Seeing Religion, Secularism And Militarism Collide In Istanbul’s Museums

Hagia Sophia famously layers Islam over Byzantine Christianity, though its treasures were carted off by Crusaders, not Turks. Topkapi Palace, the seat of the Ottomans’ Islamic state, is just a short distance from the Military Museum, which looks at a millennium of Turkish history through the rigidly secular lens of Atatürk’s ideology. And so it goes …