Trifter

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The huge church of Hagia Sophia was packed, but above the solemn canting of the service came the boom of cannon. It was the night of Mat 28, 1453, and the people were praying for the deliverance of their Christian city of Constantinople from the besieging Islamic Ottoman Turks. The prayers were in vain.

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With the dawn came the news that the Turks had reached the city walls. Advancing through the narrow streets, they smashed their way into the church, killing many of those inside. Later that day the Turkish sultan Mehmet II entered the city in triumph. He looked with awe at the great church and, to symbolize his victory over this capital of Christendom, ordered that it be turned into a mosque. After 900 years the ancient church was to begin a new life dedicated to a new god.

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The church had been built in the sixth century A.D. by the Byzantine emperor Justinian. The Byzantine Empire, founded in A.D. 300, was the first great flowering of Christian civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire. Its capital city of Constantinople (today Istanbul), on the site of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium, commanded the Bosporus, the narrow strait linking the Black Sea with the Dardanelles and the Mediterranean. The city was the geographical and cultural bridge between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Its crowning glory was to be the Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom).

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Heaven on Earth: Suffused with light, the church – and, since 1453, mosque – of Hagia Sophia may be one of the most admired buildings in the world. At the sultan Mehmet IV remarked “It is the place where heavenly inspiration descends into the minds of the devout and which gives a foretaste even here below of the Garden of Eden.”

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Justinian appointed as architects Anthemius of Trallers and Isodurus of Miletus. Their design was a masterpiece of Byzantine construction. The central dome was more than 100 feet in diameter and, at its highest point, 184 feet above the ground. With 40 windows around the base, it seemed, in the words of one observer, to be suspended from above rather than supported from below.

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For the walls and floors an army of laborers and craftsmen brought marble and granite from quarries as far distance as the Atlantic coast of France. Temples and other places of antiquity were plundered for features of special interest or beauty. Dazzling and intricate mosaics covered large areas of the wall and ceiling. Gold, silver, precious stones, and ivory were lavished on the interior decoration. Some 40,000 pounds of silver were used in the sanctuary behind the altar alone.

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The work was finished in the short space of five years – A. D. 532 to 537 – at an estimated cost (by today’s values) of more than $180 million. Entering his church for the first time, Justinian cried, “O Solomon, I have surpassed thee!”

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“A spectacle of marvelous beauty,” agreed the Byzantine historian Procopius. For the scholar Michael of Thessalonica, it was “a tent of the heavens. Sunlight flashes with such brilliance that the gold seems to flow from the dome.”

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The catastrophe struck. Earthquakes shook the city, and a part of the dome collapsed. Undaunted, Justinian had it rebuilt. Six centuries later, in 1204, Christian Crusaders on their way to the Holy Land to fight the infidel Turks attacked Constantinople and robbed the church and many of its treasures. In Hagia Sophia, although restored and still impressive, was a shadow of its former self.

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In second age of splendor, as a mosque, was about to begin. The sultan Mehmet II repaired and strengthened the building and added a tall minaret from which, according to Islamic custom, the muezzins could call the faithful to prayer. The sultan’s successors added further minarets; furnished the interior with basins of white marble, alabaster urns, and a marble throne, and suspended from the dome six large green medallions bearing the names of Allah, the prophet Muhammad, and other founders of the faith.

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For another five centuries the mosque served the faithful of Islam. But I 1935, twelve years after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of a secular Turkish state, the mosque was converted into museum. In the process may of the mosaics were restored to their former glory.

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Today the edifice of Hagia Sophia, its dome, and minarets still tower above the waterfront of waterfront of Istanbul – a monument to two great religious and more than 1,400 years of history.