Historian: Hagia Sophia’s conversion into mosque is Turkey’s “new conquest”

Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Photo: Tiqets

Turkish historian Professor Taner Akçam gave a sharp interview in which he accused the Ottomans of systematically destroying cultural heritage and called the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque “a display of barbarism,” UOJ in Greece reports.

“What happened with Hagia Sophia is a clear demonstration of barbarism. It is a declaration by the Turks that they are uncivilized and destructive,” Akçam said.

According to him, this step represents Turkey’s message to the world: “Although we live in the 21st century, we still retain the mentality of the conqueror of 1453. Even today, we have no desire to protect the world’s cultural heritage.”

“We have turned one of humanity’s greatest monuments into a mosque and conquered it again – as in 1453, but in the 21st century. What happened is a cultural catastrophe,” the historian emphasized.

Akçam cited the 19th-century Russian thinker Nikolai Danilevsky, who divided societies into those that create civilization and those that destroy it. Danilevsky listed the Egyptians, Chinese, Greeks, Romans, and Europeans among the former, while describing the Huns, Mongols, and Turks as “negative factors in history” that “fulfilled their destructive mission, contributed to the fall of dying civilizations, and then returned to their insignificance and disappeared.”

Akçam noted that criticism of the Turks’ destructive tendencies toward civilization has long existed in the West: “Not only intellectuals but ordinary people have said that Turks trample on the works of millennia-old civilizations wherever they go in the Balkans,” he said, quoting historical testimonies such as: “Wherever a Turk finds a tree, he cuts it down,” and “The Ottomans did nothing but burn, plunder, and destroy the places they conquered.”

The professor accused President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ally Devlet Bahçeli of representing “traditional barbarism and a deeply rooted tendency toward destruction.”

“Today Asia Minor is full of ruined churches and sacred sites used either as stables or as warehouses,” Akçam stressed.

He declared that resistance to Erdoğan and Bahçeli “must be seen as a struggle for civilization by every Turk” and expressed his support for imprisoned activist Osman Kavala, founder of the Anatolian Culture Foundation, which seeks to preserve the region’s cultural heritage.

Earlier, Turkish authorities claimed that Erdoğan had “liberated Hagia Sophia from its chains.”

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