Turkey Revives Plan to Convert Another Historic Church Into a Triumphal Mosque

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“If you look at history books, you will see that Turk equals Muslim,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday. He added that “a definition of Turkishness without the inclusion of Islam’s holy war spirit is merely an attempt to turn the Turkish nation into a folklore tale.” On Feb. 23, Turkey plans to reinforce its Islamic identity and “holy war spirit” by converting one of the most celebrated and important Byzantine churches in the world, the Chora Church in Istanbul, into a triumphal mosque.

Plans to transform Chora Church, or Church of the Holy Savior, which contains some of the most exquisite surviving examples of Medieval Byzantine iconography, have been in the works for four years. Ekathimerini reported Tuesday that “the plan to convert the church, which had been operating as a museum for nearly 80 years, dates from 2020,” when Erdogan included it in his much-criticized decree to turn the most important Byzantine church in the world, Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, into a mosque.

Yet while Hagia Sophia was duly made into a mosque in July 2020, “the Chora Church scheme was put on hold so that restoration work could be carried out.” A church was first built on the site of the present Chora Church early in the fourth century. “The present structure dates mostly from the 14th century,” according to UNESCO, and “its mosaics and frescoes, commissioned by the Byzantine humanist and poet Theodore Metochites (14th century) form one of the most complete ensembles of late Byzantine art to survive in Istanbul.”

Like Hagia Sophia, Chora Church first became a mosque after the Ottoman conquest and looting of Constantinople in 1453, although Hagia Sophia was converted immediately, and Chora Church remained a church until early in the sixteenth century. In 1945, Chora Church became a museum, but Erdogan is at war with Turkish secularism, and so it could not remain a museum any more than Hagia Sophia could.

In order to understand this, one must understand the idea of triumphal mosques in Islam. All over the world, there are mosques that have been built on the holy sites of conquered peoples, and sacred structures of non-Muslims that have been converted into mosques. This is done on purpose, so as to declare the victory of Islam over the other religion that once had a holy place on that spot and the superiority of Islam over that religion. That’s why there is a mosque — in fact, two mosques — on the site of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, and why Hagia Sophia, which was for nearly a millennium the grandest and most important cathedral in the Christian world, had to become a mosque. There are also thousands of mosques in India that are built over Hindu temples that jihadis destroyed.

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