Turkey Venerates Its Violent Conquest of Christian Territory with Conversion of Hagia Sophia to a Mosque

“Having taken possession of one of Christendom’s greatest and oldest basilicas—nearly a thousand years old at the time of its capture—the invaders “engaged in every kind of vileness within it, making of it a public brothel.” On “its holy altars” they enacted “perversions with our women, virgins, and children,” including “the Grand Duke’s daughter who was quite beautiful.” She was forced to “lie on the great altar of Hagia Sophia with a crucifix under her head and then raped.”

Next “they paraded the [Hagia Sophia’s main] Crucifix in mocking procession through their camp, beating drums before it, crucifying the Christ again with spitting and blasphemies and curses. They placed a Turkish cap . . . upon His head, and jeeringly cried, ‘Behold the god of the Christians!’” They “gouged the eyes from the [embalmed] saints” and dumped their corpses “in the middle of the streets for swine and dogs to trample on . . . and the images of our Lord Jesus Christ and His Saints were burned or hacked to pieces.””

Wow! Talk about your olde news. The Hagia Sophia became a mosque in 1453...

Wow! Talk about your olde news. The Hagia Sophia became a mosque in 1453...

I was just going to mention that fact. The Hagia Sophia hasn't been a Christian church since the fall of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire.

Most historians do agree that the Byzantine Empire terminated on Tuesday 29 May 1453 CE, when the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II (r.1444-6 & 1451-81 CE) conquered Constantinople.

Since 1935 when Turkey was a secular democracy it has been a museum. The current news is the plan to return it to be a mosque again and the effort and motivations behind it and a documentation of the historical record.  

So?

So?

Maybe he is trying to make Istanbul great again, by turning the sundial back 1000 years.

Islam will never recover its past “glory” without a complete reformation and renaissance of their own.  

Islam will never recover its past “glory” without a complete reformation and renaissance of their own.  

You missed the point I was trying to make. It seems that you want to turn Turkey back into a Christian stronghold. I'd rather religious belief, all of it, only be known in libraries and museums because people have moved on from believing myths to be true.    The sooner that happens the better off all of us will be because for the past 3000+ years men have been fighting over who their gods love the most and who their gods believe should be killed for not believing in them.   Theistic religion is socially acceptable organized insanity. 

I think the impetus for most war has been over land/power/resources. Religion has provided a righteous excuse for such vile behavior.

I think the impetus for most war has been over land/power/resources. Religion has provided a righteous excuse for such vile behavior.

Political power and religion go hand in hand, but if we can put an end to religious belief as a rational idea then maybe there will be a lot less bloodshed or the refusal of many people to do the bidding of those in power by fighting those wars 

I agree but I think you're dreaming. smile

There will never ever be a point in time on earth when what you describe/wish will happen.  Never. As to most of Turkey I don’t care much though I’d like to see the small European part of that country back for Christianity.  

There will never ever be a point in time on earth when what you describe/wish will happen.  Never.

Incorrect as it's a fact that the earth will long outlive humanity crawling around on it, although like epistte I do hope that religion will go the way of the Dodo long before our departure 

Humans will forever live on planet earth minus a thousand years in the near future.  Eternity/forever will be a very long time.  

Humans will forever live on planet earth

Lol well then I must have been fooled by one of those pseudo astronomy science studies which clearly stated that due to increasing solar luminosity (which has already been occurring since the sun's birth roughly 4.6 billion yrs ago) will make our planet uninhabitable (no water, no oxygen, just a big ball of dirt) in another 1 1/2 billion years.  Meh science, when has that ever had facts.

Anyway thanks for starting my day off with a laugh. Cya

I have been to the Hagia Sophia.   It looks like a mosque that has been converted into a museum (which is what happened).   Converting it from museum back to mosque is not much of a change.

Check out this video starting at 2:30.   This is not my video, but it shows what I saw.

I don't know. I saw several Christian images. One starting at 2:51

Yes, a lot of original Christian artwork is in the Hagia Sophia.   Also. a lot of the artwork is painted over (partially or fully).   And externally, the structure is adorned with minarets.  My point was that the Hagia Sophia was a mosque that was converted into a museum and the Islamic modifications to make it a mosque are quite visible.

Going back to a mosque will be easy.

But it shouldn’t be done.  It should remain a museum.  

I would prefer it stay a museum too rather than waste it on yet another mosque.  Further, it is a UNESCO World Heritage site.  But Turkey is a sovereign nation who owns Hagia Sophia.

Bring it up with Turkey then. They own it.

I like the simple answers Gordy

Sometimes, simple is better

That likely was the point of whoever wrote the seeded article. That and educating the west again as to the graphic circumstances of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks.  

Meanwhile, the world keeps turning.

That likely was the point of whoever wrote the seeded article. That and educating the west again as to the graphic circumstances of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks.  

The fall of Turkey back into the hands of religious fundamentalists instead if being ruled by a secular government that understands that keeping all religion and political power absolutely separate is the only way to create a stable and rational government for all people and not just those in power. 

and if the roles were reversed and a Christian army captured a major Muslim capital city in that manner as graphically described in the seed atheists who hate Christianity and have a soft spot for Muslims would be for ever throwing it in our faces.  But since Islam did it to Christianity its “let’s move on, nothing to see here” instead.  

For me, I would prefer that any historical temple, cathedral, church, synagogue or mosque that has evolved into a museum remain a museum.   

Also, if a sovereign nation owns an historical building I recognize their right to do with it as they please.   Even if I disagree with their actions.

For me, all religions (systems of faith) have the same fundamental problem for society — they encourage people to suppress critical thinking and follow the doctrine of the religion.

Now, I have different pros and cons depending upon the religion / denomination / sect.   I will share one very key difference that I see between the category of religions known as Christianity and those known as Islam.   The former has evolved over time and generally (not completely) represents contemporary mores and values.   The latter generally has not.   The former, for example, is far less repressive of women, is far less intrusive into the daily lives of people and has almost no facets executing apostates, mutilating female genitals to ensure fidelity and does not serve as the underlying doctrine which, when radicalized, represents the vast majority of brutal terrorism taking place today.

Your persecution complex is showing again. Perhaps you should seek professional help with that.

and if the roles were reversed and a Christian army captured a major Muslim capital city in that manner as graphically described in the seed atheists who hate Christianity and have a soft spot for Muslims would be for ever throwing it in our faces.  But since Islam did it to Christianity its “let’s move on, nothing to see here” instead.  

Wouldn't it be better to have a secular government with equal religious freedoms for all instead of a Christian government of which there is only a small minority?   Do you think that one religious group should have more political power or more civil rights than other religions/beliefs? 

Christianity in Turkey has had a long history dating back to the 1st-century AD. In modern times the percentage of Christians in Turkey has declined from 20-25 percent in 1914 to 3-5.5 percent in 1927, to 0.3-0.4% today

Wouldn't it be better to have a secular government with equal religious freedoms for all

Just like America. Absolutely it would be better.

I don’t need any professional help for any issue you suggest.  

Turkey had that before their current President came to power.  

Turkey was better for it because they have gone downhill under the control of Erdogan. 

Classic case of denial too.

The dome on the mosque/museum is dangerously unstable and could collapse with a very small earthquake. That possibility is likely because Istanbul sits on a moderately active fault line.

smithsonianmag

That is sad but how could one make it stable without altering the structure.

That inability is a natural feature of stone buildings that have no ability to bend with stress.  They

collapse when lateral force is applied instead of being able to flex like steel or wood do.

 The dome was reinforced with iron but iron doesn't  have much flex either. It's being held together now but it won't tolerate much additional force before it collapses catastrophically. There was a NOVA episode about it.

So what if it is a mosque. As long as they keep it open to the public. Just like Notre Dame, one does not have to be Catholic to enjoy it.

It’s 1482 years old and likely survived some tremors before.  The Byzantine empire held off the Islamic hordes for some 700+ years until the west was ready to resist with the renaissance and reformation beginning and a lot of Roman and Greek records, art, libraries, history was taken west before the city fell and within a generation in the west the moors were driven out of Spain.  And for the record the crusades were a defensive action in response for pleas for help from Constantinople and tying up the Muslim armies in Israel, Lebanon, and Syria as they did likely extended the life of Byzantium until the west was strong enough to resist them on our own. 

The crusaders had one goal in 1096: to capture the Holy Sepulcher, the tomb of Christ, in Jerusalem. Christianity at this time was less about ideas and more about things—places, objects and bones. The highest devotional practice was the pilgrimage, a journey to a holy site, to pray before the body of a saint. The model saint whom all others imitated was Christ, and His tomb was the most sacred one imaginable even though, unlike other saints’ shrines, Christ’s was empty.

The First Crusade, then, was not about turning back centuries of Muslim expansion. It was about seizing control of sacred landscapes. It was, in modern parlance, “a war of choice” or “an act of aggression.” On July 15, 1099, this willfully chosen campaign ended victoriously when the crusaders conquered Jerusalem.

Later crusades, arguably, were defensive, in that they sought to preserve or restore the fruits of this victory. But their defensive goals served to reaffirm that earlier act of aggression.

Many crusaders would add one proviso to this argument. While not a defensive war, it was a war of vengeance. The Christians were out to avenge the sufferings of their Savior, the humiliations He was forced to endure every day as unbelieving pagans soiled the places that He had made sacred through his touch. Indeed, one of the earliest poets to celebrate the crusade began his story imagining Christ on the Cross, comforting “the good thief,” telling him that one day, 1000 years in the future, an army of people called the Franks would avenge the cruel deaths that they were suffering.

huffpost

The crusades were in response to a plea for assistance from the Orthodox Church to the Catholic Church to try to preserve the lands where Christianity started from the Islamic hordes.

“But unanimity is not a guarantee of accuracy. What everyone “knows” about the crusades may not, in fact, be true. From the many popular notions about the crusades, let us pick four and see if they bear close examination.

MYTH #1: THE CRUSADES REPRESENTED AN UNPROVOKED ATTACK BY WESTERN CHRISTIANS ON THE MUSLIM WORLD.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and even a cursory chronological review makes that clear. In a.d. 632, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, North Africa, Spain, France, Italy, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica were all Christian territories. Inside the boundaries of the Roman Empire, which was still fully functional in the eastern Mediterranean, orthodox Christianity was the official, and overwhelmingly majority, religion. Outside those boundaries were other large Christian communities—not necessarily orthodox and Catholic, but still Christian. Most of the Christian population of Persia, for example, was Nestorian. Certainly there were many Christian communities in Arabia.

By a.d. 732, a century later, Christians had lost Egypt, Palestine, Syria, North Africa, Spain, most of Asia Minor, and southern France. Italy and her associated islands were under threat, and the islands would come under Muslim rule in the next century. The Christian communities of Arabia were entirely destroyed in or shortly after 633, when Jews and Christians alike were expelled from the peninsula.⁶ Those in Persia were under severe pressure. Two-thirds of the formerly Roman Christian world was now ruled by Muslims.

What had happened? Most people actually know the answer, if pressed—though for some reason they do not usually connect the answer with the crusades. The answer is the rise of Islam. Every one of the listed regions was taken, within the space of a hundred years, from Christian control by violence, in the course of military campaigns deliberately designed to expand Muslim territory at the expense of Islam’s neighbors. Nor did this conclude Islam’s program of conquest. The attacks continued, punctuated from time to time by Christian attempts to push back. Charlemagne blocked the Muslim advance in far western Europe in about a.d. 800, but Islamic forces simply shifted their focus and began to island-hop across from North Africa toward Italy and the French coast, attacking the Italian mainland by 837. A confused struggle for control of southern and central Italy continued for the rest of the ninth century and into the tenth. In the hundred years between 850 and 950, Benedictine monks were driven out of ancient monasteries, the Papal States were overrun, and Muslim pirate bases were established along the coast of northern Italy and southern France, from which attacks on the deep inland were launched. Desperate to protect victimized Christians, popes became involved in the tenth and early eleventh centuries in directing the defense of the territory around them.

The surviving central secular authority in the Christian world at this time was the East Roman, or Byzantine, Empire. Having lost so much territory in the seventh and eighth centuries to sudden amputation by the Muslims, the Byzantines took a long time to gain the strength to fight back. By the mid-ninth century, they mounted a counterattack on Egypt, the first time since 645 that they had dared to come so far south. Between the 940s and the 970s, the Byzantines made great progress in recovering lost territories. Emperor John Tzimiskes retook much of Syria and part of Palestine, getting as far as Nazareth, but his armies became overextended and he had to end his campaigns by 975 without managing to retake Jerusalem itself. Sharp Muslim counterattacks followed, and the Byzantines barely managed to retain Aleppo and Antioch.

The struggle continued unabated into the eleventh century. In 1009, a mentally deranged Muslim ruler destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and mounted major persecutions of Christians and Jews. He was soon deposed, and by 1038 the Byzantines had negotiated the right to try to rebuild the structure, but other events were also making life difficult for Christians in the area, especially the displacement of Arab Muslim rulers by Seljuk Turks, who from 1055 on began to take control in the Middle East. This destabilized the territory and introduced new rulers (the Turks) who were not familiar even with the patchwork modus vivendi that had existed between most Arab Muslim rulers and their Christian subjects. Pilgrimages became increasingly difficult and dangerous, and western pilgrims began banding together and carrying weapons to protect themselves as they tried to make their way to Christianity’s holiest sites in Palestine: notable armed pilgrimages occurred in 1064–65 and 1087–91.

In the western and central Mediterranean, the balance of power was tipping toward the Christians and away from the Muslims. In 1034, the Pisans sacked a Muslim base in North Africa, finally extending their counterattacks across the Mediterranean. They also mounted counterattacks against Sicily in 1062–63. In 1087, a large-scale allied Italian force sacked Mahdia, in present-day Tunisia, in a campaign jointly sponsored by Pope Victor III and the countess of Tuscany. Clearly the Italian Christians were gaining the upper hand.

But while Christian power in the western and central Mediterranean was growing, it was in trouble in the east. The rise of the Muslim Turks had shifted the weight of military power against the Byzantines, who lost considerable ground again in the 1060s. Attempting to head off further incursions in far-eastern Asia Minor in 1071, the Byzantines suffered a devastating defeat at Turkish hands in the battle of Manzikert. As a result of the battle, the Christians lost control of almost all of Asia Minor, with its agricultural resources and military recruiting grounds, and a Muslim sultan set up a capital in Nicaea, site of the creation of the Nicene Creed in a.d. 325 and a scant 125 miles from Constantinople.

Desperate, the Byzantines sent appeals for help westward, directing these appeals primarily at the person they saw as the chief western authority: the pope, who, as we have seen, had already been directing Christian resistance to Muslim attacks. In the early 1070s, the pope was Gregory VII, and he immediately began plans to lead an expedition to the Byzantines’ aid. He became enmeshed in conflict with the German emperors, however (what historians call “the Investiture Controversy”), and was ultimately unable to offer meaningful help. Still, the Byzantines persisted in their appeals, and finally, in 1095, Pope Urban II realized Gregory VII’s desire, in what turned into the First Crusade. Whether a crusade was what either Urban or the Byzantines had in mind is a matter of some controversy. But the seamless progression of events which lead to that crusade is not.

Far from being unprovoked, then, the crusades actually represent the first great western Christian counterattack against Muslim attacks which had taken place continually from the inception of Islam until the eleventh century, and which continued on thereafter, mostly unabated.” https://isi.org/intercollegiate-review/four-myths-about-the-crusades/

until the west was ready to resist with the renaissance and reformation beginning and a lot of Roman and Greek records, art, libraries, history was taken west before the city fell and within a generation in the west the moors were driven out of Spain.  

You mean the time when people decided religion should start playing less of a role? 

A different role separate from Rome.  It was timely that the Muslims/Ottoman Turks severely tested /threatened Rome during the years of the Protestant reformation pre occupying them so that they couldn’t try to militarily crush the newly Protestant nations from the beginning.  By the time of the Spanish Armada and the Hundred Years’ War Protestant denominations were well enough established to survive.  

Not a fan of Turkey, but this is not an issue. What is, is that our government doesn't recognize the Armenian genocide, because it isn't convenient for us.

I am loathe to see that a museum is being turned into a religious building (I'd much rather that things went the opposite way), but that is what happens when religion gets a foothold in government and starts turning it away from secularism

Turkey Venerates Its Violent Conquest Of Christian Territory With Conversion Of Hagia Sophia To A Mosque

LOL!