The ROC regrets that the words of Patriarch Kirill were not heard, and the Hagia Sophia again becomes the mosque, said Vladimir Legoyda, head of the Department for relations between the Church and society and the media.
Earlier on Friday, it became known that the State Council of Turkey canceled the decision of 1934 to turn the Hagia Sophia into a museum.
"In his statement of July 6, his Holiness Patriarch Kirill said that "it is the duty of every civilized state to maintain a balance: to reconcile contradictions in society, not to aggravate them, and to promote the unification of people, not division." It is a pity that these words were not heard, " Legoyda told RIA Novosti, commenting on the decision of the Turkish State Council published on Friday.
"Inter-religious peace and harmony are extremely subtle and deep issues that do not tolerate ill-considered and purely political solutions," the representative of the ROC stressed.
Hagia Sophia was founded by the Christian Emperor Justinian and was opened on December 27, 537. The cathedral was the largest church in the Christian world for more than a thousand years. After the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans and the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, the cathedral was converted into a mosque, but since 1934, the building became a museum by decree of the founder of the modern Turkish state Kemal Ataturk and was included in the UNESCO world heritage list.
GSV "Russia - Islamic World"
Photo: Creative Commons
Based on materials from RIA Novosti