There was a large turnout of Muslim pilgrims at the Chora Monastery for the Friday noon prayer, the most important in the Islamic faith, the first after the monument was converted into a mosque.

The functioning of the pericallous Byzantine temple of Istanbul as a Muslim mosque was inaugurated by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, last Monday, in a special ceremony in which he was connected directly from the presidential palace via teleconference.

Few pilgrims fit into the limited space of the church’s catholicon, so many who came for prayer occupied the outer space around the monument. The inner space was already full half an hour before the prayer.

The Monastery of Chora has been included in the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. It houses the most elaborate Byzantine mosaics surviving in Constantinople, along with Hagia Sophia and the Monastery of Pammakaristos, which also functions as a mosque.

The mosque works on the model of Hagia Sophia. The mosaics on the walls in the prayer area were covered, while an area was determined to be visited by tourists with a guide.

The church of Agios Sotiros in Chora, the catholicon of what was once a monastic complex, dates from the 6th AD. century, while its unique mosaics and frescoes were created in the 14th century, from 1305 to 1320, during the reign of Palaiologos.

The Monastery of Chora was converted into a mosque in 1511, 58 years after the Fall of the City, and by decision of the Council of Ministers of Turkey in 1945 it became a museum. After this decision, specialists from the United States carried out a huge project of restoration and maintenance of the mosaics and frescoes, removing the plasters that covered them. Work began in 1948 and was completed ten years later in 1958. In 2019 Turkey’s Council of State (Danistay) revoked the 1945 decision and a year later, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that the monument would once again function as a mosque