Pope Francis Visits Turkey Friday Nov 28,2014

 

Pope Francis has begun his first visit to Turkey in a trip aimed at building bridges with Islam and supporting the Christian minorities of the Middle East.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Pope Francis  review an honour guard during a welcoming ceremony at the presidential palace in Ankara

Paying his respects: Pope Francis lays wreaths at the mausoleum of modern Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in Ankara on Friday

Papal visits to Turkey are rare - Francis will be just the fourth pope to visit the country after Benedict in 2006, John Paul II in 1979 and Paul VI in 1967

On Friday Nov 28,2014, Francis will spend the first of three days in Turkey in the capital Ankara, notably holding a meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at his newly constructed presidential palace.

Pope Francis is to travel to Istanbul on Saturday and Sunday, visiting key sites of the city's Byzantine and Ottoman heritage as well as meeting the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I.
Pope Francis will tour two of Istanbul's most impressive sites, the Hagia Sofia - the Byzantine church-turned-mosque that is now a museum - and the nearby Sultan Ahmet mosque, Turkey's most important place of Muslim worship


On Saturday Pope Francis is to visit Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, a Byzantine-era church that was turned into a mosque after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and now serves as a museum, and the Ottoman-era Sultan Ahmet mosque, also known as the Blue Mosque.

The Christian community in Turkey is tiny - just 80,000 in a country 75 million Muslims - but also extremely mixed, consisting of Armenians, Greek Orthodox, Franco-Levantines, Syriac Orthodox and Chaldeans.

Pope Francis is expected to raise his concern about the plight of Christian communities throughout the Middle East amid the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)