Will the pope boycott Erdogan’s new palace?
he Turkish Chamber of Architects says visiting the palace would legitimise its ‘illegal’ construction
Rome: Catholic Pope Francis faces a diplomatic quandary when he visits Turkey for the first time this month, after Turkish architects urged him not to set foot in a 1,000-room palace built by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The Pope will make a three-day trip to Ankara and Istanbul during which he is expected to speak out about the threat of Islamist extremism and the persecution of Christians in Syria and Iraq.
He is poised to be the first foreign dignitary to be invited to the sprawling palace, which was controversially built in parkland bequeathed to the Turkish people by Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish state.
The Pope will arrive in Ankara on November 28 and, according to the official Vatican itinerary, will go straight to the presidential palace for a welcome ceremony and a meeting with Erdogan.
The Turkish Chamber of Architects urged him to change his plans, saying that if he visited the palace, which takes up two million square feet and is three times the size of the Palace of Versailles, he would “legitimise an illegal construction”. They have sent a letter to the Vatican, calling on the Pope “not to honour an invitation to this building”. Tezcan Karakus, the president of the association, has requested a meeting with Vatican officials to discuss the issue, which threatens to overshadow the start of the visit.
The palace, which resembles the White House and is bigger than the Kremlin and Buckingham Palace, was built at a cost of 384 million pounds- double the original estimate - and inaugurated two weeks ago. It has been condemned by many Turks as a waste of money and a symbol of President Erdogan’s increasingly autocratic rule.
Several court orders blocking the project - nicknamed Ak Saray or the White Palace - failed to halt construction. Environmentalists say the complex has ruined one of Ankara’s few remaining green spaces. “For many Turks this building is a symbol of greed and a hunger for absolute power,” Yavuz Baydar, a commentator, told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
“Half the electorate considers it illegal. The Pope understands the values of humility, austerity and equality, as a promoter of Franciscan values. It will be interesting to see if he decides to visit the palace.”
The visit will be the sixth overseas trip of Francis’s papacy, after visits to Brazil, the Holy Land, South Korea and Albania and a November 25 visit to the European Parliament in Strasbourg.
