Hagia Sophia

About

Hagia Sophia rises on the old acropolis of Constantinople above the Golden Horn, its great dome a defining feature of the Istanbul skyline. The present building was commissioned by the emperor Justinian I and completed in 537, designed by the geometers Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus. For nearly a millennium it was the largest enclosed interior in the world.

The building's name, Hagia Sophia, means the Holy Wisdom, the divine Sophia by which God is praised in Eastern Christian tradition. From its dedication in 360 until 1453 it served as the cathedral of Constantinople and the spiritual heart of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, with a brief interruption under the Latin Empire between 1204 and 1261.

After the Ottoman conquest of 1453 the building was converted to a mosque by Sultan Mehmed II, with the addition of a mihrab oriented towards Mecca, a minbar, and the four minarets that frame it today. As the principal mosque of Istanbul, it shaped the great Ottoman mosques of Sinan and his successors. In 1935 the Turkish republic reopened it as a museum, and in 2020 it was returned to the status of a working mosque.

Within, devotees and visitors encounter the great calligraphic medallions of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs, the soaring dome, and, partially visible, the Byzantine mosaics that have been recovered through careful conservation.

History

The first church on the site was completed under Constantius II in 360. This wooden-roofed Megale Ekklesia, the Great Church, was destroyed in fire and rebuilt under Theodosius II, only to be destroyed again in the Nika riots of 532. Justinian's domed basilica, raised in just five years from 532 to 537, replaced these earlier buildings.

In 1054 the papal legate Humbert of Silva Candida delivered the bull of excommunication against the Patriarch Michael Cerularius here, an act remembered as the beginning of the East-West Schism. The building was sacked in 1204 by the Fourth Crusade and held as a Catholic cathedral until 1261, when it was restored to Orthodox worship.

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 the building became the chief mosque of Istanbul under Sultan Mehmed II. It was opened as a museum in 1935 by decree of the Turkish republic, and in July 2020 a decision of the Council of State returned it to mosque status.

Significance

Hagia Sophia is among the most spiritually charged buildings in the world, holding in its fabric the long Christian devotion of Byzantine Constantinople and the Islamic prayer of Ottoman and modern Istanbul. For Eastern Orthodox Christians it remains the mother church of their tradition. For Sunni Muslims today it is a working Friday mosque. For all who enter, the dome lifts the eye towards what early Byzantine theologians called the Wisdom that surrounds and orders all things.