Turkey to cover Hagia Sophia's Christian icons during prayers
![](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2020/7/11/0d7d6ae7990a410c9e6cdc1ba9fcc3f9_18.jpg)
President Erdogan declared the building a mosque and said the first prayers would be held there within two weeks [Murad Sezer/Reuters]
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By 2018, official Chinese government statistics said there were 39 million Protestants in China. Scholars estimate that including house church worshipers pushes the real number to at least 80 million — almost 6% of China’s population, on par with Communist Party membership.