"Completed in 537 AD, Hagia Sophia stood for nearly a millennium at the heart of the Christian world...."

"In 1453, Mehmed II conquered Constantinople, and although his troops plundered what they could carry, the building was saved and turned into a mosque. For 500 years it was the venerated center of the Muslim Ottoman Empire.... Minarets were added, and later the great Ottoman architect Sinan built massive buttresses to prevent the walls from buckling under the weight of the dome, which was damaged in earthquakes. With the fall of the Ottoman Empire... Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern secular republic of Turkey, ended the role of religion in the state and closed religious institutions.... But [President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan’s supporters speak of the building as the third holiest site in Islam, after the Grand Mosque of Mecca and Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and insist that once a mosque it should never be unconsecrated."

From "Erdogan Talks of Making Hagia Sophia a Mosque Again, to International Dismay/The World Heritage site was once a potent symbol of Christian-Muslim rivalry, and it could become one once more" (NYT).

"Beyond politics, art historians and conservationists worry that they will lose access for study and research if the monument becomes a working mosque, and tourist companies and city authorities fear that visitors will be deterred from coming. The monument is the most visited tourist site in Turkey, with 3.7 million visitors last year.... The greatest worry is what will happen to the incomparable medieval mosaics, among them depictions of Christ, the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist, alongside rare portraits of imperial figures including Emperor Justinian I and Empress Zoe, one of the few women to rule in her own right. The mosaics were whitewashed for the more than five centuries during Ottoman rule — the depiction of the human form being considered idolatry — and were uncovered and restored only after Hagia Sophia was turned into a museum in the 1930s..... If the museum becomes a mosque, the mosaics will have to be covered during Muslim prayers somehow, including seraphs high up at the base of the dome. Tourists and non-Muslims may be restricted to certain areas...."

A thousand years is a long time and 500 years is a long time. All that religion in one phenomenal place, but the solution, since 1935, has been to keep it as a museum.

It's interesting to encounter this problem at a time when we here in America are struggling over whether to retain images of human heroes. I respect the desire to use a structure to practice a living religion — especially in a phenomenally beautiful building — but the artwork is artwork of another religion, and there's such a strong interest in protecting access for Christians and those of us who love art and architecture.

Here's a "Great Courses" episode on Hagia Sophia (click on Episode 3). I've seen it and strongly recommend it. You'll get lots of closeup looks at the mosaics and the architectural details. I've watched the whole course — "The World's Greatest Churches" — and the teacher ranks Hagia Sophia as the greatest church building in the world.