Pre-dawn Koran readings stoke fears over Istanbul's Hagia Sophia
24.06.2016
Before dawn in Istanbul, in the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. A turbaned Turkish cleric kneels on a prayer carpet and prepares to recite verses from the Koran.
"In the name of God, the compassionate and the merciful..."
Nothing especially unusual – except the cleric is reading not in a mosque but what is officially a museum. And the museum is the Hagia Sophia, one of the single most emblematic edifices of human civilisation. A masterpiece of architecture, the Hagia Sophia was first built as a church in the sixth century under the Christian Byzantine Empire as the centrepiece of its capital Constantinople, today's Istanbul.
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