HAGIA SOPHIA – CHANGING WITH CHANGING TIMES

Istanbul or Constantinople, as it was once called, is a major city in Turkey that straddles Europe and Asia across the Bosphorus Strait. Its Old City reflects cultural influences of the many empires that once ruled here. In the Sultanahmet district, the open-air, Roman-era Hippodrome was for centuries the site of chariot races, and Egyptian obelisks also remain. The iconic Byzantine Hagia Sophia features a soaring 6th-century dome and rare Christian mosaics. The mystical city Istanbul hosted many civilizations since centuries, of which Byzantium and Ottoman Empires were both the most famous ones. The city today carries the characteristics of these two different cultures and surely Hagia Sophia is a perfect synthesis where one can observe both Ottoman and Byzantium effects under one great dome. It is one of the magnificent landmarks in Istanbul’s historical centre.

Some cities just have travel in their blood. You can feel their spirit of adventure pulsing through invisible veins in the same way cars fill their streets and people pack their pavements and life roils and bubbles around you. Istanbul has travel in its soul. The world has come to Istanbul because Istanbul really was, once, the world. This coastal stronghold has a history as tattered and colourful as any other ancient city would die for. There's still an edge to the city too, as there is in any border post, particularly one that marks the end of one continent and the beginning of another; the end of one world and the start of a whole new universe. But that's part of Istanbul's charm, part of the feeling that the whole world is here, and that it's welcome to make its mark.

The Hagia Sophia, is part of the UNESCO World Heritage site in Istanbul. Its name translates to “holy wisdom”, was built by the East Roman Empire in the 6th century. It was then converted into a mosque and fortified following Mehmed the Conqueror’s rule in 1453. One can admire this architectural wonder’s marbled structure, as well as its dreamy interiors. It features calligraphic panels and bronze lamps, and most of its walls are covered in beautiful mosaics made of gold, silver, and colourful stones. 

Hagia Sophia is the former Greek Orthodox Christian patriarchal cathedral, later an Ottoman imperial mosque and then a museum (Ayasofya Müzesi) and now, by a court intervention and a hyper-nationalist government, again a mosque. It is said to be built on a site which originally had a Pagan temple dedicated to Venus and Apollo. It is famous for its large dome. Built in AD 537, during the reign of Justinian, it was the world's largest building and an engineering marvel of its time. The unfortunate decision of Turkey’s top administrative court to cancel Hagia Sophia’s museum status and reconvert it into a mosque has rightly been criticised all over the world.

The Eastern Orthodox Church, the sect to which Hagia Sophia originally belonged, has just 0.001 per cent share in the population of Turkey today. This is due to the Treaty of Lausanne signed in 1923, which ended Ottoman rule and led to an exchange of population between empires. It resulted in almost one million non-Muslims going to Greece, Armenia, and Muslims from these states settling in Turkey.

The original church to occupy the site (called the Megale Ekklesia or Great Church) was commissioned by Emperor Constantine I in 325, razed during a riot in 404, later rebuilt, and destroyed once again in 532.  The building that exists today, some historians believe that old pagan temples were destructed and the remains of them were used in new Christian structures. The upsided Medusa heads in Basilica Cistern are believed to have been taken from the closed Pagan temples.

Hagia Sophia was constructed by Emperor Justinian I between 532 and 537 AD and remained an Orthodox Christian church for almost 900 years. Although, in the middle, it was converted into a Roman Catholic Cathedral during the fourth Crusade of 1204, but it was converted into an Eastern Orthodox Church again when the Byzantine empire made a comeback in 1261. For almost a millennium after its construction, it was the largest cathedral in all of Christendom. It served as a center of religious, political, and artistic life for the Byzantine world and has provided us with many useful scholarly insights into the period.

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Ottoman Sultan Mehmat II converted it into a mosque by purchasing it and creating a waqf. Bringing the structure in line with the Islamic tradition called for a series of other modifications, not all of which were undertaken during the reign of Mehmed II. The Alter, the bells, sacrificial vessels and iconostasis were all removed when the church was converted into a mosque. Many Christian mosaics and frescoes were plastered over when Hagia Sophia converted in to a mosque by Sultan Mehmed II. There are 4 seraphim mosaics ( God's protector angels with 6 wings) on the 4 pendentives that carry the dome. The 4 seraphims' faces were covered with 6-7 layers of plaster for almost 160 years during the sovereignty of Ottomans. The last person who saw the faces of the Seraphims was the Swiss architect Gaspare Fossati while he was holding the restoration at Hagia Sophia in 1840s. With a 10 day hard work, experts managed to take off the 7 layers of plasters and reveal the face of one of the seraphims.

During Mehmed’s rule, a wooden minaret (no longer standing), a mihrab (niche positioned in the direction of Mecca), aminbar (pulpit), a madrasah (school), and a grand chandelier were added. Later modifications included the construction of more minarets, the whitewashing of Christian mosaics, and the addition of structural supports. There were two more Churches accepted as Church of Holy Wisdom, but only Hagia Sophia was not destroyed by Ottoman rulers.

Hagia Sophia remained a mosque until 1931 when it was closed. It was reopened as a museum in 1934 in a decision by the Turkish Republic’s first president Mustafa Kemal Ataturk cabinet. It was ‘secularised’ and opened to all with an entry fee. When Hagia Sophia was a church 50 foot silver iconostasis was decorating inside, later it was on display in the museum. Now, Turkey’s Council of State has ruled that this conversion to a museum was illegal.

Hagia Sophia is not, in fact, the only name that the structure has gone by. Even now it’s known by several different monikers: Ayasofya in Turkish, Sancta Sophia in Latin, and Holy Wisdom or Divine Wisdom in English (alternate English translations of the Greek words Hagia Sophia). The name Hagia Sophia didn’t come about until around 430 CE.

The Hagia Sophia combines a longitudinal basilica and a centralized building in a wholly original manner, with a huge 32-metre (105-foot) main dome supported on pendentives and two semidomes, one on either side of the longitudinal axis. In plan the building is almost square. There are three aisles separated by columns with galleries above and great marble piers rising up to support the dome. The walls above the galleries and the base of the dome are pierced by windows, which in the glare of daylight obscure the supports and give the impression that the canopy floats on air. Only Patheon in Rome has slightly bigger dome than the dome of Hagia Sophia in the world.  Hagia Sophia has 40 windows in the area where worshipers sit and it’s known as famous reflecting mystical light. The Blue Mosque and Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul were designed with an inspiration of Hagia Sophia.

Hagia Sophia become one of the leading artistic and architectural monuments in the world therefore attracting not only the tourists but also the historians, the architects, the artists and the archaeologists. Art historians consider the building’s beautiful mosaics to be the main source of knowledge about the state of mosaic art in the time shortly after the end of the Iconoclastic Controversy in the 8th and 9th centuries. Its architecture, its history, its grand magnificence and its functionality all makes it a prized world heritage site, too precious to be harmed by religious fundamentalism.