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World

Erdogan, Hagia Sophia and the rebirth of an Islamic Turkey

15 July 2020

7:27 PM

15 July 2020

7:27 PM

Here in Greece the temperature is rising. As July rolls on, the heat thickens: people become irritable in 40 degrees. Now they have even more reason for anger. Last Friday, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared that Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia would open for Muslim prayers as a mosque. He made the announcement after a Turkish court ruled that Kemal Atatürk’s 1934 conversion of it to a museum was illegal.

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