Hagia Sophia

I've shared this Cappella Romano video featuring Hagia Sophia in Constantinople on Facebook numerous times, but tonight something just struck me about it. (I will never say "Istanbul", BTW. Some orange-haired lefty at one of the talks given at the Assumption Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Denver during its annual Greek festival complained in the Q&A session that the priest giving the talk kept referring to the city as "Constantinople", when he should be calling it "Istanbul." His response,  "Because for us it will always be Constantinople", whereupon the orange-hair and his male friend stormed out of the cathedral. True story , but I digress.)

The video begins with the Byzantine chant that echoed throughout the cathedral for a thousand years until the imperialistic forces of Mahound conquered Asia Minor.

Under the secularist regime of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the Turks turned Hagia Sophia into a museum. Here you see tourists traipsing through it when it was a museum. The chanters go silent. When the visitors dissipate, the ghostly chanters begin again.

Turk President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, against all admonitions from the Western world, recently turned Hagia Sophia into a damnable mosque again.

But then the tourists and Muslims are all gone and the space is empty, this is what the ghosts and angels chant, and it is heard in the heavenlies.

It will never truly belong to the Muslims, any more than the Temple Mount in Jerusalem does.

"And send word to the Franks, that the Turk has taken the City, to come and empty it, to leave nothing behind.

To take Aghia Sophia, with its gold screens, to take the Gospel, and the Altar.

And our Lady when she heard it,

her eyes filled with tears,

and Michael and Gabriel they comforted her:

Weep not our Lady, and be not tearful,

With the passing of years, and in time, they'll be ours again".