American professor urges to give Hagia Sophia back to Christianity

PanARMENIAN.Net - Donald Heinz, professor of religious studies, California State University, Chico, issued a letter to the editor published by Hurriyet Daily News.

In the letter titled “Give Hagia Sophia back to Christianity”, prof. Heinz writes: “In bookstores and billboards, I saw Istanbul wants to be a bridge between cultures, to a world beyond Turkey. I saw the claim that Istanbul is an almost exclusively Turkish-Muslim metropolis, not accidentally the least ethnically and religiously diverse of the great modern cities. While population exchange lies in the past, Turkish minorities still charge that an excessive monism dominates the national consciousness. A politics of enforced absence prevails over a politics of multicultural presence.”

The history of Hagia Sophia is well known. From its dedication in 360 until 1453, this Byzantine landmark was the Orthodox cathedral of Constantinople. It became a mosque from 1453 until 1934, when it was secularized, and re-opened as a museum in 1935.