Pope Francis begins Turkey visit
Pope Francis begins Turkey visit
November 28, 2014
Pope
Francis has begun his first visit to Turkey in a trip aimed at building
bridges with Islam and supporting the Christian minorities of the
Middle East.
On
Friday, Francis will spend the first of three days in Turkey in the
capital Ankara, notably holding a meeting with President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan at his newly constructed presidential palace.
Francis
is to travel to Istanbul on Saturday and Sunday, visiting key sites of
the city’s Byzantine and Ottoman heritage as well as meeting the
Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I.
On
Saturday Francis is to visit Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, a Byzantine-era
church that was turned into a mosque after the conquest of
Constantinople in 1453 and now serves as a museum, and the Ottoman-era
Sultan Ahmet mosque, also known as the Blue Mosque.
The
Christian community in Turkey is tiny – just 80,000 in a country 75
million Muslims – but also extremely mixed, consisting of Armenians,
Greek Orthodox, Franco-Levantines, Syriac Orthodox and Chaldeans.
Francis,
77, is expected to raise his concern about the plight of Christian
communities throughout the Middle East amid the rise of the Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Some 2,700 police are set to supervise his visit in Ankara, a number that will rise to 7,000 in Istanbul.
There
have also been calls on Francis not to meet Erdogan at his presidential
palace, which is seen by critics as an authoritarian extravagence with
1,000 rooms and cost at least $615m to build.
But
the Vatican has refused to be drawn into the polemic, saying it is
merely accepting the invitation by the hosts for Francis, who will be by
far the most important visitor so far at the palace.
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