And Apa Suphea— what was its fate? Looking on at the ups and downs of life, that old building of fourteen hundred years stands still in Istanbul. For nine hundred years, it witnessed Greek services and smelt all the incense used in Greek worship. Then for four hundred and eighty years, it heard the azan in Arabic and lines of devotees for namaz stood on its floor stones.And now? One day, in this year 1935, only a few months back, by the orders of Gazi Mustafa Kemal…it has been decided that instead of being a mosque, Suphea be converted into a museum— especially that of the Byzantine period— an era of Christians before the arrival of the Turks…Thus Suphea, now, in a way, went back again to the Christian era.Great excavations are going on there these days, the mounds of earth are being removed. Work is going on under the supervision of experts of Byzantine art who have been called from America and Germany.While going round the museum, think of the peculiar history of this world and let your mind roam thousands of years back and onwards.Strange are the pictures, the spectacles, the tortures and terrors that one comes across. Ask those walls to relate to you their story, and narrate their experiences to you. Maybe the study of yesterday and today will enable you to remove the curtain and peep into the future.But those stones and walls are silent. They had seen a lot of Juma namaz and Sunday services. A daily exhibition is now their lot. The world keeps changing, but they stay. On their worn-out faces is an apparent smirk and a mellow voice as if whispering: how ignorant and foolish is this human creature who does not learn by his thousands of years of experience and repeats the same follies.”(Selected and edited by Mridula Mukherjee, former Professor of History at JNU and former Director of Nehru Memorial Museum and Library)
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