Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu has rejected EU criticism of the change in the status of St. Sophia Cathedral (Aya Sophia) in Istanbul, recalling the mosques in Spain that have become Christian churches.
Earlier the head of the European diplomacy Joseph Borrel said that the EU foreign ministers at a meeting in Brussels on Monday supported the proposal to call on Turkey to review and cancel the decision to resume Muslim worship at St. Sophia Cathedral in Istanbul.
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“We reject criticism from the EU. This is a topic related to our sovereignty. Just as our ancestors kept Aya Sofia, so we will keep her. There will be namazas there, but access for visitors will also be open. There are mosques in Spain that have been converted into churches. What do we do now, condemn and demand that they be turned back into mosques”, – Cavusoglu told reporters in Ankara.
On July 10, the Supreme Administrative Court of Turkey annulled a 1934 decision to turn the St. Sophia Cathedral into a museum. Immediately after that, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said he signed a decree on turning the cathedral into a mosque and starting Muslim worship services there. They will begin on July 24.
The Cathedral of St. Sophia was founded by Christian Emperor Justinian and opened on December 27, 537. The cathedral was the largest church in the Christian world for about a thousand years. After the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans and the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, the cathedral was converted into a mosque, but since 1934 by decree of the founder of the modern Turkish state Kemal Ataturk the building became a museum and was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.