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President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday inaugurated the first church built with government backing in overwhelmingly Muslim Turkey’s 100-year history as a post-Ottoman state.

The Mor Ephrem Syriac Orthodox Church’s opening marks an important cultural and political moment for both Turkey and its powerful leader.

Erdogan drew widespread condemnation during his two-decade rule for converting ancient churches into mosques and making Islamic conservatism into a leading social force.

He has always countered that he was simply restoring the rights of pious Muslims in the staunchly secular republic founded by field marshal Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923.

Erdogan laid the first stone for the church’s construction for Istanbul’s 17,000-strong Assyrian Christians in 2019.

“We are seeing big problems today across many parts of the world,” Erdogan told the faithful as all-out war raged between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza.

“But the solidarity shown here today — I find it very important,” Erdogan said.

“We always protect the oppressed against the oppressor. That is our duty.”

Assyrian Christianity traces its history to communities that lived in the first century AD in a region stretching from southeastern Turkey to Syria and Iraq.

Its main church moved from the Turkish city of Mardin to Damascus in 1932.

‘Love letter’

Some small Turkish churches have been quietly restored and re-opened in the past 100 years.

Erdogan said on Sunday that 20 existing churches had been repaired since his Islamic-rooted party came to power in 2002.

But the Mor Ephrem “is the first newly built church to open its doors since the founding of the Turkish Republic,” Assyrian community leader Sait Susin told AFP by telephone.

“We are very happy.”

Erdogan drew international indignation for converting Istanbul’s iconic Hagia Sophia —once the world’s largest cathedral —from a museum into a mosque in 2020.

The United Nations cultural body UNESCO expressed “grave concern” at the time.

Erdogan brushed the criticism aside and did exactly the same thing to Istanbul’s Byzantine-era Chora Church later that same year.

Greece called that conversion “yet another provocation against religious persons everywhere”.

Erdogan came under particularly strong attacks at home for unveiling a new mosque in 2021 on Taksim Square — an Istanbul gathering point built around a monument celebrating Ataturk’s foundation of the secular Turkish state.

The new Istanbul church can accommodate 750 worshippers.

Erdogan wavers in his speeches between robustly defending pious Muslims and embracing Turkey’s numerous communities.

He told supporters on the eve of the first round of May’s presidential election that he had written a “love letter” to Turkey.

“We have penned a love letter for every individual of our nation, without any distinction of origin or religion,” he told the crowd.

He ended that day by leading Muslim prayers at the Hagia Sophia mosque.

Erdogan edged out his secular rival in a runoff election two weeks later.
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The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta has brought colorful displays to the New Mexico sky in an international event that attracts hundreds of thousands of spectators every year.

The event started Saturday with a drone light show before sunrise followed by a mass ascension of hot air balloons. Over nine days, local residents and visitors will be treated to a cavalcade of colorful and special-shaped balloons.

The annual gathering has become a major economic driver for the state’s biggest city. The Rio Grande and nearby mountains provide spectacular backdrops to the fiesta that began with a few pilots launching 13 balloons from an open lot near a shopping center on what was the edge of Albuquerque in 1972.

The fiesta has morphed into one of the most photographed events in the world, now based at Balloon Fiesta Park. Balloon designs have featured cartoon animals, Star Wars characters and even the polar bear found on Klondike bars.

“But they’re still all about the basics,” said fiesta director Sam Parks, who flies a globe-style balloon modeled after one flown by the fiesta’s late founder Sid Cutter. “You add heat to a big bag of air and you go up.”

Nearly 830,000 people from around the world attended last year’s event. Scheduled nighttime events include fireworks and balloon glows, in which hot air balloons are inflated and lit up from the ground.

The launch window opens Saturday evening for what is billed as one of the biggest events in aviation: the Gordon Bennett competition. The winner of the gas balloon race is the one who flies the farthest distance.

Some 550 balloon pilots are registered to fly this year, seeking to take advantage of a phenomenon known as the “Albuquerque box,” when the wind blows in opposite directions at different elevations, allowing skillful pilots to bring a balloon back to a spot near the point of takeoff.

Visitors to the event also can pay to go aloft for views of the Sandia Mountains to the west and New Mexico’s capital, Santa Fe, farther north.

“It has become part of the culture,” Parks said. “The thread, if you will, of those here.”

Elizabeth Wright-Smith, who is flying the Smokey Bear balloon this week, said she reunites with friends from all over the country at the fiesta that she would not see otherwise. As of early Saturday afternoon, she had already run into 30 people she had met from various balloon races, safety seminars and other events across the country.

“It’s a big reunion,” she said.

Her favorite part of the fiesta is watching and interacting with the thousands of spectators who flock to Balloon Fiesta Park, which grow smaller as she ascends in her balloon. The sky was clear Saturday – a contrast from last year, when off-and-on rain left parts of the fiesta soggy.

“Pictures don’t do it justice, videos don’t do it justice,” Wright-Smith said. “You’ve got to be standing there watching them to really get it.”
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Tourists at the Acropolis this holiday season can witness the resolution of one of the world’s most heated debates on cultural heritage.

All they need is a smartphone.

Visitors can now pinch and zoom their way around the ancient Greek site, with a digital overlay showing how it once looked. That includes a collection of marble sculptures removed from the Parthenon more than 200 years ago that are now on display at the British Museum in London. Greece has demanded they be returned.

For now, an app supported by Greece’s Culture Ministry allows visitors to point their phones at the Parthenon temple, and the sculptures housed in London appear back on the monument as archaeologists believe they looked 2,500 years ago.

Other, less widely known features also appear: Many of the sculptures on the Acropolis were painted in striking colors. A statue of goddess Athena in the main chamber of the Parthenon also stood over a shallow pool of water.

“That’s really impressive … the only time I’ve seen that kind of technology before is at the dentist,” Shriya Parsotam Chitnavis, a tourist from London, said after checking out the app on a hot afternoon at the hilltop Acropolis, Greece’s most popular archaeological site.

“I didn’t know much about the (Acropolis), and I had to be convinced to come up here. Seeing this has made it more interesting — seeing it in color,” she said. “I’m more of a visual person, so this being interactive really helped me appreciate it.”

The virtual restoration works anywhere and could spare some visitors the crowded uphill walk and long wait to see the iconic monuments up close. It might also help the country’s campaign to make Greek cities year-round destinations.

Tourism, vital for the Greek economy, has roared back since the COVID-19 pandemic, even as wildfires chased visitors from the island of Rhodes and affected other areas this summer. The number of inbound visitors from January through July was up 21.9% to 16.2 million compared with a year ago, according to the Bank of Greece. Revenue was up just over 20%, to 10.3 billion euros ($10.8 billion).

The app, called Chronos after the mythological king of the Titans and Greek word for “time,” uses augmented reality to place the ancient impression of the site onto the screen, matching the real-world view as you walk around.

AR is reaching consumers after a long wait and is set to affect a huge range of professional and leisure activities.

Medical surgery, military training and specialized machine repair as well as retail and live event experiences are all in the sights of big tech companies betting on a lucrative future in immersive services. Tech giant like Meta and Apple are pushing into VR headsets that can cost thousands of dollars.

The high price tag will keep the cellphone as the main AR delivery platform to consumers for some time, said Maria Engberg, co-author of the book “Reality Media” on augmented and virtual reality.

She says services for travelers will soon offer a better integrated experience, allowing for more sharing options on tours and overlaying archive photos and videos.

“AR and VR have been lagging behind other kinds of things like games and movies that we’re consuming digitally,” said Engberg, an associate professor of computer science and media technology at Malmo University in Sweden.

“I think we will see really interesting customer experiences in the next few years as more content from museums and archives becomes digitized,” she said.

Greece’s Culture Ministry and national tourism authority are late but enthusiastic converts to technology. The popular video game Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which allows players to roam ancient Athens, was used to attract young travelers from China to Greece with a state-organized photo contest.

Microsoft partnered with the Culture Ministry two years ago to launch an immersive digital tour at ancient Olympia, birthplace of the Olympic Games in southern Greece.

Culture Minister Lina Mendoni said the innovations would boost accessibility to Greece’s ancient monuments, supplementing the recent installation of ramps and anti-slip pathways.

“Accessibility is extending to the digital space,” Mendoni said at a preview launch event for the Chronos app in May. “Real visitors and virtual visitors anywhere around the world can share historical knowledge.”

Developed by Greek telecoms provider Cosmote, the free app’s designers say they hope to build on existing features that include an artificial intelligence-powered virtual guide, Clio.

“As technologies and networks advance, with better bandwidth and lower latencies, mobile devices will be able to download even higher-quality content,” said Panayiotis Gabrielides, a senior official at the telecom company involved in the project.

Virtual reconstructions using Chronos also cover three other monuments at the Acropolis, an adjacent Roman theater and parts of the Acropolis Museum built at the foot of the rock.
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If stones could talk, sing and tell stories, Yogi Trivedi believes the marble and limestone that adorn the spires, pillars and archways of the stunning Hindu temple in central New Jersey would compose a paean to the divine.

The tales these stones tell are those of seva (selfless service) and bhakti (devotion), which form the core of the Swaminarayan sect, a branch of Hinduism, said Trivedi, a scholar of Hinduism at Columbia University.

It took a combined total of about 4.7 million hours of work by artisans and volunteers to hand-carve about 600,000 cubic meters of stone. The four varieties of marble from Italy and limestone from Bulgaria traveled first to India and then nearly 13,000 kilometers across the world to New Jersey.

They were then fitted together like a giant jigsaw to create what is now touted as the largest Hindu temple outside India to be built in the modern era, standing on a 126-acre tract. It will open to the public Monday.

The largest temple complex in the world is the Ankgor Wat, originally constructed in the 12th century in Krong Siem Reap, Cambodia, and dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu by King Suryavarman II. It is now described as a Hindu-Buddhist temple and is one of 1,199 UNESCO World Heritage sites.

The Robbinsville temple is one of many built by the Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha or BAPS, a worldwide religious and civic organization within the Swaminarayan sect.

“Service and devotion are the two basic elements that form the subtle foundation of how a temple so majestic gets built here in central New Jersey,” said Trivedi, who studies the Swaminarayan faith tradition and follows it.

This temple will be the third Akshardham or “abode of the divine” the organization has built after two others in New Delhi and Gujarat, where BAPS is headquartered. The former is the largest Hindu temple complex in the world. The sect, which will celebrate its 50th year in North America next year, oversees more than 1,200 temples and 3,850 centers around the world.

The New Jersey Akshardham, which has been in the works for about 12 years, came under scrutiny and criticism after a 2021 civil lawsuit alleging forced labor, meager wages and grim working conditions.

Twelve of the 19 plaintiffs have now retracted their allegations and the lawsuit is on hold pending an investigation “with which BAPS continues to cooperate fully,” Trivedi said. 

The complaint alleges that those exploited were Dalits or members of the former untouchable caste in India. Caste is an ancient system of social hierarchy based on one’s birth that is tied to concepts of purity and social status.

The case continues to raise questions among activists fighting caste discrimination and those advocating for workers’ rights, about the blurred lines between uncompensated work and the concept of selfless service, which followers of the faith say constitutes their core belief.

Trivedi said these allegations weighed heavily on community members because their faith has always taught them “to see the divine in all and love and serve them as manifestations of the divine.” He said Pramukh Swami Maharaj, the sect’s fifth spiritual successor, who envisioned such a temple campus in the United States, was a progressive guru who cared deeply about social equality.

“Caste and class do not divide us,” Trivedi said.

The temple project brought forth volunteerism and service, which like the sculptor’s chisel, chip away people’s egos and prime them to learn, he said.

“In that learning, one becomes a better person within and that is the end goal of seva,” Trivedi said. “It’s not just to give to the community or build these (ornate structures), but to better oneself.”

He said the temple would not have been possible without the service of thousands of volunteers many of whom took time off school and work to serve in different capacities. This might be the first Hindu temple where women were involved in the actual temple construction under the artisans’ supervision, he added.

This week, families from across the country have been streaming into the temple campus to get a sneak peek. Devotees bowed to each other and to monks in saffron robes. As the sun set, two men in white robes performed a ceremony in front of the 49-foot-tall statue of the Bhagwan Nilkanth Varni, who later became known as Bhagwan Swaminarayan, the founder of the sect who ushered in a moral and spiritual renaissance in western India.

Avani Patel was visiting from Atlanta with her husband and their two children, ages 11 and 15. She knelt inside the temple and marveled at the ornate ceiling, her hands folded in prayer.

“It’s jaw dropping, mind blowing,” she said.

Patel said she and her husband, Pritesh, were among the volunteers who gave their time to create the complex, and she is proud to be a part of an organization that would build such a resource to pass on these values to posterity.

Trivedi said he does not view the temple “just as a Hindu place of worship.”

“It’s not even just Indian or Indian American,” he said, adding that the temple stands for universal values that can be found in every religious text and in the hearts and minds of great thinkers and leaders of every era.

“What we’ve tried to do is express these universal values in a way that relate to all visitors.” 
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