The pope said he feels 'deeply saddened' by the decision of Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to convert Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia from a museum back into a mosque. The Unesco-listed building was first constructed as a cathedral in the Christian Byzantine empire but was converted into a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453
Pope Francis 'very distressed' over Hagia Sophia mosque move