https://www.diyanet.gov.tr/tr-TR/Kurumsal/Detay/33057/enez-ayasofya-cami-i-serifi-cemaatine-kavustu
Edirne is in eastern Thrace, where, according to genocide scholars, the 1913-23 Christian genocide that targeted Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks commenced prior to the First World War. The decision to eliminate Christians was made by the political party in power in the Ottoman Empire, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), also known as the Young Turks. The city, ethnically cleansed of its indigenous Greek population by Turks, is a former Greek city – like other cities in Thrace and Asia Minor. The Ottoman Turks captured Adrianopolis (Edirne), a major Byzantine Greek city in Thrace, in the fourteenth century and made it the Ottoman capital until they invaded Constantinople in 1453.
The Greek Genocide Resource Center details the persecution of the Greeks of Eastern Thrace:
Over one hundred years after the genocide, the history and cultural heritage of indigenous Christians is still being systematically erased in Turkey. Countless churches, monasteries and other religious and cultural heritage sites belonging to Christians have been violated, destroyed, or left in disrepair across Turkey. For instance, only a wall remains of the Armenian St. Bartholomew Monastery, which has become an excavation site for treasure hunters and villagers in the city of Van, eastern Turkey.
The Firat News Agency (ANF) reported on January 1 that the monastery was once used as a police station. The monastery was for years closed to transportation as it was within the borders of Albayrak Police Station, which was used as a base by the Turkish Special Operations Teams since 1990. After the police station was moved to a new building, the [usage right of the] church was transferred to Turkey’s Ministry of Culture. Although the then Governor of Van Münir Karaloğlu announced in 2011 that the restoration works would be started, no steps have since been taken. President of the Environment Association of Van, Ali Kalçık, stated that the mentality of “We have destroyed the Armenians in the past; let’s destroy their history now” continues to wreak havoc on historic structures.
Van was a majority-Armenian populated city for millennia until the genocide collapsed the Christian population there. The city was invaded by Seljuq Turks in the eleventh century. In 1548, it was besieged and captured from the Safavid Empire by Ottoman Turks. This city, writes Raffi Tapanian, “has a long history of being populated by thousands of Armenians in the past 3,000 years under the various Armenian kingdoms and foreign empires, but following the Armenian Genocide of 1915 perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire, the Armenian population has vanished. Along with the erasure of the Armenian population of Van, the erasure of thousands of years of Armenian heritage has and continues to take place.” Tapanian refers to the destruction as “cultural genocide.”
Tapanian then gives some examples of churches and monasteries in Van that are in ruins, have been demolished or used for sacrilegious purposes. The Hokiats Monastery, for instance, was used by locals in Van to hold livestock. He continues:
