In a resolution, Greece’s national academy, the Academy of Athens, denounces the “conversion of the glorious monument of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople from a monument of culture and spirit into an operating place of worship for Muslims,” while describing this move as a “serious mistake” and a “stain on the Turkish people.”
Read the full resolution issued by the Academy of Athens:
“The Academy of Athens addresses all the academies in Europe, with which it shares a common origin and common spiritual and scientific purposes, to denounce the conversion of the glorious monument of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople from a monument of culture and spirit into an operating place of worship for Muslims. Kemal Ataturk’s decision in 1934, who intended to make the monument a site of world pilgrimage, was wise and worthy of the monument. The decision to use the monument in a way which the founder of the Republic of Turkey had rejected is a serious mistake. It will forever be a stain on the Turkish people, who is linked to an arbitrary appropriation of a monument that belongs to all humankind and is a symbol of goodwill and peaceful coexistence of peoples.
Source: ANA-MPA