This month's museum pick...

Hagia Sophia

A structure holy to two religions is now a museum

As the 1,400-year-old antipathy between Christendom and Islam threatens to become inflamed, it’s helpful to remember that not every ancient friction between the two religious worlds has been left to fester or remain unresolved.

Perhaps the best example of that is the Hagia Sophia (“Holy Wisdom”), the magnificent domed church erected in Constantinople by the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian in 532 A.D. It remains the finest example of Byzantine architecture ever built and one of the great domes of human history.

But in 1453 A.D., as Constantinople finally fell to the Ottoman Turks, the Hagia Sophia was converted to a mosque. At first, its magnificent mosaics, depicting Jesus, the Holy Spirit and the saints, were allowed to remain, thanks to a tolerant Muslim ruler, but eventually were covered over in keeping with Islam’s ban on the graphic depiction of spiritual beings or themes that denied the unitarian nature of God.

Then, in the 1920s, in a development unmatched in Muslim history, the “Young Turks,” a group of rebellious army officers led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, established a secular state in which religion was to be held in a sphere separate from government, law and politics. One of the side effects of that sea change in Turkish life was Ataturk’s insistence in 1934 that the Hagia Sophia be closed as a mosque and turned into a museum.

It was perhaps the best that Christians could hold out for as the fate of their old church. As determinedly secular as Ataturk was, he knew that Turkey’s majority Muslim population would have never tolerated the restoration of the Hagia Sophia to status as a church.

Still, the secularization of the site itself allowed for the restoration of some of the Hagia Sophia’s ancient glories. Though much of the church’s exquisite Byzantine mosaics had been stripped off or plastered and painted over after the fall of Constantinople, enough remained to hint powerfully at former glories.

But the interior decorations, as magnificent as they are (and were), are not the biggest draws here. The structure itself is what amazes. Built in only five years time by a work force of 10,000 laborers, the Hagia Sophia covers almost two acres. The top of its shallow dome rises 185 feet 8 inches above the ground and spans a distance of almost 103 feet. To support such a great dome, the architects positioned four massive pillars in a square at the center of the church. But in a stroke of design genius, they pierced the dome at its base with 40 arched windows. Light pouring through these windows created a floating effect, as though the dome were barely touching the structure.

When the church was finished in 537 A.D., Justinian looked in awe at the building and proclaimed, “O, Solomon, I have surpassed thee.”

But the church could not surpass nature. Its great dome crumpled after a succession of earthquakes. It was rebuilt, but using new supports that were the first of many structural accretions that began to adhere to the building. There were also assaults by man: A group of Iconoclasts vandalized the interior mosaics in the name of cleansing the church of corruption, and Crusaders subsequently looted it then changed it from an Orthodox to a Roman Catholic church for six decades. After the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, and the church’s conversion to a mosque, the Ottoman leader Mohammed the Second signaled his intention that the church’s treasures were to remain untouched when he executed a soldier on the spot whom he saw prying bits of marble from one of the walls. Mohammed even refused to change the church’s name, simply rendering it in a Turkish-ized form as “Aya Sofya.”

It says even more for the Ottomans that they designed minarets so worthy of the original structure that many people mistakenly believe that they have existed, along with the church itself, since the 6^th century.

The structure remained reasonably intact until the 18^th century when a purist form of Islam came into vogue and the Hagia Sophia’s vast interior spaces were painted over or stripped of their facings. Ironically, the visual simplification produced by these whitewashes rendered the incredible interior lines and massings of the building that much easier to see.

Aside from the steady restoration of its interior by dedicated artists, it was Ataturk who produced this era’s most dramatic event at the Hagia Sophia. A man who cut quickly to the pith of things, Ataturk announced the change in the building’s status simply by walking up to the doors of the mosque and attaching a sign to them in his own hand. It read, “Museum closed for repairs.”   — Patrick Totty