Pope Leo XIV visited the Little Sisters of the Poor home for the elderly in Istanbul on Friday and thanked them for their hospitality, calling it their “gift.”

Elderly people in wheelchairs filled the front pews of the chapel.

The Pope stopped to greet and bless many of them.

The nursing home run by the Little Sisters of the Poor, is an order founded in France in the 1840s to care for poverty-stricken older people.

Pope Leo XIV is on his first foreign trip to Turkey and later Lebanon, marking an important Christian anniversary and bringing a message of peace to the region at a crucial time for efforts to end the war in Ukraine and ease Mideast tensions.