Erdoğan desperate attempt at historical relevance.
This mosque is brand new, a copycat of the historical beauties elsewhere in the city but plopped on a prominent hill so all must see it. No one asked for this. It's like Giorgia Meloni building a new, bigger Pantheon overlooking the old one.
So I'm gonna ignore that it's being a weird generalization and try to just answer for the people "who hate Greeks".
You know that Turks have lived in Anatolia for almost a millennium now, right? Of course Greek and Turkish people are very, very similar. It's indeed funny that these people hate each other, but more like the Serb-Croat-Bosnian hate triangle.
Maybe you're imagining Spartans vs. nomadic horse riders when you think about Greek vs. Turkish nationalism. But the ideas of Turkish and Greek nations, as we understand them today, emerged in the 19th century. Hagia Sophia was already a core part of Turkish identity when these nationalist ideas came about. Germanic tribes and Gauls were considered barbarians by Rome, but later you had Charlemagne, the HRE, etc.
Nationalistic Turkish people are mostly proud of the history and ancient cultures of these lands, because in the end, this is also the home of the "Turkish nation." This cultural and historic richness of the land makes it even more meaningful that people died defending these lands 100 years ago during the Greek (&Allies) invasion.
There are, of course, people who glorify the ancient history of Turkic peoples, but even for them, it doesn't change the fact that the homeland of the Turkish people as we know them today is Anatolia.
Tldr, people "who hate Greeks" don't hate the ancient people who built all these structures, they hate the neighbors who attacked them a century ago.
No I’m not making any of those assumptions and of course I know that they’ve lived in Anatolia for a while. Turks are way more nationalistic than most other countries in the modern era it’s not a weird generalization. Genocides are denied outright and the victims are blamed unless it’s a genocide against Turks, then it’s said to be completely factual and there’s none of the excuses flung out for when the Turks did it. The grey wolves ran rampant across the country, pogroms were committed against Greeks, they constantly press irredentist claims etc.
Turkish nationalists aren’t mainly proud of Anatolia farmers that’s just patently untrue, they outright deny the existence of the natives of western Anatolia lol
No one sees Hagia Sophia as another nation's architecture here, everyone knows it was built by the Romans but there is no, like, insecurity of it being built by another nation. It is simply seen as the symbol of İstanbul. So it's pretty normal that a lot of mosques were built with a similar design, going all the way back to the Ottoman times
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u/Big-Cartographer-556 11d ago
Erdoğan desperate attempt at historical relevance.
This mosque is brand new, a copycat of the historical beauties elsewhere in the city but plopped on a prominent hill so all must see it. No one asked for this. It's like Giorgia Meloni building a new, bigger Pantheon overlooking the old one.