PRESIDENT Tayyip Erdogan attended the first prayers at Turkey's Hagia Sophia on Friday since declaring the ancient monument a mosque, crowning his long campaign to place Islam at the heart of public life in the once fiercely secular republic. In 17 years in power, Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted AK Party have changed the face of modern Turkey, lifting a ban on wearing Muslim headscarves in public, championing religious education and building thousands of mosques across the country. While retaining Turkey's secular constitution, forged by the republic's founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Erdogan has transformed the country which Ataturk led nearly a…