[tsimionescu]

The fact that you are a self-admitted bigot (taking offense at being compared to any member of an entire group is the definition of bigotry)doesn't entitle you to change history or geography.

Turkey is geographically partly in Europe. Istanbul sits on the historical border between Europe and Asia, and there is a chuck of land west of Istanbul that is Turkish. In fact, there are parts of Turkey on the European mainland that are farther west than much of Ukraine or Moldova.

Islam is an important part of the culture of many European countries - Spain in particular has significant historical Muslim influence, especially in your architecture. Several majority-Muslim countries are firmly in Europe - Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, North Macedonia. There are significant Muslim minorities in a few other countries - Bulgaria, Cyprus, Montenegro, Georgia. Even in Western Europe, there are significant Muslim minorities in many of the old colonial empires - France, Belgium, Sweden, The Netherlands, UK.

Not to mention, Turkey is still a secular country, even if Erdogan seems poised to turn it towards fundamentalism unfortunately.

[_dain_]

A man could have seen both the Turkish conquest of Constantinople and the Moors being driven out of Spain in the same lifetime; yet you let the Turks take credit for the pre-conquest Hagia Sophia (which they didn't build), while also subordinating Spanish civilization to their Moorish predecessors.

[tsimionescu]

I did neither of those things.

The importance of the Hagia Sophia being in Turkey is to remind everyone that that land is indeed part of Europe, and has deep cultural ties to other parts of Europe, even if it was later conquered by the Turks. Anyone claiming that Istanbul is not part of Europe has to also claim that Constantinople was not a part of Europe. Not to mention, the Turks borrowed a great deal of culture from the Byzantines whose land they conquered. It's not like they burned down their cities and killed all the people - the Ottoman Empire was to a great extent built around the legacy of the Byzantine (Roman) empire. Even ethnically, most Turks today are much closer to the Greeks and Romans living in Byzantium than to the original Turkish conquerors (who were of Mongol descent), at least in the western parts of the country.

The Hagia Sophia can also act as a nice symbol of this: it is largely identical to the church that emperor ~Julian~ Justinian commissioned (the last Roman emperor to ever hold Rome, though only briefly), but it has been repurposed as a mosque, with two minarets added and several parts of the church re-painted for Islamic sensibilities. An Islamic church built on the structure of the old Roman/Greek one.

As for Spain, the situation is similar: when the medieval Europeans invaded Spain and (re-)conquered it, they then borrowed quite a bit from the culture that the Moors left behind there, as is plainly visible in Spanish architecture of the time and later, even up to the present. Of course, the Moors themselves had been influenced by the Roman & Spanish culture that they found when they originally conquered the peninsula themselves.

Edit: small correction - Justinian conquered Rome and had the Hagia Sophia built, not Julian.