Hagia Sophia to host first Muslim prayers since reverting to a mosque

Friday prayers will be held for the first time at Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia since President Tayyip Erdogan declared the building once again a mosque after a top Turkish court ruled in favour of annulling its museum status, Reuters reported.

The monument served as a Christian Byzantine cathedral for 900 years before it was seized by Ottoman conquerors and converted to a mosque. Muslims prayed there until 1934 when it was turned into a museum.

Hagia Sophia is nearly 1,500 years old and was one of the most exalted seats of Christian and then Muslim worship in the world, meaning that the change to its status has profound repercussions for followers of both faiths. It is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Here are the key facts of Hagia Sophia’s history, the campaign to change its status, and statements by religious and political leaders following its conversion to a mosque.

Hagia Sophia, or ‘Divine Wisdom’ in Greek, was completed in 537 by Byzantine emperor Justinian.

The vast, domed structure overlooked the Golden Horn harbour and entrance to the Bosphorus from the heart of Constantinople. It was the centre of Orthodox Christianity and remained the world’s largest church for centuries.

Hagia Sophia stayed under Byzantine control - except for a brief seizure by Crusaders in the 13th century - until the city was captured by the Muslim forces of the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmet the Conqueror, who converted it into a mosque.

The Ottomans built four minarets, covered Hagia Sophia’s Christian icons and luminous gold mosaics, and installed huge black panels embellished with the names of God, the prophet Mohammad and Muslim caliphs in Arabic calligraphy.

In 1934 Turkey’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, forging a secular republic out of the defeated Ottoman Empire, converted Hagia Sophia into a museum, now visited by millions of tourists every year.