ISTANBUL: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday ordered another ancient Orthodox church that became a mosque and then a popular Istanbul museum to be turned back into a place of Muslim worship. The decision to transform the Kariye Museum into a mosque came just a month after a similarly controversial conversion for the UNESCO World Heritage-recognised Hagia Sophia.

Both changes reflect Erdogan's efforts to galvanise his more conservative and nationalist supporters at a time when Turkey is suffering a new spell of inflation and economic uncertainty caused by the coronavirus. But the moves have added to Turkey's problems with prelates in both the Orthodox and Catholic worlds.

The Greek foreign ministry called the decision "yet another provocation against religious persons everywhere" by the Turkish government. The 1,000-year-old Kariye building's history closely mirrors that of the Hagia Sophia - its bigger and more famous neighbour on the western bank of the Golden Horn estuary on the European side of Istanbul.

The Holy Saviour in Chora was a Byzantine church decorated with 14th-century frescoes of the Last Judgement that remain treasured in Christendom. It was originally converted into the Kariye Mosque half a century after the 1453 conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks. It became the Kariye Museum after World War II as Turkey pushed ahead with the creation of a more secular new republic out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.