Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

May 29: The Last Day of the World

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“On May 29, 1453,” the state-run Turkish broadcaster TRT World reported happily on Thursday, the 572nd anniversary of the fateful day, “a 21-year-old Sultan Mehmed II led the Ottoman army to a decisive victory over the Byzantine Empire. The conquest of Istanbul remains a shining jewel in the crown of the Ottoman Empire.” Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s desire to restore the lost glory of that empire is well known, but those who are the children and heirs of the victims of its bloody expansion look on this anniversary with somewhat less enthusiasm than TRT World displayed.

Some Greek Orthodox Christians to this day refer to May 29, 1453, as “the last day of the world.” In a very real sense, that is exactly what it was: the end of over two thousand years of the Roman Empire, the end of what had for centuries been the world’s foremost power and leading Christian state. The conquest of Constantinople meant the eclipse of Christianity in Asia Minor, which had been such an important center of the faith that three of Paul’s New Testament epistles — Galatians, Ephesians, and Colossians — were addressed to Christian congregations there.

Constantinople had been the center of Christianity in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, and the second see in the Church, after only Rome. After the East/West schism of 1054, Constantinople was the heart of Orthodox Christianity. As “The History of Jihad” recounts in detail, however, on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the armies of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II finally broke through Constantinople’s defenses after a long siege, marking the end of the great Christian Roman Empire.

The conquerors were extraordinarily brutal, raiding monasteries and convents, emptying them of their inhabitants, and plundering private houses. They entered Hagia Sophia, which for nearly a thousand years had been the grandest church in Christendom. The faithful had gathered within its hallowed walls to pray during the city’s last agony. The Muslims halted the celebration of Orthros (morning prayer), while the priests, according to legend, took the sacred vessels and disappeared into the cathedral’s eastern wall, through which they shall return to complete the divine service one day. Muslim men then killed the elderly and weak and led the rest off into slavery.

The Byzantine scholar Bessarion wrote to the Doge of Venice in July 1453, saying that Constantinople had been “sacked by the most inhuman barbarians and the most savage enemies of the Christian faith, by the fiercest of wild beasts. The public treasure has been consumed, private wealth has been destroyed, the temples have been stripped of gold, silver, jewels, the relics of the saints, and other most precious ornaments. Men have been butchered like cattle, women abducted, virgins ravished, and children snatched from the arms of their parents.”

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Comments

  1. And now the Muslims of Egypt are robbing Christendom of its oldest continuing functioning monasteries.

    • SKA, I heard that Egypt is backing down on this after bad publicity. I guess time will tell…

    • Not offically–still hiding behind the fig leaf of Attaturk. But this is coming.

    • Dictator erdogan’s arse is very high right now, he has become so emboldened that he attacks the secular constitution. He is already violating the current constitution and the new one made by him and his gang of terrorists will be terrible.
      The West let Erdogan to destroy Turkey.

      Shame on Trump for supporting this anti-democratic, tyrant scum.

    • Infidel,

      If Turkey officially becomes an islamic republic, what happens to their NATO membership?

      • Turkey is for all intents and purposes an Islamic Republic today….and it has not hurt their NATO membership in the least. They were frozen out of buying the F-35, but that was not because of Erdogan’s Islamist policies, it was because he purchased the SAM-400 missile defense from Russia.

        Now, Erdogan is imposing his Islamism on northern Cyprus.

  3. May 29: The Last Day of the World
    ………………………………….

    This was certainly the last day of the civilized world in Constantinople.

    • You would think that the unrelenting savagery meted out by the death cultists would have abated by now, in this advanced, oh-so-civilised world – not one iota, I’m afraid

      • Civilization has to be embraced–and Islam’s pious followers are not doing that.

  4. In northern Lebanon, Syrian Alawites shelter in mosques, graveyards after fleeing homes
    Almost 40,000 people have fled Syria into north Lebanon since March, the UN refugee agency UNHCR said in a statement.
    Saturday 24/05/2025
    Displaced Syrians from the Alawite minority take shelter in a school in the village of Al-Masoudiyeh, in Lebanon’s northern Akkar region, March 19, 2025. (AFP)
    Displaced Syrians from the Alawite minority take shelter in a school in the village of Al-Masoudiyeh, in Lebanon’s northern Akkar region, March 19, 2025. (AFP)
    HISSA, Lebanon

    Behind a ramshackle mosque in Hissa, north Lebanon, the living are making a home for themselves among the dead.

    Beside mounds of garbage in the shade of towering trees, men, women and children from Syria’s Alawite community seek shelter among the graves surrounding the half-built mosque, grateful to have escaped the sectarian violence at home but fearing for their future.

    “We each have our own horror story that drove us to this place,” said a man with sunken eyes.

    All of the refugees that spoke to reporters, requested anonymity for fear of retribution.

    Around 600 people have sought shelter at the Hissa mosque. Hundreds sleep in the main hall, including a day-old baby.

    On the building’s unfinished second storey, plastic sheets stretched over wooden beams divide traumatised families.

    Others sleep on the roof. One family has set up camp under the stairwell, another by the tomb of a local saint. Some sleep on the graves in the surrounding cemetery, others under trees with only thin blankets for warmth.

    They are among the tens of thousands refugees who have fled Syria since March, when the country suffered its worst bloodshed since Bashar al-Assad was toppled from power by Islamist-led rebels in December.

    Almost 40,000 people have fled Syria into north Lebanon since then, the UN refugee agency UNHCR said in a statement.

    Needs but no resources

    The recent violence in Syria, which has pitted the Islamist-led government’s security forces against fighters from the Alawite minority, the sect to which Assad’s family belongs, has killed more than 1,000 people since March.

    For more than 50 years, the Assad family crushed any opposition from Syria’s Sunnis, who make up more than 70 percent of the population. Alawites, an offshoot of Shia Islam, took many of the top positions in government and the military and ran big businesses.

    Alawites now accuse the new government of President Ahmed al-Sharaa of exacting revenge, but Sharaa says he will pursue inclusive policies to unite the country shattered by civil war and attract foreign investment.

    Trump said last week he would lift sanctions on Syria, triggering hopes of economic renewal. But this has provided little comfort to the refugees in northern Lebanon, who are struggling to meet their basic needs.

    “UNHCR, but also other agencies, are not now in a position to say you can count on us,” said Ivo Freijsen, UNHCR representative in Lebanon, in an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation in April.

    “So, in response to new arrivals, yes, we will try, but it will be less (than before).”

    More refugees come from Syria every day. Almost 50 people arrived over two days last week, said one camp representative, who asked not to be named for security reasons.

    UNHCR is equipping new arrivals with essential items like mattresses, blankets and clothes, as well as providing medical help and mental health support, said a spokesman.

    “UNHCR is also conducting rehabilitation works in shelters to make sure families are protected,” the spokesman added.

    ‘Forgotten refugees’

    At the mosque, food is scarce and the portable toilets provided by an aid group have flooded. Garbage is piling up and is attracting vermin. Snakes have been killed in the camp, and one refugee spoke of the “biggest centipedes we have ever seen.”

    The camp’s children have nowhere to go.

    It can be difficult for refugee children to access Lebanon’s school system, Human Rights Watch has said, while the refugees at the mosque say private schools are too expensive and may not accept children enrolling mid-year.

    The refugees sheltering in the mosque are among the millions of people affected by Trump’s decision to freeze US funding to humanitarian programmes in February.

    The UNHCR has been forced to reduce all aspects of its operations in Lebanon, Freijsen said, including support to Syrian refugees.

    The UNHCR had enough money to cover only 14 percent of its planned operations in Lebanon and 17 percent of its global operations by the end of March, the UN agency said in a report.

    “Our assistance is not what it is supposed to be,” Freijsen said. “In the past, we always had the resources, or we could easily mobilise the resources. These days are over, and that’s painful.”

    The people in the mosque fear that they have been forgotten.

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