Just days after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan 'claimed' that there are no mosques in Athens, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu repeated the same lie without any shame.
In an interview yesterday, the Foreign Minister said "first of all Hagia Sophia does not belong to Greece. It is the property of the Turkish Republic. It was conquered [by the Ottomans]."
He then continued to say that Athens is the only capital city in Europe "that does not have any mosque," before adding that "They [Greeks] are not sincere. This [behaviour of Greece] is going way over the line."
#Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu defended today the politically-motivated religious showdown in Hagia Sophia by his boss president #Erdogan, slammed #Greece. pic.twitter.com/NTdCdWvndz
— Abdullah Bozkurt (@abdbozkurt) June 3, 2020
On the weekend, Erdoğan said "our mosques and landmark monuments in territories that we had to leave a century ago were entirely destroyed very shortly after."
The Turkish president said this lie even though in December 2017 he visited and prayed in an Ottoman era mosque in the Greek town of Komitini.
Erdogan is such a blatant liar that he said Greece destroyed all the mosques even though in December 2017 he visited and prayed in an Ottoman era mosque in the Greek town of Komitini. How do his supporters not realize the blatant liar he is. pic.twitter.com/QX000d6prQ
— Paul Antonopoulos 🇬🇷🇨🇾 (@oulosP) June 1, 2020
Erdoğan then said "look at Athens, there is not even a single mosque of ours today. They were all completely destroyed,” Erdoğan said, omitting the Fethiye Mosque located in the Roman Agora, built in the 1600’s and the famous Tzistarakis Mosque built in 1759 located in the touristic Monastiraki district.
A functioning mosque also exists in the suburb of Votanikos.
Erdoğan has fully utilized Turkish media to assist in the propaganda campaign. Turkey is one of the lowest ranked countries for media freedoms in the world, is the second most susceptible country surveyed on the European continent to fake news, has the most journalists jailed in the whole world, and 90% of media is government controlled.
