On 24 July, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan joined thousands of worshippers on the streets around Istanbul’s historic Hagia Sophia at a doubly symbolic moment.Surrounded by a swarm of politicians, infantrymen, security forces and imams, the Turkish leader made his own through the giant.ancient Byzantine cathedral through gates that were once opened through the conquest of Ottoman infantry soldiers in 1453.Inside, he read the Namaz, or Muslim prayer, officially transforming the construction of 1,500 years into a mosque.
In doing so, Erdogan was turning the page to nine decades of recent history, that this ordinary design and UNESCO World Heritage site had been a world-renowned symbol of secular Turkey.In fact, since 1934, Sainte-Sophie was neither a cathedral nor a mosque, but a secular museum, created as such through the fashionable founder of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.However, Erdogan not only challenged Ataturk’s vision of a secular state that day.By opting for July 24 to hold the reopening ceremony, Erdogan also questioned the entire base of Turkey’s foreign fashion status …