On July 10, 2020 Turkish President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan announced that Hagia Sophia, H.S., would be reopened for Muslim worship, and control over it was transferred from the ministry of culture to the directorate of religious affairs.  However, although Muslim religious services are to begin there, Hagia Sophia, like Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, will be, according to official assurances, open to people of all faiths and nationalities. Hagia Sophia, a spacious architectural masterpiece, has been a political landmark as well as a religious and cultural one, politically and symbolically important for 1,400 years.  In those years it has been a temple of the Eastern Orthodox Church, a Catholic Cathedral for 57 years, an Orthodox temple again, a mosque, a museum, and now a mosque.  In 537 A.D., the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, warrior and codifier of the laws, decided to build in Constantinople the largest Christian edifice in the world, and workers...(Read Full Post)