Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has declared Istanbul's Hagia Sophia open to Muslim worship after a top court ruled that the building's conversion to a museum by modern Turkey's founding statesman was illegal, reports Alzajeera.
Erdogan made the announcement on Friday an hour after the court ruling was revealed, despite international warnings not to change the status of the nearly 1,500-year-old monument, revered by Christians and Muslims alike.
"The decision was taken to hand over the management of the Ayasofya Mosque ... to the Religious Affairs Directorate and open it for worship," the decision signed by Erdogan said.
Erdogan had previously proposed restoring the mosque status of the UNESCO World Heritage Site, a focal point of both the Christian Byzantine and Muslim Ottoman empires and now one of the most visited monuments in Turkey.
Earlier, a top Turkish court revoked the Byzantine-era Hagia Sophia's status as a museum. The Council of State, which was debating a case brought by a Turkish religious organisation, cancelled a 1934 cabinet decision that defined the sixth-century building as a museum.
"It was concluded that the settlement deed allocated it as a mosque and its use outside this character is not possible legally," Turkey's top administrative court said in the ruling.
"The cabinet decision in 1934 that ended its use as a mosque and defined it as a museum did not comply with laws," it said.
Erdogan shared on his Twitter feed a copy of the decree he had signed which said the decision had been taken to hand control of the Ayasofya Mosque, as it is known in Turkish, to the country's religious directorate and reopen it for worship.
Reporting from Istanbul, Al Jazeera’s Sinem Koseoglu said the decree was not a surprise as Erdogan had previously stated that he would like to see Hagia Sophia open for Muslim prayers on July 15, the anniversary of a failed coup attempt.
Koseoglu said that in four hours Erdogan was expected to make a speech on the importance of the Hagia Sophia, and its status being altered to a mosque again.
"There are dozens of people in front of Hagia Sophia museum. As soon as the court decision was announced ... they have been here chanting, they have been celebrating since then, and we spoke to them, they are very impatient to be able to pray inside Hagia Sophia," Koseoglu said.
International concerns
Hagia Sophia 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.
In 1935, in the early days of the modern secular Turkish state under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, it became a museum.
The organisation which brought the court case, the latest in a 16-year legal battle, said the Hagia Sophia was the property of the Ottoman leader who captured the city in 1453 and turned the already 900-year-old Byzantine church into a mosque.
Erdogan threw his weight behind the campaign to convert the building before local elections last year. He is due to speak shortly before 9pm (1800 GMT), his head of communications said.
In response to the ruling, the Russian Orthodox Church on Friday said the decision could lead to even greater divisions.
The United States, Russia and Greece, along with UNESCO, had expressed concerns ahead of the ruling.
UNESCO said its World Heritage Committee would review Hagia Sophia's status, saying it was "regrettable that the Turkish decision was not the subject of dialog nor notification beforehand".
"UNESCO calls on the Turkish authorities to open a dialog without delay in order to avoid a step back from the universal value of this exceptional heritage whose preservation will be reviewed by the World Heritage Committee in its next session," the United Nation's cultural body said in a statement.
Erdogan earlier this month rejected international criticism as an attack on Turkey's sovereignty.