This is a major sign of more to come. Read the excerpts from various articles below.
“Greece and Turkey are once again at odds over the fate of one of Christendom’s largest and oldest churches, built under Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the 6th century, and surviving changing empires throughout history. The Church of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was – prior to the Turkish takeover of Byzantium in 1453 – Constantinople’s most famous church and center of the Orthodox Christian world…. But now Turkish President [dictator] Recep Tayyip Erdogan and lawmakers are eyeing changing its status back to a mosque, which has outraged Athens. Russia has also chimed in, with both the Kremlin and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill condemning any potential move to turn Hagia Sophia into a mosque.”
[Kirill later said: “Patriarch Kirill warned that “A threat to Hagia Sophia is a threat to the entire Christian civilization.” Which begs the question: What Christian civilzation? Europe is more concerned with carbon emissions, George Floyd and BLM, and not offending Muslims than they are with Christianity. Western Europe is post-Christian. Christian civilization, ironically, may mean Russia.]
“We by all means hope that Hagia Sophia’s status as a world heritage site will be taken into consideration,” a Kremlin spokesman said Monday. [7/5/20] “Of course, this is a world masterpiece beloved by tourists coming to Turkey from all over the world and especially by tourists from Russia who not only recognize Hagia Sophia’s tourist value but also it’s sacred spiritual value,” he added. Turkey’s top court is said to still be debating the move. There are still multiple tens of thousands of indigenous Christians in Istanbul and in parts of Anatolia, mostly Greek, Syriac, and and some few remnant Armenian Christians. These ancient communities say Erdogan has newly unleashed a war on Turkey’s Christians. The Russian Orthodox Church slammed the potential Turkish move as “unacceptable” and a “violation of religious freedom”. The statement said: “We can’t go back to the Middle Ages now” — referencing centuries where Ottoman policy severely suppressed Christians throughout Asia Minor.” (https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russia-greece-warn-turkey-over-turning-historic-hagia-sophia-church-mosque)
Less than two weeks later, Erdogan is beyond considering this move. The Hagia Sophia is now officially a mosque. I will refrain from bashing the New York Times and merely point out that the editors there have a different and wildly more wonderful spin on this: they note that in the 1950s “Sections of Islamist and pan-Turkic romanticists began campaigning for the reopening of the Hagia Sophia. They believed that the secular republic, far from having saved Turkey’s sovereignty, wounded it in the deepest sense possible: It had sold its soul to Western modernity. The conversion of the Hagia Sophia was the symbol of this humiliation.”
“The reconversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque was an old dream of Turkey’s Islamists. In the Islamist political tradition of President Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party, Ataturk’s experiment in secular republican government was a foreign imposition on Turkey, and the Hagia Sophia’s status as a museum a seal on the country’s spirit.” “When Mr. Kisakurek, the powerful Islamist poet, raised the rallying cry for the reconversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque in 1965, it is likely that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an 11-year-old boy in the working-class, religious neighborhood of Kasimpasa near the Golden Horn in Istanbul, would have heard the poet’s call.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/opinion/hagia-sophia-turkey-mosque.html)
I would expect the New York Times to view a blow against Christianity as poetry, and a dream, and justice, and romantic, and the reversal of humiliation. Others have a different take on it.
“Turkish President Erdogan’s move to make Hagia Sophia a mosque is part of his masterplan to claim leadership of global Islam…
Late afternoon in May 29, 1453, Sultan Mehmet, the third son of Murad, born of a slave-girl – probably Christian – in the harem, fluent in Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Latin, Persian and Hebrew, followed by his top ministers, his imams and his bodyguard of Janissaries, rides slowly towards the Great Church of St Sophia in Constantinople.
So here we have Sultan Mehmet silently proceeding with his slow ride all the way to the central bronze doors of St Sophia.
He dismounts and picks up a handful of dust and in a gesture of humility, sprinkles it over his turban.
Then he enters the Great Church. He walks towards the altar.
A barely perceptible command leads his top imam to escalate the pulpit and proclaim in the name of Allah, the All Merciful and Compassionate, there is no God but God and Muhammad is his Prophet.
The Sultan then touches the ground with his turbaned head – in a silent prayer. St Sophia was now a mosque.
Sultan Mehmet leaves the mosque and crosses the square to the old Palace of the Emperors, in ruins, founded by Constantine The Great 11 and ½ centuries before. He slowly wanders the ancient halls, his fine velvet slippers brushing the dust from the fabulous pebbled floor mosaics.
Then he murmurs two verses of a Persian poet:
“As the spider weaves the curtain over the palace of the Roman Caesars
The owl sings the time of the house of Afrasiab”
The Byzantine empire, founded by Constantine The Great on Monday, May 11, 330, was over on a Tuesday, May 29, 1453.
Sultan Mehmet is now the Lord of Constantinople and the Lord of the Ottoman Empire. He’s only 21 years old.
Last week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan re-christened Hagia Sophia from a museum back into a mosque. He may have done it because his popularity is waning; his proxy wars are a disaster; his AKP party is shattered; and the economy is bleeding badly.
But what’s striking is that right at the beginning of his official televised speech, Erdogan quoted exactly the same verses by the Persian poet murmured by Sultan Mehmet in that fateful afternoon in 1453.
Erdogan’s latest move – which is part of his perennial master plan to claim leadership of global Islam over the decrepit House of Saud – was widely interpreted in myriad latitudes as yet another instance of clash of civilizations: not only Orthodox Christianity vs. Islam but once again East vs. West.” (https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/escobar-turkey-clash-civilizations)
“The gradual process of Turkey’s becoming an Islamic sharia-law country, again, is no longer so gradual. It has taken a sudden and sharp rightward turn, into Islamic-nationhood. Turkey’s Hagia Sophia, which had been “the world’s largest cathedral for nearly a thousand years, until Seville Cathedral was completed in 1520,” has now been officially declared by the Turkish Government to be, instead, a mosque.
….The biggest, oldest, and the most important, cathedral in all of Orthodox Christendom — and the world’s most important Byzantine building, which was constructed as the Saint Sophia Cathedral by the Byzantine Roman Emperor Justinian I in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in the year 537, and which stands on the site that had been consecrated in the year 325 by the Roman Emperor Constantine (and which cathedral was relabeled the Hagia Sophia “museum” in 1935 by Turkey’s Constitutionally secularist Government) — has now become, officially, at last, designated, by the restored Islamic Government of Turkey, a Muslim house of worship, a mosque, a Muslim house of worship.
This signals the end of Turkey’s being ruled by a secular Government, which it had been, ever since 1923. It is the end of Turkey’s secular Government and the restoration of the Islamic Mehmed the Conqueror’s 1453 order that it be a mosque. That ended the Byzantine Roman Catholic Empire, and started Islamic-ruled Turkey. It ended Constantinople and started Istanbul…. And now, even the Orthodox Christians are being marginalized in Turkey, because the Hagia Sophia had been “for almost 1,000 years the most important Orthodox cathedral.”
This is an act with huge international implications. It is an important event in human history…. In other words: the Turkish Government’s official change of Saint Sophia Cathedral, which Justinian had created in 537, into now and henceforth a mosque, is a taking ownership of, and a Turkish-Muslim declaration of supremacy over, a different religion’s main house of worship. It’s a historical dagger into the heart of Orthodox Christianity, as well as being an insult to Roman Christianity.
This is not merely an isolated act, either; it is, instead, something to which Erdogan has long been building. Erdogan’s grab of land from secularist-ruled (committedly anti-sectarian) Syria, and his recent sending of troops to help conquer the formerly secularist Libya, which land had been turned into a hellish civil war by a U.S.-and-allied invasion in 2011 and which chaos there continues to this day, all are consistent with an understanding of Erdogan in which his foremost objective is a restoration of the Ottoman Empire…. Erdogan insists upon Turkey’s not being merely a vassal-state or colony within a foreign-led empire, but instead the leading nation of its own empire, starting perhaps with gobbling up Syria and Libya, but extending ultimately more globally.” (https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/how-nato-member-turkey-reverted-back-being-islamic-dictatorship)
In 2014 I wrote a book about the Antichrist coming to greater, more dictatorial power in mid-2016. Barack Obama may re-enter politics soon, but he didn’t become dictator in mid-2016. Trump didn’t take office as president until January 2017. Turkey’s Erdogan did seize dictatorial powers in July 2016. Could he still prove to be the Antichrist, persecuting Christians in the biggest war in all of history?
FWIW, the French prophet Nostradamus warned us almost 500 years ago that when the new land of America, although allied with Britain – would be down for the count and unable to help Europe, the Islamic world would be led by Turkey and Persia (Iran) in an invasion of Europe that would culminate in a brutal world war ending in late 2028, shortly before a catastrophic pole shift in October 2029. Time will tell.
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Christians ! LET THE TURKS HAVE CONVERT HAGIA SOPHIA INTO A MOSQUE !
its better than stupid ignorant tourists trampling on the floor what once was washed
by the blood of our holy christian martyrs !