Turkey's Erdoğan signs decree converting Hagia Sophia into mosque

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan signed a decree on Friday opening Istanbul's Hagia Sophia as a mosque after a Turkish court annulled a 1934 government decree that had turned it into a museum, a copy of the decision showed.

Erdoğan shared on his Twitter feed a copy of the decree he had signed which said the decision had been taken to hand control of the Ayasofya Mosque, as it is known in Turkish, to the country's religious directorate and reopen it for worship.

Turkey's high administrative court threw its weight behind a petition brought by a religious group and annulled the 1934 Cabinet decision that turned the site into a museum. Within hours, Erdoğan signed a decree handing over Hagia Sophia to Turkey's Religious Affairs Presidency.

Erdoğan has demanded that the hugely symbolic world heritage site should be turned back into a mosque.

Nationalist and conservative groups have long been yearning to hold prayers at Hagia Sophia, which they regard as part of the Muslim Ottoman legacy.

The group that brought the case to court had contested the legality of the 1934 decision by the modern Turkish republic's secular government ministers and argued that the building was the personal property of Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II, who conquered Istanbul in 1453.

The court ruled that Hagia Sophia was the property of a foundation managing the Sultan's assets and was opened up to the public as a mosque.

Some Islamic prayers have been held in the museum in recent years and in a major symbolic move, Erdoğan recited the opening verse of the Quran in the Hagia Sophia in 2018.

Built under Byzantine Emperor Justinian, Hagia Sophia was the main seat of the Eastern Orthodox church for centuries, where emperors were crowned amid ornate marble and mosaic decorations.

Four minarets were added to the terracotta-hued structure with cascading domes and the building was turned into an imperial mosque following the 1453 Ottoman conquest of Constantinople — the city that is now Istanbul.

The building opened its doors as a museum in 1935, a year after the Council of Ministers' decision.

Mosaics depicting Jesus, Mary and Christian saints that were plastered over in line with Islamic rules were uncovered through arduous restoration work for the museum. Hagia Sophia was the most popular museum in Turkey last year, drawing more than 3.7 million visitors.