>A catastrophe under the frozen glance of the British, as retaliation for the Cypriot struggle for Independence >Constantinople was the capital of the eastern Christian world since Emperor Constantine in 330 A.D. It was conquered by the Muslim Sultan Mehmet II on May 29, 1453. Tens of thousands of Christians were raped, killed, enslaved or deported during the fall of Constantinople. The largest Christian church in the world for nearly a thousand years, Hagia Sophia, was converted into a mosque. Muslims covered the church’s four acres of beautiful Bible-themed gold mosaics with whitewash and Qur’an verses, and surrounded the church with Islamic minarets. The Turkish government has never offered to give ownership of the church back to Christians. >On April 1st, 1955 the Greek-Cypriot struggle for Independence had started against the British occupation of the island. The British were furious and sought a way to retaliate against the Greeks. They gave the “OK” to Turkey to organize a provocation, as an English diplomat told Stefanos Stefanopoulos, then Minister of Foreign Affairs of Greece, and was made public many years later in a television documentary by an old politician, colleague and friend of Stefanopoulos, Giorgos Zigdis. >Adnan Menderes’ government carried out the provocation whereby a Turkish university student was to place explosive charges in the Turkish Consulate and in the birthplace of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in Thessaloniki, Greece. The plan was to blow it up on Sept. 3, 1955 and blame it on the Greek Christian minority.