Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan formally opened a former Byzantine church in Istanbul as a mosque on Monday, four years after his government had designated it a Muslim house of prayer, despite criticism from neighboring Greece. Turkey formally converted The Church of St. Saviour in Chora, known as Kariye in Turkish, into a mosque in 2020, soon after it similarly turned Istanbul’s landmark Hagia Sophia into a Muslim house of prayer. Both conversions drew praise from Muslim faithful but criticism from Greece and other countries who had urged Turkey to protect the important Byzantine-era m…