Pope Begins Three-Day Turkey Visit
Aiming at strengthening ties with Muslim leaders, Pope Francis began his three-day Turkey tour Friday.
On the first day, the pontiff is expected to fly from Rome to Ankara to meet President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the top cleric, Mehmet Gormez, to discuss issues like religious tolerance and fighting extremism. The majority of the population in the country consists of Muslims and it is constitutionally a secular nation. The visit comes amid fresh Christian-Muslim tensions in the region.
The Christian population in Turkey is very small. There are just 80,000 in a country where almost 75 million Muslims reside. It must be mentioned that the community is not only small in number, but also extremely mixed, consisting of Armenians, Greek Orthodox, Franco-Levantines, Syriac Orthodox and Chaldeans.
The Islamic State militants have seized major areas in Iraq and Syria pushing around 1.6 million refugees across the border into Turkey. There were speculations that the Pope might meet the refugees at Turkey's border with Syria during his three-day visit to the country, but it doesn't seem likely anymore, the Telegraph reports.
He will travel to Istanbul Saturday and Sunday. There, he will visit crucial areas of the city like Byzantine and Ottoman heritage and will also meet the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I.
It has been learnt that the 77-year-old pontiff is scheduled to visit Istanbul's Hagia Sophia, which was a church during the Byzantine era that was turned into a mosque after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The structure now serves as a museum. He will also visit the Ottoman-era Sultan Ahmet mosque, which is also known as the Blue Mosque, Al Jazeera reports.
