“If Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan succeeded in anything with the desecration of Hagia Sophia, it is the realization of all that Turkey has now permanently moved away from the West.
The shocking images, which were broadcast around the globe, with the curtains covering the mosaics of the Great Church made it clear in the eyes of every civilized person that the huge gap between Turkey and what we call European culture,” said the head of the Greek delegation to the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly of Orthodoxy (IAO), Maximos Charakopoulos, as reported by skai.gr.
He added that “Turkey’s invocation of ‘conquest’ and ‘right of the sword’ to justify the conversion of the symbol of universal Orthodoxy into a mosque shows Ankara retreats into views not far from those of the Taliban, which destroyed World Heritage Sites for considering them pagan.
After all, we heard that too! It is not enough for them that in the past they destroyed works of art, plastered gold mosaics, whitewashed murals, now a Turkish ‘historian’ came to ask for the dismantling of the mosaics, which were revealed when Hagia Sophia was turned into a museum in 1934, because they are seen as blasphemous for Islam,” he added.
He said that “Modern Turkey has taken a considerable step backwards. Instead of realizing the enormous wealth of the unique Hellenistic and Byzantine-Christian monuments in its territory, it seems to be disturbed because they recall the pre-Turkish civilization of Asia Minor.”