Starting Monday, the entrance to the Hagia Sophia Mosque in Istanbul will be paid for foreign tourists three and a half years after the museum was turned into a religious object.
A ticket to Hagia Sophia will cost 25 euros for foreign tourists, and admission will be free for Turkish citizens, the press service of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism told RIA Novosti earlier. India has become closer: what's new in tourism for Russians Yesterday, 07:30
After granting Hagia Sophia the status of a mosque in July 2020, admission became free for all visitors, including tourists. Before that, tourists could get to the mosque using a museum subscription or by buying a ticket at the ticket office - according to media reports, in 2020 a ticket for a foreigner cost 100 lira (about 15 US dollars at the exchange rate at that time). Accordingly, access to the upper galleries of the mosque has been closed to tourists since 2020, when the museum became a religious site.
Now, apparently, only believers will be able to get to the first floor of the mosque. It is currently unknown how the entrance to the mosque of foreign believers will be organized and how they will be checked for what purpose they came to the mosque.
It also remains unclear whether there will be discounts for foreigners with a residence permit, as in other museums in Turkey – for this category of guests of the country, prices are usually the same as for citizens.
The ministry said that a separate entrance and exit will be organized for tourists, they will be able to explore the galleries of the mosque on the second floor, as well as mosaics of the Byzantine era.
In July 2020, the Turkish State Council annulled the decision of 1934 to turn the Hagia Sophia Cathedral into a museum. Immediately after that, President Tayyip Erdogan announced that he had signed a decree on turning the cathedral into a mosque and starting Muslim worship there. The first prayer was performed in Hagia Sophia on July 24, 2020.
The Church of St. Sophia was founded by the Byzantine Christian Emperor Justinian I and opened on December 27, 537. The cathedral has been the largest church in the Christian world for about a thousand years. After the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans and the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, the cathedral was converted into a mosque, but since 1934, by decree of the founder of the modern Turkish state Kemal Ataturk, it became a museum and was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.
