheritance. He also rejected foreign criticism as interference in Turkey’s sovereignty. The decision proceeded despite American and European warnings and severe criticism from parts of the Christian world.

For Atatürk, museum status had demonstrated the secular direction of the new republic and allowed people of different backgrounds to encounter the building’s history. Erdoğan’s order reversed that choice. Hagia Sophia remained a Byzantine monument and an important part of Greek Orthodox heritage, but its formal use and administration changed. The distinction matters: the controversy concerned both the right to worship there and the public meaning assigned to a former cathedral, an Ottoman mosque, and a republican museum by Turkey’s government.

Aftermath and legacy

Christian and Greek objections reflected Hagia Sophia’s exceptional place in Orthodox history. Greek Orthodox leaders criticized the inaugural prayers, and Greece opposed the conversion of a monument it considers an important part of Greek heritage. For many Christians, the museum had offered a way to acknowledge the building’s successive histories without placing its present use wholly within one religious tradition. Its restoration as a mosque renewed attention to the loss of its original function as a cathedral and to the treatment of Christian heritage under Turkish rule.

The issue added to tensions between Greece and Turkey during 2020. Their disputes also included maritime boundaries, drilling, and other regional questions, but Hagia Sophia brought a distinct cultural and religious dimension to the relationship. Greek–Turkish tensions, including the planned conversion, were discussed during the Greek prime minister’s visit to Israel on June 16, 2020. The visit showed that the dispute was already part of wider regional diplomacy before the Council of State ruled. Hagia Sophia’s significance to Greeks made its status a matter of concern outside Turkey even while the formal decision rested with Turkish institutions.

Arab responses exposed another division. Sunni figures in Arab states sharply criticized the conversion, and the decision widened Turkey’s divide with states that opposed Erdoğan’s regional course. Critics saw the move as part of a broader attempt to revive Ottoman symbolism and strengthen Turkey’s political influence. Public figures and commentators in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates challenged Erdoğan’s use of religious identity in politics. Their objections show why reactions cannot be reduced to a division between Christians and Muslims.

Spokesmen for the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas welcomed the conversion. Hamas is a terrorist organization, and its approval placed it among political movements that celebrated Erdoğan’s decision. Officials in Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran, by contrast, defended Turkey’s authority to decide the building’s status. These responses arose from different political positions: support for Turkey’s sovereign decision did not necessarily express approval of the same regional agenda advanced by Erdoğan’s allies. Together, the reactions showed how a decision concerning one Istanbul monument became a marker in broader diplomatic and ideological disputes.

Some Arab critics also objected to the way Erdoğan’s message connected Hagia Sophia with Jerusalem. His public presentation emphasized access and Turkish sovereignty, while Arabic-language messaging invoked a future change concerning the Temple Mount. That difference intensified criticism among opponents of his regional policies. It also drew attention to the risks of treating religious monuments as instruments of rivalry between states. The argument over Hagia Sophia thus extended beyond its own walls, even as its Byzantine, Ottoman, and republican histories remained the immediate basis of the dispute.

A later case illustrated how Hagia Sophia could figure in tensions within the Muslim world. In 2022, a Saudi court sentenced Abdullah Basfar, a professor and imam from Jeddah, to 12 years in prison in a case associated with prayers he led on Hagia Sophia’s grounds in 2014, when the building was still a museum. The earlier event occurred during a period of strained Saudi–Turkish relations. The case belongs to a separate national and legal context from Turkey’s 2020 order, but it underscores the political weight that acts of worship at the site had acquired.

The conversion became a defining symbol of Erdoğan’s political legacy. By restoring mosque status, he fulfilled a longstanding conservative objective, connected his rule to the Ottoman Empire, and reversed one of Atatürk’s most visible decisions. Turkey remains constitutionally secular, yet Hagia Sophia’s transfer to the Directorate of Religious Affairs displayed the greater public role of state religious authority under Erdoğan. The building’s successive functions—Greek Orthodox cathedral, Ottoman mosque, republican museum, and mosque again—continue to embody the central divide between Atatürk’s secular vision and Erdoğan’s transformation of religion’s place in Turkish public life.