Back in 2020, when the Turkish government formally re-converted the Hagia Sophia (also known as the Ayasofya in Turkish) into a mosque, the decision was framed domestically as a restoration of national sovereignty against the rising tide of Western secularism. However, internationally, the news was received very differently, particularly in Greece, Russia, Georgia, and the Balkans. For much of the Orthodox Christian world, the move reopened old wounds going back five centuries that never fully healed after the fall of Constantinople. The Hagia Sophia is not solely a historic structure or an architectural marvel. Rather, it is, first and foremost, a living symbol of Eastern Orthodox Christian theology and the continuity of Orthodox identity.

Constructed in the sixth century under Emperor Justinian I, Hagia Sophia was designed to be more than just a cathedral. It was the theological and ceremonial heart of the Eastern Roman Empire, where emperors were crowned and the liturgy embodied the union of heaven and earth. Its vast dome, luminous mosaics, and acoustics were designed to communicate a transcendent, celestial truth: that the Christian cosmos was ordered, rational, and divinely sustained. For nearly a millennium, Hagia Sophia stood as the preeminent church of Christendom. Other basilicas, East and West, including the Vatican itself, were dwarfed by the immense scale of this axis mundi (Axis of the world). The Ecumenical Patriarch, still regarded by the Orthodox churches as primus inter pares (first among equals), presided there and his ecclesial influence echoed throughout the Christian East. It would be here that the ancestors of modern-day Russia would first encounter Christendom in the 10th century. Among its polished colonnades the Varangian guards, Vikings from medieval Scandinavia, carved graffiti into its marble buttresses. Some of its ancient marble pillars are said to have been harvested from the ancient Temple to Artemis at Ephesus.

When the crusaders took the church during the Fourth Crusade, they briefly converted it into a Roman Catholic cathedral, until it was retaken by the Greeks in 1261 AD under Emperor Michael VIII. During its last days, it would resume this function within Catholicism as the last of the Byzantine emperors appealed to Rome for military and financial support. When Ottoman forces captured Constantinople in 1453 AD, the armies of the sultan swiftly claimed it for Islam. The transformation signaled not only military victory, but civilizational succession. Likewise, many of the Byzantine sites of Constantinople met such a fate, but none so poignantly as the Imperial cathedral of the city.

Over the next five hundred years, Turkey saw significant cultural and political changes. The Ottoman state collapsed, the Turkish republic attempted to modernize and industrialize, and tokens of the Ottoman past were regarded as backward relics of a pre-industrial, pre-Enlightenment society. As such, in 1934, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk secularized the mosque of Hagia Sophia, converting it into a national museum. This move was radical for its time and largely unexpected. Atatürk sought to neutralize the building’s religious identity, recasting it as a shared cultural inheritance of the city’s past rather than a contested sacred space. In doing so, he removed some of the plaster that had been placed over the older Byzantine mosaics of the Christ Child, Theotokos, the saints, and the late Roman Emperors. At the time, this move was seen, at least partly, as a reconciliation of the Greeks and Turks following the bloodshed of the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922). Moreover, for many Orthodox Christians, this compromise was tolerable as it permitted them access to the sacred space once again, albeit in a limited secular capacity. Hagia Sophia was no longer theirs in a liturgical sense, but neither was it triumphantly claimed by another faith. Its doors were opened to the public and its Greek Christian history was fully acknowledged. The building stood in an uneasy, but meaningful, suspension between past and present, between Christian and Islamic civilizations. That suspension ended in 2020.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s decision to reconvert Hagia Sophia into a mosque was framed as a correction of historical injustice committed by Atatürk, an abrupt turn away from Western secularism, and a reassertion of Turkish identity over the history of Constantinople. For Orthodox Christians, the reconversion was perceived as an aggressive act of religious exclusion. The building was not simply returned to Islamic worship. It was removed from shared cultural memory. Christian icons were once again obscured during prayer. The universalism implied by the museum status gave way to Islamic confessional exclusivity.

Orthodoxy remains deeply tied to national identity in much of Eastern Europe and so Hagia Sophia’s status resonates with contemporary anxieties about cultural survival, religious freedom, and historical erasure. The Turkish government has pivoted away from emphasizing its Byzantine past to re-establishing the imagery of Ottoman triumphalism through cultural jingoism. Turkish education has reframed the Byzantine government as corrupt, Godless, and decadent; commemoration of Byzantine accomplishments is minimized, if mentioned at all. Visitors have noted the robust maintenance of Ottoman monuments in the city, while artifacts of the Eastern Roman Empire are purposefully neglected.

In the case of the Hagia Sophia, what makes it unique is that the building itself refuses to become solely an artifact of its original devotees. Unlike ruined temples or archaeological sites in Anatolia, it remains active, inhabited, and symbolically charged. Each change in its status is experienced not as preservation or renovation, but as a declaration of the zeitgeist of the era. Its sectarian affiliation, Orthodox, Catholic, secular, and Islamic, all reflect the heart of the ancient city, and how it desires to collectively remember the past and its long-standing traditions. 

For the Orthodox world, the reconversion reinforced a longstanding fear: that their historical memory is negotiable, contingent, and vulnerable to political expediency, as it has been since Turkish hegemony began in 1453. It recalled centuries in which Orthodox Christianity survived under conditions of legal tolerance, but civil and cultural marginalization. Moreover, because of the genocidal history of the late Ottoman Empire, Greeks, Bulgars, Armenians, and Assyrians all wince at the prospect of a new and revitalized Turkish nationalism, one made all the more bellicose by President Erdoğan’s aggressive national policies. For Muslims in Turkey, by contrast, the decision was widely interpreted as a rightful reclamation of the site, a reversal of Western secularism that has ignored Ottoman heritage and the presence of Islam within the history of the Turkish peoples. These two interpretations are not easily reconciled, because both draw from genuine historical experience and a reading of history that is distinctively nationalistic. 

Hagia Sophia’s re-conversion sheds light on a broader truth about the reality of religious pluralism: liberalism’s optimism about multicultural openness is only possible if all cultures are willing to drop their pretensions of societal supremacy. If they cannot, or rather do not, they harden identities and magnify long-standing historic grievances. While Atatürk’s museum model was imperfect, it acknowledged the building’s layered sanctity and historic cultural continuity. The 2020 decision resolved this ambiguity by publicly siding with Ottoman triumphalism, thereby transforming a symbol of a shared historic memory into a marker of religious dominance.