Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has marked the 573rd anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople by criticizing those who, he said, still harbor resentment over the fall of the Byzantine capital.
Speaking at commemorative events in Istanbul, as the city is now known, Erdogan said “there are still people who have never come to terms with the conquest of Istanbul. There are those who cannot escape the grip of 573 years of resentment.”
The conquest in 1453 by Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II was “not merely a great victory or an event that closed one era and opened another, but the transformation of darkness into light in one of the world’s most precious cities,” the Turkish president said.
He also described the conquest as the restoration and rebirth of a city whose places of worship had been “looted and destroyed” and whose neighborhoods had “turned into swamps.”
“It was the reconstruction, revival and rebirth of a city, including Hagia Sophia,” Erdogan said, referring to one of Christianity’s most important places of worship for about a millennium that became a mosque after the fall. Transformed into a museum under Ataturk, it was reconverted into a mosque in 2020 under Erdogan’s orders.
