ANKARA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 29th July, 2020) Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday that his country was protecting the cultural heritage of Christianity, citing the restoration of one of the world's oldest Orthodox monasteries, Panagia Soumela Monastery in northeastern Trabzon province, as an example.
"Turkey has many major cultural sites of global importance. The Soumela Monastery is one of the symbols of our country. There are traces of many civilizations here. We have been working for years to preserve the monastery. We never tried to destroy these objects, on the contrary, we tried to preserve them," Erdogan said at the ceremony of completing the second stage of the monastery's restoration.
The leader noted Turkey's careful attitude to the objects of other religion and dismissed the negative reaction of a number of countries to the transformation of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul into a mosque earlier in July.
"If we wanted to target symbols of other beliefs, the winds would already be blowing in the place of Soumela. The fact that we are restoring such objects is a concrete example of how we protect civilizational values. For our Orthodox citizens, a service will be held in Soumela on August 15," Erdogan added.
Panagia Soumela is an inactive Orthodox monastery of the Constantinople Orthodox Church, erected in the late 4th-early 5th centuries. It is one of the oldest in the world and claims to be included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.
