Question:

Turkey Turns Hagia Sophia into a mosque, your response?

Answer:

This is an attempt to pull back the history and digging out the past events; it would cause confusion and misunderstanding, especially when it deals with a religious premise, so culturally acclaimed all over the world. We cannot re-shape and remake the history. The past should be seen in that historical and geographical context and not in a contemporary context. This Church considered as a “living example of religious harmony” was declared as a world heritage by UNESCO with outstanding universal value of the property.” Reducing it to a property of a single State or religion and making it the worship place of only one religion shows the narrowmindedness and rigid mentality of a nation. It was considered to be a “symbolic place of encounter, dialogue, solidarity and mutual understanding between Christianity and Islam” – by Eastern Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, – but now restrictions are put on it and is envisaged as a place of monologue and monotheism. The fact that the concerns expressed by different Christian denominations were not heeded to, let us hope that this decision may not affect the good relation-ship between the two religions, not only in Turkey and Greece, but also else-where in the world. I hope and pray that such invasions and submissions that took place in vicissitudes of history may not be re-visited similarly in other parts of the globe, especially in our motherland, where so many religions live peacefully.

Abp Kuriakose Bharanikulangara
Faridabad