Hagia Sophia Has Reverted to a Mosque, Erdogan Says

ISTANBUL—President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Friday that the city’s sixth-century Hagia Sophia, which grew to become a symbol of secularism in fashionable Turkey when it was transformed into a museum in the thirties, would reopen to Muslim prayer as a total-fledged mosque later this thirty day period, a shift opposed by the U.S. and others.

The composition, with its big dome and towering minarets, has very long played a pivotal purpose in the lifestyle of the metropolis and in Turkey at significant. It was created as Christian temple by the Byzantine empire, then grew to become a mosque…