It is the Pope’s first foreign trip.

Pope Leo XIV has visited Istanbul’s Blue Mosque at the start of an intense day of meetings and liturgies with Turkey’s religious leaders and a Mass for the country’s tiny Catholic community.

The head of Turkey’s Diyanet religious affairs directorate showed Leo the soaring tiled dome of the mosque and the Arabic inscriptions on its columns, as Leo nodded in understanding.

Speaking to reporters after the visit, the imam of the mosque, Asgin Tunca, said he had told the Pope that the mosque was “Allah’s house”.

“It’s not my house, not your house, (it’s the) house of Allah,” he said. He said he told Leo: “’If you want, you can worship here’, I said. But he said, ‘That’s OK’.”

He added: “He wanted to see the mosque, wanted to feel (the) atmosphere of the

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