BREITBART reports that The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, held its first Ramadan prayers in 88 years on Friday to mark the start of the Islamic month of fasting, after being converted into a mosque in 2020.

The Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque — once the Church of the Holy Wisdom, before the Turks’ violent conquest of its city — held its first tarawih prayer since 1934, when the cathedral-turned-mosque was converted into a museum by the secularising government of Kemal Atatürk.

Turkey’s President Recept Tayyip Erdogan had converted the Hagia Sophia into a mosque in 2020 despite protests from local Christians and many abroad — although Erdogan achieved his conversion of the iconic house of worship with less accompanying destruction than Mehmet II in 1453

Orthodox Christians, for whom the Hagia Sophia was their grandest cathedral prior to the Ottoman conquest, were particularly outraged over its 2020 conversion.

In September of that year, for example, the Greek Orthodox Church of the United States petitioned the United Nations to force the Turkish government to protect the Christian heritage of the cathedral.

“By unilaterally changing the status, structure and name of these UNESCO sites, with particular significance to Orthodox Christians, Turkey is in violation of its obligations under international law to preserve cultural heritage and to respect the political, cultural and religious freedoms of Orthodox Christians in Turkey and abroad,” Archdiocese of America counsel Christina Hioureas warned.

In neighbouring Greece, polls showed that a majority of Greeks were unhappy with the weak international response to the conversion, with 87 per cent saying they were disappointed in the reaction of the European Union, in particular.

Photo: Reuters