Greetings from Istanbul. (If you are checking on my blog for information about SHJ parish's restructuring, scroll down the page and you'll find what you're looking for.)
The Istanbul area is where many of the early Church councils took place defining our faith for the ages. Every Sunday we recite the Nicene Creed which was formulted just a few miles from here and put into its final form right here in Istanbul, then known as Constantinople. The largest church in the Church's first millennium was right here. It was called Hagia Sophia, i.e. Holy Wisdom, referring to the second person of the Holy Trinity because Jesus is the Wisdom of the Father. The original Hagia Sophia was built by Constantine in the early 300's AD. The present building was build by the Emperor Justinian in 532 AD. And it looks that old. When the Muslims took over Constantinople in the 1300's they made Hagia Sophia a mosque and changed the name of the city to Istanbul, meaning something like "plenty of Islam." In the 1920's Attaturk made the remains of the Ottoman Empire into a secularist country, Turkey. He also turned the Hagia Sophia into a museum. That's all for now.
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