İstanbul Mayor backs Hagia Sophia conversion: 'For me, it's been a mosque since 1453'

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İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu has announced support for the government's decision to convert the Hagia Sophia museum into a mosque.

"In my mind and conscience, Hagia Sophia has been a mosque since 1453," he told reporters at the construction site of a funicular railway, referring to the Ottoman Empire's takeover of İstanbul.

After a Council of State decision on Friday (July 10) annulling a Council of Ministers decree in 1934 to convert the then mosque into a museum, President and Justice and Development Party (AKP) Chair Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that Hagia Sophia would reopen as a mosque on July 24.

İmamoğlu, a member of the secularist Republican People's Party (CHP), further said that he had always called Hagia Sophia a mosque.

He also noted that a part of it the call for prayers had been recited from one of the minarets for 30 years and Muslims had been allowed to pray in a prayer room in Hagia Sophia.

What needed to be questioned was not whether the decision was good or bad, but Erdoğan's remarks a year ago against the conversion of the monument, he said, without mentioning the President's name.

At a rally last year, Erdoğan said the price of converting Hagia Sophia into a mosque would be very heavy and said, "Do those who say [Hagia Sophia should be reopened as a mosque] think about what would happen to thousands of mosques around the world?"

"Now I'd like to ask: Are our mosques in various places around the world in a risky situation now? Will anything happen to these mosques where tens of thousands of Muslims, my expat brothers pray?" İmamoğlu asked. (AÖ/VK)