 In 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks.The cathedral church of Hagia Sophia was seized and turned into a mosque, and the Sultan Mehmed II reassigned to the Greek Patriarch Gennadius Scholarius the church of the Holy Apostles, which thus temporarily became the new administrative centre of the Greek Orthodox Church.But the Church was in a dilapidated state, and the area around the church was inappropriate and soon settled by Turks.