President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in his new palace, which Pope Francis is scheduled to visit. Photo / AP
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in his new palace, which Pope Francis is scheduled to visit. Photo / AP
Pope Francis faces a diplomatic quandary when he visits Turkey for the first time this month, after Turkish architects urged him not to set foot in a 1000-room palace built by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The Pope will make a three-day trip to Ankara and Istanbul and is expected tospeak out about Islamist extremism and the persecution of Christians in Syria and Iraq.
He is poised to be the first foreign dignitary to be invited to the sprawling palace, which was controversially built in parkland bequeathed to the Turkish people by Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish state.
The Pope will arrive in Ankara on November 28 and, says the official Vatican itinerary, will go straight to the palace for a welcome ceremony and a meeting with Erdogan.
The Turkish Chamber of Architects urged him to change his plans, saying if he visited the palace, which takes up 186,000sq m and is three times the size of the Palace of Versailles, he would "legitimise an illegal construction".
They have sent a letter to the Vatican calling on the Pope "not to honour an invitation to this building".
Association president Tezcan Karakus has requested a meeting with Vatican officials to discuss the issue.
The palace, which resembles the White House and is bigger than the Kremlin and Buckingham Palace, was built at a cost of 384 million ($768 million) - double the original estimate - and inaugurated two weeks ago. It has been condemned by many Turks as a waste of money and a symbol of Erdogan's increasingly autocratic rule.
Several court orders blocking the project - nicknamed Ak Saray or the White Palace - failed to halt construction. Environmentalists say the complex has ruined one of Ankara's few remaining green spaces.
"For many Turks this building is a symbol of greed and a hunger for absolute power," Yavuz Baydar, a commentator, told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
