![]() ![]() All of changes to Hagia Sophia since 1453 are seen by them as positive improvements in line with God's intentions. They honor Christ as a Prophet and even respect Christ's mother. Religious Turks see Islam as a religion of peace and the ultimate fulfillment of Christianity and Judaism. Most Turks are in the same boat, thy can't read the Arabic, but they recognize the beauty in the calligraphy and the verses from the Koran that they know they depict. Foreign tourists who don't read Arabic have no idea what the Islamic inscriptions say. What you see when you visit Hagia Sophia today depends on what you see. The beauty of the architecture and its decoration was treasured by the Sultans, who did their best to protect what they had inherited from the past, even though they had utterly destroyed Byzantium in 1453 and replaced it with a new Islamic Empire. This seems inconceivable today, but it is true. For 300 years after the conquest the mosaics of Hagia Sophia were uncovered, millions of Muslims worshiped under them, undisturbed. From the beginning the Ottomans understood that they were custodians of its Christian past and had a responsibility to preserve it, even as they used it for their own faith. The modifications to Hagia Sophia to adapt it for Muslim worship have never fit the building and feel awkward and unnatural. There are more videos on this page.Įverybody understands that Hagia Sophia essential identity is Christian, even Muslims. This destroyed most of the mosaics that were still in Hagia Sophia in 1845, there's more on that below. The oil paint cut off the walls and vaults so they could no longer breathe and water was trapped behind it. You can see the damage the 1845 Fossati oil-painting is still doing to the vaults, which is pealing away and falling in strips. You can see they were repainting the north typanium inside the nave. Much of the inside is obscured with scaffolding and there are partitions cutting off a great part of the church. ![]() Here is a recent YouTube video from April 2019 that shows the exterior and interior of Hagia Sophia. It has always functioned as a church and was never converted into a mosque. There is a wonderful 10th century Byzantine church there that might date from the reign of John I Tzimiskes, an Armenian emperor. It was great to see the recent reports of the visit of the Greek Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, to Hagia Sophia and the possibility the re-opening of the Theological School of Halki will happen soon. It would be great if this means we can rest assured that it will continue as a museum and the agitation by and demonstrations fundamentalists will stop. I have no idea how independent the Turkish courts are from the President, I assume not much, so this decision must reflect the President's direction on the future of Hagia Sophia. However, just a few months previously, in April, the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, felt compelled to recite Muslim prayers and praise Mehmet Fatih in Hagia Sophia. In September 2018 Turkish courts finally forbade the re-conversion of Hagia Sophia to a mosque. Erdogan wants to recite the Islamic prayer of conversion himself in the same spot as Mehmet II in 1453. Now they are claiming the 1934 decree on the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a museum bearing Kemal Ataturk’s signature was forged! God save us from this newest insanity. NO TOURISM TO TURKEY - A BREAK IN DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS? Time to organize on social media. IT HAS BEEN DONE - HAGIA SOPHIA IS A MOSQUE! What will the world do? What will the Orthodox world do? Will the Evangelicals in the USA join a boycott? This was an intentional insult to ALL Christians, Orthodox, Protestant and Catholics. Catholic writers identified the heretical body as the site of humoral contamination, whereas Calvinist theorists regarded the idolatrous body as the locus of inordinate sensuality.2020 - HAGIA SOPHIA TODAY IN GREAT DANGER! In this intellectual milieu, Catholic and Calvinist pastoral treatises generally relied on similar corporal features to signify a sinful state, but polemical texts made important distinctions about the effects of religious difference. This corporal hermeneutic coincided with a pivotal moment in the history of medicine, in which a widespread enthusiasm for anatomy mixed uneasily with time-honored notions of Galenic physiology until the ascendancy of a mechanical Cartesian outlook in the late 1600s. Both Catholics and Calvinists utilized bodily corruption as a motif to promote piety and unmask religious difference in a period of intense confessional conflict. This study examines Catholic and Reformed Protestant readings of the body among pastoral and polemical writers from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. ![]()
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