Hagia Sophia, Istanbul

 

Image: https://www.trtworld.com/turkey/hagia-sophia-will-be-called-a-mosque-erdogan-25317


    Hagia Sophia was built in the year 537 as the patriarchal cathedral for the capital of Constantinople, and was the largest Christian church of the eastern Roman empire. 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. It was also an important site of Muslim worship after Sultan Mehmed II conquered Constantinople in 1453 and turned the cathedral into a mosque.

There are few buildings throughout history that change the way we look at architecture, and the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, is one of those buildings. The land of which this building resides, was previously inhabited by the Roman Empire, and before that the Greeks. This product of the 6th century is recognized worldwide for its ambition, scale, and most importantly its design. Instead of them engineering a building with the common basilica structures that we saw the romans become very comfortable with, the buildings dome was created with a centrally planned space with a basilica space. Basilica meaning more long and narrow design, centrally planned based more on a circle/ cylinder design. The dome of the Hagia Sophia is more than 180 feet in the air! Throughout the building the walls are covered with marble, and the floor is made with huge paving stones that produce a pattern of waves to the eye. An enormous amount of money was payed to have the amount of marble for the cathedral imported from across his empire. There were only the most beautiful and elegant slabs of marble in the church, and those slabs are embedded in the walls throughout the building. All surface area that isn’t colored stone, were covered with gold mosaic that has decretive patterns with acanthus leaves, palm leaves and crosses. Some say it lacks some of the classis roman architecture and that’s because it introduces the new Christian-Roman architecture for the new Christian people. When important rites took place in this church, with the presence of the emperor and the patriarch, it was an expression of faith and unity of heaven on earth.

 

·         Dr. Nancy Ross, "Introduction to the Middle Ages," in Smarthistory, August 8, 2015, accessed September 29, 2020, https://smarthistory.org/introduction-to-the-middle-ages/.

“Hagia Sophia, Istanbul (Video) | Byzantine.” Khan Academy, Khan Academy, www.khanacademy.org/humanities/medieval-world/byzantine1/constantinople-east/v/hagia-sophia-istanbul

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