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24 Jul 2020

Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia holds first Muslim prayers in 86 years

President Erdogan of Turkey has joined huge crowds in Istanbul, for the first Friday prayers at Hagia Sophia since the 1,500-year-old former church was turned back into a mosque. The Pope has expressed his sadness at the move – while church bells rang out in neighbouring Greece, which called it an “open provocation to the civilised world”.

 

Our foreign affairs correspondent Jonathan Rugman reports.