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As Hagia Sophia opens for prayer on 24 July, Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens and All Greece has announced that on this date will be a day of mourning for Christians and Greek people everywhere. He will perform the customary Good Friday liturgy and hymns at the Metropolitan Church of Athens Evangelismos Theotokou and is inviting everyone to join in prayers for aid and support to the nation.
“I am deeply grieved that the powerful of this world, at least the majority of them, are hiding behind their finger, or rather behind their own geopolitical and geostrategic designs,” said Archbishop Ieronymos.
The head of the Orthodox Church of Greece added: “with this attitude they are tolerating or essentially accepting, in contravention of all sense of international legality, an unholy act of sacrilege of not just a holy spiritual centre for our Orthodox faith, of Christianity in general, and of a symbol of our faith but of an ecumenical cultural monument and symbol of the mutual rapprochement of peoples and human beings, of people with different religious identities.”
Archbishop Ieronymos continued: “The great church of Hagia Sophia is made a plaything in the hands of people, who habitually and through the ages, trample on international law and human rights and feed the darker form of religious intolerance in order, as they think, to establish their dominance.”
Muslim leaders in solidarity with WCC’s urgent calls to keep Hagia Sophia a place of openness