Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton
President Recep Erdogan in 2020 converted the former Byzantine church, the Hagia Sophia, back into a mosque.
Several hundred thousand Christians reside there. About 25,000 of those are Roman Catholics, many of them migrants from Africa and the Philippines, according to a 2022 report by the U.S. State Department. Turkey’s status as a place difficult to be Christian has long roots, despite the country being one of the original places where Christianity flourished.