Istanbul, February 7, 2024
The Chora Monastery is home to perhaps the most famous icon of the Resurrection of Christ in the world. Photo: Wikipedia
Just months after the world-famous Hagia Sophia Cathedral in Istanbul was converted back into a mosque in the summer of 2020, Turkey’s President Erdoğan announced the same fate for the nearby Christ the Savior Chora Church.
The 6th-century monastery was initially converted into a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in the 16th century. Beginning in 1945, it operated as a museum, until the decision of the Turkish Supreme Court in 2019 and Erdoğan’s decree in August 2020 that ordered it to be turned back into a mosque.
Photo: pravlife.org
Since then, the church has been undergoing restoration work in preparation for its reopening as a mosque, which the state has announced will happen on February 23, reports Vima Orthodoxias.
The Chora Church is home to a fresco of the Resurrection of Christ known to all Orthodox Christians, as seen above.
The initial decision four years ago sparked protests from the Church and international organizations.
“It’s a fact that the conversion of Hagia Sophia and now the Monastery of Chora into mosques has hurt us,” Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople said at the time.
“These two unique monuments of the city were built as Christian churches. They express the universal spirit of our faith, love, and the hope of eternity. The incomparable mosaics and their other icons are Heavenly food for the soul and an inexhaustible joy for the eyes, as Photios Kontoglou from Ayvalik would say, and they belong to the world cultural heritage,” the Patriarch stressed.
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