Hagia Sophia

• 1. Introduction

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  Hagia Sophia in Istanbul once left a group of foreign visitors unable to say where they were standing. Early in the 10th century, the pagan ruler of the Kievan Rus' sent emissaries to study the faiths of his neighbors. They looked into Judaism, Islam, and both Roman and Orthodox Christianity. After they visited Hagia Sophia, they reported back: "We were led into a place where they serve their God, and we did not know where we were, in heaven or on earth."

  The building that overwhelmed them was a cathedral at the time. Over the centuries it became a mosque, then a museum, and then a mosque again. This documentary asks how builders in the 6th century raised such a space, and why it outlasted fires, earthquakes, and sieges. It also asks why a single building can draw both condemnation and celebration from governments around the world.

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• 2. Three Fires

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  Magna Ecclesia, the Great Church, was the name given to the first building on the site, because it dwarfed the other churches of its day in the city. According to the Chronicon Paschale, the Arian bishop Eudoxius of Antioch consecrated it on the 15th of February 360, under the emperor Constantius II. Who actually built it is unclear. A tradition no older than the 7th or 8th century credits his father, Constantine the Great. But Constantine died in 337, and the bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, linked to an earlier building, served only in 339-341. So Constantius seems the likelier founder.

  Little is known about how the first church looked. Sources mention a timber roof, curtains, columns, and an entrance facing west, and one description compares its shape to a Roman circus. Excavations beneath the later western entrance found that it stood on a road about 8 m wide. Early accounts say a pagan temple stood there first, but no artefacts confirm it. A later account says a woman named Anna donated the land in return for the right to be buried there.

  On the 20th of June 404, the patriarch John Chrysostom was sent into exile after clashing with Aelia Eudoxia, wife of the emperor Arcadius. Riots followed, and the church was largely burnt down. Palladius noted that the round treasury building beside it, the skeuophylakion, survived the flames.

  Theodosius II inaugurated a second church on the 10th of October 415, and its architect was Rufinus. Surviving fragments show carved decoration on the outside and colorful mosaics on the floor just inside the portico. One frieze showed 12 lambs standing for the 12 apostles. The German archaeologist Alfons Maria Schneider dug on the western side in the mid-1930s and published his final report in 1941. He stopped digging for fear of harming the standing building, and some trenches still expose the Theodosian foundations.

  Around 428, the patriarch Nestorius refused the Augusta Pulcheria, sister of Theodosius II, access to the sanctuary. She claimed entry because her position matched that of the Virgin Mary. With Pope Celestine I and Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria, she had Nestorius condemned at the ecumenical council and exiled.

  The Nika Revolt, which began in the Hippodrome, ended the second church. A fire in that tumult burned it to the ground on the 13th and the 14th of January 532. The court historian Procopius wrote that the rioters had taken up arms against God as well as the emperor. He added that God allowed the burning because he foresaw the beauty the shrine would take on.

  One piece of the 5th-century complex still stands today. It is the rotunda that replaced the old skeuophylakion, and the Vakıflar restored it in 2014.

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• 3. Justinian's Gamble

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  On the 23rd of February 532, only weeks after the second church burned, the emperor Justinian I launched a third and entirely different basilica. He chose two designers. Anthemius of Tralles was a mathematician, and Isidore of Miletus was a geometer and engineer. The first funds came from Phocas, the praetorian prefect, who supplied 4,000 Roman pounds of gold. Phocas was dismissed in October 532. John the Lydian said he raised the money by moral means, while Evagrius Scholasticus later claimed it was obtained unjustly.

  Anthony Kaldellis points out that both architects were linked to the school of the pagan philosopher Ammonius of Alexandria. That raises a striking possibility. They, and John the Lydian, may have seen the church as a great temple to a supreme Neoplatonist deity who revealed himself through light and the sun. John described the building as the sacred precinct of the Great God.

  The finished exterior was covered in marble veneer, and gilding on some parts would have made it shimmer. Surviving fragments and attachment points on the western face show where panels once hung. That glow would have made the church far easier to see from the sea. Inside, the surfaces were sheathed in polychrome marbles, green and white with purple porphyry, along with gold mosaics.

  Procopius described the construction in his work On Buildings. Columns and other marble elements came from across the Mediterranean. Scholars once thought the columns were spoils from cities such as Rome and Ephesus. In fact they were made for this building, yet they vary in size. More than ten thousand people worked on the project.

  The bronze-plated Column of Justinian, topped by an equestrian statue of the emperor, dominated the Augustaeum outside. This open square linked the church to the Great Palace through the Chalke Gate. Also facing the square were the Baths of Zeuxippus and a civic basilica built above the vast Basilica Cistern. On the opposite side of the church stood the older cathedral, Hagia Irene.

  Justinian and Patriarch Menas inaugurated the building on the 27th of December 537, five years and ten months after work began. Procopius claimed that Christians shown a model of the new church before the fire would have prayed for the old one to burn. The emperor reportedly declared: "Solomon, I have surpassed thee." The basilica housed the seat of the Patriarchate and hosted imperial ceremonies such as coronations. It also offered sanctuary to criminals, although writers disagreed about whether Justinian meant murderers to qualify.

  Within two decades, earthquakes would crack the new dome.

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• 4. Geometry and Collapse

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  Earthquakes in 553 and 557 cracked the main dome and the eastern semi-dome. Another quake in 558 brought the eastern semi-dome down, wrecking the ambon, altar, and ciborium. The cause lay in the design. The dome was too flat, and its enormous load deformed the piers beneath it. Justinian ordered an immediate restoration and gave it to Isidorus the Younger, who used lighter materials. The whole vault came down and went back up 20 Byzantine feet, or 6.25 m, higher than before. That gave the interior its present height of 55.6 m. Isidorus also changed the design to a ribbed dome on pendentives.

  Around 560, on Justinian's orders, eight Corinthian columns were dismantled at Baalbek in Lebanon and shipped to Constantinople. The work finished in 562. On the 24th of December 562, Patriarch Eutychius presided over the re-dedication. For the occasion, the poet Paul the Silentiary composed an ekphrasis, a long visual poem describing the building.

  The rebuilt dome rests on an arcade of 40 arched windows. The repairs left it slightly elliptical, with a diameter between 31.24 and 30.86 m. At the western entrance and the eastern liturgical end, arched openings extend into half domes of the same diameter as the main dome. These sit on smaller semi-domed recesses. Together they form a cascade of domes across a clear span of 76.2 m.

  Two scholars, Svenshon and Stiffel, suggest that the architects drew on Hero of Alexandria, a Hellenistic mathematician of the 1st century AD. Hero's values for vaults rely on the side-and-diagonal number progression. In it, 12 gives the side of a square and 17 its diagonal, values already used in Babylonian cuneiform texts. The great central square at Hagia Sophia has sides of about 31 m, long assumed to equal 100 Byzantine feet. Svenshon proposes 99 feet instead. That fits the progression as 70 over 99, and it yields a diagonal of 140, a manageable figure for a huge dome.

  Brick and mortar tell a quieter story. The mortar joints are 1.5 times as wide as the bricks. They contain sand mixed with minute ceramic pieces, a recipe also used in Roman concrete. Builders added a considerable amount of iron as cramps and ties.

  The marble floor dates from the 6th century. After the collapse, the debris was left in place and a new floor was laid over it. From then on the floor became part of the liturgy, with different-coloured stones and marbles marking significant spaces. Most of it is Proconnesian marble from Marmara Island, the main white marble of Constantinople's monuments. Thessalian verd antique appears too.

  The damage kept coming. A great fire in 859 and an earthquake in 869 hurt the basilica, and the quake collapsed one of the half-domes. Emperor Basil I ordered repairs to the tympanas, arches, and vaults. After an earthquake in 989 collapsed the western dome arch, Emperor Basil II asked the Armenian architect Trdat, creator of the Cathedral of Ani, to direct the work. Trdat rebuilt the arch and the western side of the dome with 15 ribs. Repairs took six years, and the church reopened on the 13th of May 994. New decoration included four immense paintings of cherubs and a new Christ on the dome. On the apse went a Virgin holding Jesus between the apostles Peter and Paul, an image that would meet a very different fate in 2020.

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• 5. Rituals and Rifts

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  The emperor Constantine VII set down a detailed account of imperial and patriarchal ceremonies in Hagia Sophia in his Book of Ceremonies, De Ceremoniis. The church was also a place where emperors faced pressure from outside. During the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628, the emperor Heraclius ordered liturgical vessels melted down. Theophanes the Confessor says they became gold and silver coins, and a tribute was paid to the Avars. In 623 the Avars attacked areas outside Constantinople, and the garment relic of Mary was moved into Hagia Sophia from its shrine at Blachernae. On the 14th of May 626, the Scholae Palatinae, an elite body of soldiers, protested inside the church against a planned rise in bread prices.

  In 726, the emperor Leo the Isaurian issued edicts against the veneration of images and ordered the army to destroy icons. All religious pictures and statues were removed from Hagia Sophia. Empress Irene brought a pause from 797 to 802, but the iconoclasts returned. The emperor Theophilus later installed two-winged bronze doors bearing his monograms at the southern entrance.

  Olga of Kiev, widow of Igor I, visited Constantinople in the 940s or 950s, probably around 954 or 955. She ruled as regent for her infant son Sviatoslav I, and Constantine VII received her as queen of the Rus'. She was probably baptized in the baptistery of Hagia Sophia, taking the name of the reigning augusta, Helena Lecapena. Constantine's own account of the visit never mentions a baptism. An early 14th-century source dates the founding of Saint Sophia's in Kiev to about 952, and the name probably honors her baptism.

  In 1054, Humbert of Silva Candida, envoy of Pope Leo IX, delivered the excommunication of Patriarch Michael I Cerularius in the church. That act is considered the start of the East-West Schism.

  In 1181, Maria Comnena, daughter of the emperor Manuel I, and her husband, the caesar Renier of Montferrat, fled into Hagia Sophia. They were locked in a feud with the empress Maria of Antioch, regent for her son Alexius II Comnenus. With the patriarch's support, they occupied the cathedral. The historian Niketas Choniates wrote that they "transformed the sacred courtyard into a military camp." Fighting spread across the Augustaion and the Milion, and defenders fell back to the exonarthex of the church itself. The patriarch feared that enemy troops would trample the holy floor with unholy feet. After a successful sally by Renier and his knights, Maria asked for a truce, and an amnesty was negotiated. Choniates compared the preservation of the cathedral to the efforts of the emperor Titus to spare the Second Temple at Jerusalem.

  Choniates also reports that in 1182 a white hawk wearing jesses flew from the east to Hagia Sophia. It then flew three times between the Thōmaitēs basilica and the Palace of the Kathisma, where new emperors were acclaimed. People took it as an omen that the reign of Andronicus I Comnenus would end.

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• 6. Sack and Fall

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  In 1203, the emperors Isaac II Angelus and Alexius IV Angelus stripped Hagia Sophia of its gold ornaments and silver oil-lamps. They needed to pay the Crusaders who had ousted Alexius III Angelus and helped Isaac return to the throne, according to Choniates. The following year, in the Sack of Constantinople, the church was ransacked and desecrated. Choniates did not witness it in person, but he wrote that the remaining metal ornaments were stripped away and the altar smashed. He describes a "woman laden with sins" who sang and danced on the synthronon. Mules and donkeys carried off the spoils, and one slipped on the marble floor and was disembowelled, further fouling the sanctuary. Ali ibn al-Athir, probably relying on a Christian source, reported that Crusaders massacred clerics who had surrendered.

  Baldwin I of Constantinople was crowned emperor in Hagia Sophia on the 16th of May 1204, in a ceremony that closely followed Byzantine practice. Enrico Dandolo, the doge of Venice who led the Fourth Crusade, was buried in the church, probably in the upper eastern gallery. A cenotaph marker placed by an Italian restoration team in the 19th century is often mistaken for a medieval relic. The Ottomans destroyed the original tomb when they converted the church into a mosque.

  When Michael VIII Palaeologus recovered the city for the Empire of Nicaea in 1261, he found the church dilapidated. In 1317, the emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus ordered four new buttresses for the eastern and northern parts. He paid for them with the inheritance of his late wife, Irene of Montferrat. The earthquake of October 1344 opened new cracks in the dome, and on the 19th of May 1346 several parts of the building collapsed. The architects Astras and Peralta began repairs in 1354.

  On the 12th of December 1452, Isidore of Kiev proclaimed in the church the union of the western Catholic and eastern Orthodox churches, as decided at the Council of Florence. The Byzantines disliked the arrangement and had already expelled Patriarch Gregory III for backing it. According to the historian Doukas, anti-union worshippers began avoiding the cathedral, calling it a haunt of demons. Instead they gathered at nearby venues to drink toasts to the Hodegetria icon.

  A hagiography of Andrew the Fool had imagined the end of the city long before. In it, a questioner says that some believe the Great Church will hang suspended in the air while Constantinople sinks. The saint replies that no one will need it, since God does not dwell in temples made with hands.

  On the 21st of May 1453, in the last days of the siege, Nestor Iskander's Tale reports a startling sight. The sky lit up, and a great flame circled the neck of the church for a long time before rising into heaven. Many took it as the Holy Spirit abandoning the city.

  Even so, the Great Church filled with people once the walls were breached. Doukas explains that for years, false prophets had predicted that the Turks would enter and massacre the Romans as far as the Column of Constantine. There an angel would hand a sword to a poor, humble man and tell him to avenge the Lord's people. The Turks would then be driven back to a place called the Lone Tree, near the borders of Persia. The crowd packed the upper floors, the ground floor, and the courtyards, and they closed the gates. Women, children, the elderly, the sick, and the wounded were among them.

  Invaders battered down the doors and stormed inside, believing the church held the greatest treasures in the city. Those sheltering there became spoils of war. Most of the elderly and the sick or injured were killed, while the rest, mainly teenage males and young boys, were chained and sold into slavery. Custom allowed Sultan Mehmed II three days of pillage. Yet by the end of the first day he ordered the looting to stop, because touring the city filled him with profound sadness.

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• 7. Mosque to Museum

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  Constantinople fell to the Ottomans on the 29th of May 1453, and Mehmed II ordered Hagia Sophia converted into a mosque at once. One of the ulama climbed onto the ambo and recited the shahada, marking the change. The church's priests kept performing Christian rites until they were compelled to stop. Mehmed is reported to have taken a sword to a soldier who tried to pry up a slab of the Proconnesian marble floor. He attended the first Friday prayer there on the 1st of June 1453. Western visitors such as Pero Tafur and Cristoforo Buondelmonti had described a dilapidated church with doors fallen from their hinges, so Mehmed ordered a renovation.

  Aya Sofya became the first imperial mosque of Istanbul. From 1478, income from 2,360 shops, 1,300 houses, 4 caravanserais, 30 boza shops, and 23 shops selling sheep heads and trotters supported its foundation. Imperial charters of 1520 and 1547 added shops in the Grand Bazaar and other markets.

  A small minaret rose at the southwest corner before 1481, and Bayezid II built another at the northeast corner. One collapsed in the earthquake of 1509. Around the middle of the 16th century, two diagonally opposite minarets at the east and west corners replaced them. In 1498, Bernardo Bonsignori was the last Western visitor to report seeing the ancient Justinianic floor. Soon after, carpet covered it, and it stayed hidden until the 19th century.

  Suleiman the Magnificent brought two colossal candlesticks from his conquest of Hungary and set them on either side of the mihrab. During his reign, the mosaics above the narthex and imperial gates, showing Jesus, Mary, and Byzantine emperors, were covered with whitewash and plaster.

  Under Selim II, the building began to show fatigue. The architect Mimar Sinan, who was also an earthquake engineer, strengthened it with supports added to the exterior. In 1576-1577 he built two more large minarets at the western end, a sultan's lodge, and the tomb of Selim II to the southeast. A golden crescent was mounted on the dome, and a respect zone 35 arşın wide, about 24 m, was imposed around the building. Every house within the perimeter was demolished. The tomb became the resting place of 43 Ottoman princes.

  Murad III imported two large alabaster Hellenistic urns from Pergamon and placed them on two sides of the nave. In 1594, Davud Ağa built the tomb of Murad III, where the sultan and Safiye Sultan are buried. The octagonal mausoleum of Mehmed III followed in 1608. His son Mustafa I converted the baptistery into his own tomb.

  In 1717, under Ahmed III, crumbling plaster in the interior was renewed. This indirectly preserved many mosaics that mosque workers would otherwise have destroyed. It had been usual to sell the mosaics' tesserae to visitors, who believed them to be talismans. In 1739, Mahmud I ordered a restoration and added a medrese, a soup kitchen, and a library. A fountain for ritual ablutions followed in 1740, turning the building into a social complex.

  Sultan Abdulmejid I ordered the next restoration, carried out in 1847-1849 by eight hundred workers under the Swiss-Italian architect brothers Gaspare and Giuseppe Fossati. They bound the dome with an iron chain, strengthened the vaults, and straightened the columns. Mosaics in the upper gallery were exposed and cleaned, although many were covered again for protection. Eight huge medallions designed by the calligrapher Kazasker Mustafa Izzet Efendi were hung from the cornice. They bear the names of Allah, Muhammad, the first four caliphs, and Muhammad's two grandsons. The exterior stucco was tinted yellow and red in these restorations. The mosque reopened with a ceremony on the 13th of July 1849, and a set of lithographs of the work was published in London in 1852.

  After the First World War, British, French, Italian, and Greek forces occupied Constantinople. The Greek Orthodox military priest Eleftherios Noufrakis performed a Divine Liturgy in Hagia Sophia, the only one since 1453. Greek 500 drachma banknotes issued in 1923 featured the building.

  The whitewash over the mosaics was removed in 1930 under the Turkish Republic. The building closed to the public in 1931, and in 1935 the first Turkish president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, reopened it as a museum. During the Second World War, the minarets housed MG 08 machine guns. Removing the carpet and the mortar beneath revealed marble floor decorations such as the omphalion. Neglect then took its toll. The World Monuments Fund placed the building on its 1996 and 1998 Watch Lists. The copper roof had cracked, so water leaked onto fragile frescoes and mosaics, and rising ground water raised the humidity inside.

  Grants from 1997 to 2002 funded repair of the roof and the preservation of the dome's interior, with the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism taking part. The second phase trained young Turkish conservators in the care of mosaics. The project was complete by 2006, though many areas still needed work. In 2014, almost 3.3 million visitors came, making it the second most visited museum in Turkey.

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• 8. The 2020 Conversion

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  Worship in the museum was officially prohibited, yet exceptions appeared. In 1991, the Turkish government allowed a pavilion in the complex to serve as a prayer room. Since 2013, two of the minarets had regularly sounded the call to prayer. In November 2013, deputy prime minister Bülent Arınç demanded that the building become a mosque again. On the 1st of July 2016, Muslim prayers were held there for the first time in 85 years. In October 2016, the Directorate of Religious Affairs appointed its first imam in 81 years, Önder Soy. A lawsuit filed that November by a Turkish NGO failed, and the court said it should stay a monument museum.

  President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pushed the idea further. On the 31st of March 2018, he recited the first verse of the Quran in the building, dedicating the prayer to the souls of those who left the work as an inheritance. In March 2019 he said turning it into a museum had been a "very big mistake." As a UNESCO World Heritage site, a change in status would need approval from the World Heritage Committee. In May 2020, the 567th anniversary of the conquest was marked with an Islamic prayer inside, and Greece condemned it. On the 25th of June, John Haldon, president of the International Association of Byzantine Studies, wrote an open letter asking Erdoğan to consider the value of keeping it a museum.

  On the 10th of July 2020, the Council of State annulled the decision that had created the museum. It ruled that the building could be used for nothing but a mosque and that it was property of the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Han Foundation. Its reasoning was that Mehmed II had set the property aside as a mosque for the public. Erdoğan signed a decree reverting its status, and the call to prayer sounded from the minarets soon after the announcement. A presidential spokesperson said it would be a working mosque open to anyone, like the churches Sacré-Cœur and Notre-Dame in Paris, and that Christian icons would be protected.

  A turquoise carpet was laid on the 22nd of July. The first Friday prayers took place on the 24th of July, the 97th anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne. The mosaics of the Virgin and Child in the apse were covered with white drapes. Ali Erbaş, head of the Directorate of Religious Affairs, said in his sermon that Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror had dedicated the building to believers to remain a mosque until the Day of Resurrection. Erdoğan attended, and many worshippers prayed outside. At one point, dozens broke through the security cordon.

  On the 12th of July, Pope Francis told the crowd in St Peter's Square: "My thoughts go to Istanbul. I think of Santa Sofia and I am very pained." UNESCO said it "deeply regretted" a decision made without prior discussion. Patriarch Bartholomew I said the conversion would disappoint millions of Christians. Patriarch Kirill of Moscow said a threat to Hagia Sophia was a threat to all of Christian civilization. The twenty-seven foreign ministers of the European Union condemned the decision at a meeting on the 13th of July. Greek culture minister Lina Mendoni called it an "open provocation to the civilised world." The novelist Orhan Pamuk noted that Atatürk had made the building a museum as a sign of modern secularism. Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu supported the conversion "as long as it benefits Turkey."

  Support came from many directions. A spokesman for Iran's foreign ministry called it an internal affair of Turkey. Russia's deputy foreign minister Sergei Vershinin said the same. A Hamas spokesman called it "a proud moment for all Muslims." In Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, there were prayers and celebrations, topped by the sacrifice of a camel. Egypt's grand mufti Shawki Allam ruled the conversion impermissible. Sahak II Mashalian, the Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople, endorsed it: "I believe that believers' praying suits better the spirit of the temple instead of curious tourists running around to take pictures."

  In July 2021, UNESCO asked for an updated report on the state of conservation and expressed grave concern. Turkey answered that the changes had no negative impact and called the criticism biased and political. Today most of the ground floor is reserved for worshippers, women must wear headscarves, and the upper galleries reopened to visitors in 2024. Since the 15th of January 2024, foreign nationals have paid an entrance fee.

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