Will Erdogan turn Hagia Sophia back into a mosque? Thomas Seibert reports on the latest from Turkey:

As Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan looks for an issue to fire up his Islamic and nationalist voter base amid declining poll numbers, he is moving closer to turning Istanbul’s ancient Basilica of the Hagia Sophia, a world heritage site and a powerful symbol for both Christians and Muslims, from a museum into a mosque.

Built 1,500 years ago as the main church of the Byzantine Empire, Hagia Sophia (which means holy wisdom) was the most important house of worship in Christianity for almost a thousand years. The Ottomans declared the building a mosque after conquering Constantinople, today’s Istanbul, in 1453.

But modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, decreed in a 1934 cabinet decision that the massive building in the heart of Istanbul’s historic center be used as a museum, banning religious worship there. The U.N. cultural organization UNESCO declared Hagia Sophia a world heritage site in 1985.

Islamists have campaigned for years to turn Hagia Sophia, or Ayasofya, back into a mosque, and they are now closer than ever to getting what they want. Once dismissive of their demands, but always conscious of his core Islamist base, Erdogan has signaled his support for the initiative. He told a television interviewer last year that Hagia Sophia might be known as ‘Hagia Sophia Mosque’ in the future. Erdogan’s justice minister, Abdulhamit Gul, told the state news agency Anadolu last month that ‘it is our joint wish to break the Hagia Sophia’s chains and open it for prayers.’

Turkey’s top administrative court, the Council of State, on Thursday took up the issue after an association calling for the change asked the judges to declare Ataturk’s decision null and void. The hearing lasted just 17 minutes, and the court said it would issue a verdict within 15 days.

In other news: Kevin Gutzman reviews R. B. Bernstein’s The Education of John Adams: “Two accounts of John Adams are current among Americans today. The first, purveyed by popular historian David McCullough in his mega-bestselling John Adams, focused on the Massachusettsan’s peculiar—though appealing—personality. Reading it, one might think that Adams had been a mere character. The other, developed by academic historian Gordon Wood in a chapter of his seminal The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 entitled ‘The Relevance and Irrelevance of John Adams,’ makes Adams an out-of-place if powerful thinker. Richard Bernstein’s new book joins the personality and political science of the Colossus of Independence.”

A history of the bunker: “What is a bunker? The term derives from an Old Swedish word meaning ‘boards used to protect the cargo of a ship’. But if we take it, as we usually do, to mean a defended structure, often underground, intended to shield people and important goods through a period of strife, then it is one of the oldest building types made by humans.”

Ennio Morricone has died. He was 91: “The Italian composer, who scored more than 500 films — seven for his countryman Leone after they had met as kids in elementary school — died in Rome following complications from a fall last week in which he broke his femur.”

Charles Péguy is “little known beyond specialist circles concerned with fin-de-siècle French politics and culture.” Should that be the case? Jay Tolson reviews Matthew Maguire’s new biography: “Maguire . . . makes a very large claim for Péguy (1873–1914): namely, that this fiercely independent man of letters and founder of the influential fortnightly journal Cahiers de la quinzaine stood brilliantly athwart the defining cultural antinomies of his time by challenging the two main ways of being modern, the progressive and the reactionary.”

Andrei Filatov, a Russian businessman, has offered to buy America’s “problematic” statues: “His Art Russe Foundation has made offers to preserve monuments of Theodore Roosevelt and Alexander Baranov that have been the target of protesters in the U.S.”

Speaking of statues, students at Rutgers—Camden have requested that one of Walt Whitman be removed because it perpetuates “a racist past.”

Mitchell G. Klingenberg remembers the Battle of Gettysburg: “As it happened, Union victory in Pennsylvania on July 3, and the surrender of Confederate forces at Vicksburg, Mississippi, on July 4, portended a gradual death for the Southern rebellion. When the Confederacy collapsed in 1865, so, too, did the foundation of its apartheid society: institutionalized racial slavery. Yet the ultimate success of Union arms was hardly a foregone conclusion in 1863.”

Miles Smith defends “The Star-Spangled Banner”: “The national anthem was not composed to record political glories or greatness achieved by military might or idealized ethno-national exceptionalism. It was written in 1814 to record a free republic’s endurance through the darkest night it had yet experienced. There are better reasons to stand and sing than to honor a nationalistic ideal or even to honor the American military. We should sing to remind ourselves that when our politics fail—when the republic encounters dark nights of war, domestic strife, or constitutional dysfunction—a free republican citizenry endowed with God-given liberties must nonetheless endure.”

Photo: Eclipse under bamboo

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