Erdogan inaugurates mosque found in Istanbul's Taksim Square

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan inaugurated a great imposing new mosque found in Istanbul on Friday, fulfilling a decades-old target and stamping a spiritual identity about the landmark Taksim Square found in the center of Turkey's largest city.

The Taksim mosque and its own 30-metre high dome tower symbolically over a monument to the building blocks of the Turkish republic by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, whose staunchly secular legacy has been eroded by almost 2 decades of Mr Erdogan's rule.

After performing Fri prayers with a large number of worshippers, Mr Erdogan said completion of the mosque marked the culmination of a dream for Turks, and that the call to prayer will be heard there "before end of time".

Mr Erdogan told crowds beyond your mosque that before construction work started several years ago there was not a prayer room at the site. "Worshippers were seeking to pray here together with newspapers, literally like a hen-house," he said.

Building of the mosque commenced in February 2017 in a task championed by Mr Erdogan, a good devout Muslim, and his Islamist-rooted AK Party, but that was beset for many years by courtroom battles and open public debate.

Officials on Fri shared on Twitter a good video showing Erdogan in 1994, the year he became mayor of Istanbul, pointing from the most notable of a construction towards the region where he said he'd build the mosque, the actual spot where it at this time stands.

It is one of many construction jobs with which Mr Erdogan is leaving his tag on Turkey, including a huge hilltop mosque overlooking the Asian area of Istanbul. This past year he reconverted right into a mosque the city's Byzantine-era Haghia Sophia, for years and years the world's most significant church before being converted into a mosque and museum subsequently.

Supporters of the Taksim project said there were not enough Muslim spots of worship close to among the city’s busiest hubs. Opponents observed it as an effort to impose a spiritual tone on the square, which includes a cultural centre focused on Ataturk that was demolished and has been rebuilt.

The mosque complex, with two towering minarets, should be able to host as many as 4,000 worshippers and includes an exhibition hall, a library, carpark and soup kitchen, state-owned Anadolu news agency said.

Pro-government newspapers hailed the new mosque. Aksam's headline mocked critics who dread creeping religiosity: "It appears wonderful. A mosque was built-in Taksim and neither has sharia come, nor gets the republic collapsed," it said.

The inauguration coincided with the time when protests began merely 100 metres away in Gezi Park, before growing in to the huge demonstrations against Mr Erdogan's government that spread across Turkey in June 2013.

The Gezi protests started out on May 28, 2013 after demolition work began in a single corner of the park the prior evening, knocking downwards a wall plus some trees, drawing a small group of protesters who camped out at the site.

The anniversary of the protests is generally marked on May 31, when the protests escalated. In June of this year, thousands of folks took to the streets in demonstrations against an idea to build a reproduction Ottoman barracks on Gezi Recreation area.