What an amazing city Istanbul is! Straddling Europe and Asia across the Bosphorus Strait, Istanbul is the only city in the world to sit across two continents. And it buzzes with a collision of cultures as it reflects cultural influences of the many empires that once ruled here. While the open-air, Roman-era Hippodrome was for centuries the site of chariot races, and Egyptian obelisks also remain, history unfolded in front of my eyes when I stepped inside the Hagia Sophia museum exactly 13 years ago.
Hagia Sophia was built as a cathedral in the Christian Byzantine Empire in the year 537 by emperor Justinian I, and was believed to be the world’s largest church and building at that time. When the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople in 1453 and changed the city’s name to Istanbul, Sultan Mehmed II converted it into a mosque, adding four minarets to the exterior and covering ornate Christian icons and gold mosaics with panels of Arabic religious calligraphy.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first Turkish President and founder of the Republic of Turkey, turned it into a museum in 1934 in a drive to make Turkey more secular. Interestingly, after the fall of Constantinople, Ottomans didn’t destroy the Byzantine mosaics of Hagia Sophia, rather these mosaics were covered in whitewash, and when Hagia Sophia was converted into a museum, these were uncovered – the sign of covering being prominent to the viewers.
Subsequently, it became Turkey’s most popular tourist site, attracting more than 3.7 million visitors a year in the recent past. In his 1932 travelogue-cumessay ‘Parasye’, Tagore indicated that in the dawn of a new Turkey, their Minister of Justice had said, “Mediaeval principles must give way to secular laws. We are creating a modern civilised nation and we desire to meet contemporary needs. We have the will to live, and nobody can prevent us.” Unfortunately, the minister couldn’t foresee the future a century ahead.
Now, exactly a century after the Turkish War of Independence, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is taking one more step to dismantle Kemal Atatürk’s secular legacy, and re-mould Turkey according to his vision. While there is a lot of discussion and international concerns about the changing religious character of Turkey under President Erdogan, I wondered about a few points. Reclaiming Hagia Sophia is certainly deeply associated with the political base of Erdogan – the religious conservatives and Turkish nationalists. ‘Neo-Ottomanism’ is an increasingly popular label for Erdogan’s party, the AKP.
However, Erdogan has been at the helm of his country since 2003 – as the Prime Minister during 2003-2014, and as the President subsequently. Some other monuments and churches in Turkey have been converted to mosques during these years. For example, another ‘Hagia Sophia’, a Byzantine church-turnedmuseum with the same name in Trabzon on the Black Sea coast, is functioning as both mosque and museum since 2012. But these issues don’t have as big an impact as of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, which became a symbol of secularism in modern Turkey and is now the symbol of the country’s changing national character.
Then, why did Erdogan take 17 long years to convert Hagia Sophia of Istanbul to a mosque for the second time in its history? The Turkish high court stripped the sixth-century Byzantine site’s museum status, paving the way for it to be converted into a mosque, we know. However, couldn’t such a lawfare, as some prefer to call it, be done earlier? Did Erdogan wait so long instead because Hagia Sophia is the most important and iconic one, and it was never an easy task to re-characterize it?
The secularism implanted by the Atatürk legacy is still strong among millions of Turks – no doubt about that. As the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Ferit Orhan Pamuk, for example, has said: “There are millions of secular Turks like me who are crying against this but their voices are not heard.” Also, is there anything related to Covid-19 which has devastated the economy of Turkey like many other countries? A tanking Turkish economy has been further ravaged during the deadly pandemic, for sure.
The war in Idlib, Syria, is a growing humanitarian crisis, and a potential disaster for Ankara. With 97 per cent of tourism frozen, hotels are closed, and hundreds of thousands of people have become unemployed. Is it an illustration of ‘The Shock Doctrine’ by Erdogan? Such a concept has been outlined by the Canadian author Naomi Klein in her 2007 book having the same title. The book described how national crises and disasters are exploited to establish controversial and questionable policies, while citizens are excessively distracted.
Again, while Erdogan was trying to re-implant Islamic culture in Turkey, the Turkey I saw in 2007 was far from an Islamic state. Remember that Erdogan had already completed four years of reign by then. Actually, I believe, everything might be deeply related to Turkey’s failure to join the European Union (EU) during these years. Ever since 1987, Turkey has been trying hard for formal membership into the EU (then European Economic Community).
However, Europe was clearly never very enthusiastic about Ankara’s membership. Turkey’s economic and political situation, as well its poor relation with Greece and the conflict with Cyprus were major reasons behind this. Turkey, however, was quite serious and a bit desperate too. In 2007, Turkey even stated that they were aiming to comply with EU laws by 2013. However, it was apparently clear by mid-2018 that Turkey had been moving further away from the European Union, and Turkey’s accession negotiations had therefore effectively come to a standstill.
EU’s General Affairs Council was especially concerned about the continuing and deeply worrying backslide on the rule of law and on fundamental rights including the freedom of expression in Turkey. Thus, while Turkey’s EU membership did not mature partially due to the nature and activities of the Erdogan regime, the almost-failed effort for EU membership might have been instrumental in creating the current situation of Turkey as well. I firmly believe that an EU membership could have reoriented the fortunes of the people of the country in a different direction, and that could also have prevented Turkey from taking such drastic steps as converting the Hagia Sophia museum into the Ayasofya mosque!
Had Turkey been a member of the EU, its President couldn’t just have told the world that it was all about the ‘sovereignty’ of Turkey. Now, the reality is that, for the second time in its history, Hagia Sophia has been turned into a mosque. The first Friday prayers in the new regime were hosted on 24 July, the anniversary of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. The prayers were attended by Erdogan himself.
The Byzantine mosaics would remain uncovered, but mosaics depicting Christian figures will be covered with curtains during Muslim prayers. The mosaics would keep on reminding visitors of the 1500-year history of the city. Like most visitors, I was most thrilled about the covering and uncovering of history. History has been covered up again. However, I’d have liked to visit Hagia Sophia museum once more in my lifetime. For towards the end of his essay entitled ‘Kemal Atatürk’, Rabindranath wrote: “The vitality he has induced to Turkey may not come to an end.” And, history has an uncanny knack of uncovering itself.
(The writer is Professor of Statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata)