President Erdogan's Dream

……..The reconversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque was an old dream of Turkey’s Islamists. In the Islamist political tradition of President Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party, Ataturk’s experiment in secular republican government was a foreign imposition on Turkey, and the Hagia Sophia’s status as a museum a seal on the country’s spirit. After making the announcement, according to one report, Mr. Erdogan was so shaken with emotion that he did not sleep until first light the next morning. What he thought of as an era of humiliation had ended. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/opinion/hagia-sophia-turkey-mosque.html