Hagia Sophia Millenary Mille-feuille

Successively church, mosque then museum, there is nothing static about the history of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. On the decision of the Turkish president Erdoğan, it has just been converted into a mosque once again. On this occasion Christophe Catsaros returns to this eclectic building, which has always been characterised by its openness. “The eyes cannot stop for long and consider one place without being immediately attracted by the beauty of others. Viewers are transported, in a continual ferment that stems from doubting what they should admire most.Their minds follow the movement of their eyes, and after turning in all directions they remain in a kind of suspension. Enough on this subject.”

Description of Hagia Sophia Procopius of Caesarea, ca. 550 (1) Procopius of Caesarea wasn’t an architect, and his work The Buildings, a panegyric to the great building sites of the emperor Justinian, doesn’t have the substance of an architectural treatise. However, his glowing description of Hagia Sophia, shortly after its inauguration, reflects a quality that would characterise this emblematic building for centuries to come: its eclecticism. Still today, how can one find peace faced with such a rapture of the senses? How can one achieve the tranquility to pray in this skillfully orchestrated chiaroscuro, where Byzantine mosaics, cherubs and the names of prophets carefully calligraphed, all coexist, ordered by the randomness of the various archaeological missions that have followed one another? In order to transform Hagia Sophia into a place of worship, curtains, carpets and screens had to be installed to create an atmosphere conducive to prayer. In spite of the efforts made, the highly eclectic character of the place remains; it is even, in certain respects, reinforced by the believer’s necessarily vain quest for a clear message in this high place of cultural polysemy. Long before the father of the Turkish nation, Atatürk, ordered, in a progressive, secular spirit, the transformation (2) of the mosque into a museum, Hagia Sophia was already the eclectic sum of the two main civilizations that have governed the city since its creation. This is how it was perceived in the 16th and 17th centuries, when travelling to Constantinople took several weeks and was the most advanced stage of the Grand Tour, or again in the 19th century, when the Fossati brothers, commissioned to restore and consolidate the building, evened up the minarets and revealed the mosaics in the gallery in passing. The decision of President Erdoğan to reconvert Hagia Sophia into a mosque is part of a series of symbolic and political, constructive and archaeological transformations which, since the 6th century AD, have forged the identity of the monument. Choosing a noun for Hagia Sophia—basilica, mosque or museum—can only be reductive, since the identity of the place lies precisely in its ability to switch from one to the other, i.e. to be resilient and adaptable.

CRACK IN THE DOME It is said that the initial act of transforming Hagia Sophia into a mosque in 1453, an act which preserved its name, was accompanied by an account of symbolic appropriation which raised the repairs to the rank of a foundation. The birth of Mohammed corresponded, more or less, with the first destruction of the basilica’s dome, following a series of earthquakes in 553, 557 and 558. According to this mythical account, it was the birth of Mohammed that caused the fault in the dome, and it is said that it was thanks to his saliva mixed with sand from Mecca that it was repaired, in anticipation of its future use. This mythical repair proves to be of great importance for anyone who wishes to place the value of the building not in a fixed identity, that of the 900 years during which it was a basilica, or the 500 years during which it was a mosque, but in its ability to glide from one civilisation to another. The Ottoman appropriation lends itself to such an interpretation. It can rightly be considered as saving, if not respecting the previous state, at least capa

ble of sparing its main attributes. The iconoclasm which qualifies the new cult established there in the 15th century didn’t prevent the preservation of a good part of the mosaics, covered with plaster over the centuries, and meticulously rediscovered by archaeological missions from the middle of the 19th century onwards. More importantly, the Ottoman culture and its model of governance by millet was characterised by a disposition to administrative autonomy for non-Muslim religious communities.The Christian cult persisted in the new empire, and Ottoman society was built, in a pragmatic way, on the intermingling of cultures and languages that preceded the conquest.The Ottomans had no other way of administering territories, such as the Balkans, where Muslims were a minority. The fact remains that this tolerant Islam, which welcomed the persecuted Jews from Spain, which allowed the Greeks and Armenians to prosper to the point of embodying the bourgeoisie of the main urban centres in the 19th century, and which made the right to self-government of the communities a fundamental principle, deserved a place in the picture of European cultural commonality. This cannot be said to be the case. The integration of Ottoman eclecticism into the great narrative of Europe would, however, be a way of anchoring multi-culturalism in the history of the continent. Above all, it would be a significant gesture to build common ground, pedagogically, culturally and politically, with the 16 million Muslims living in the different countries of the European Union. Instead, it is the narrative of the “Christian fortress”, dear to the far right, that seems to be coming back with a vengeance. Was the gesture of the Islamists in power in Turkey anything other than a reaction to Europe’s refusal to consider Turkey as part of its shared heritage? En

ough on this subject.

FIXED TRANSFORMATION There is something in the diachronic image of the monument, in the very shape of the building itself, that chronicles its transformation and elevates it to the rank of quality.The essential act of this transformation, which could apply to an archetypal principle of conversion, is none other than the addition of the minarets, carried out in several stages. The four towers that enclose the basilica in a virtual parallelepiped are external additions and, in some respects, obvious attributes of the conversion. They frame the basilica, contain it and restore it to its iconic dimension. Obvious prostheses, the minarets constitute an almost postmodern gesture, that of an appropriation through the addition of a permanent frame. What is less evident are the countless acts of repair carried out over the centuries, which explain the longevity of the monument. In the 16th century the erection of the minarets was accompanied by the addition of massive buttresses, which would prove essential to the building’s resistance to the earthquakes in this seismic region. More than sixteen major earthquakes since its creation haven’t put an end to it. This longevity is certainly due to its constructive qualities, but also, and above all, to its perpetual and almost obsessive maintenance over the centuries, both by the Byzantines and the Ottomans. By satisfying a demand from the most radical fringe of his electorate, Erdoğan is attacking the secular heritage of modernTurkey, as outlined by Atatürk nearly a century ago. He is thus participating in a reinforcement of the religious that can be observed in most societies with strong social inequalities.The rise of political Islamism in Turkey is of the same order as the strengthening of Hindu nationalism and evangelical expansionism (and its epiphenomenon, Trumpism). Except that, in the case of Erdoğan, this political gesture also has an unintended consequence. By linking neo-Ottoman expansion to a monument that symbolises cultural polysemy, by making Hagia Sophia the object of conquest, he is creating the conditions for contesting the legitimacy of his aspirations. What today would challenge Turkey’s right to dispose of this heritage, if not the act of Erdoğan itself? His gesture re-stages a predation forgotten by all, with the sole intention of rekindling a polarisation. Erdoğan is invoking ghostly enemies and threats, with the mad hope that they might come out of the crypt. The newspaper Orthodox Times ran a headline a few days after the inaugural prayer, about the mysterious death (following a heart attack) of the muezzin who had officiated at the symbolic ceremony. Magical thinking revels in these occult echoes, in these unexplained correspondences, all the more precious as they come from the opposing camp. The ultimate consequence of the reconversion into a mosque is to maintain Hagia Sophia in a position both central and tragic as a torn, contested monument. It suspends and perpetuates indefinitely an act, taking, which usually lasts only an instant, that of a conquest or a revolution.That it could be the centre of both the Greek and Turkish worlds probably escapes the sensibility of most believers, Muslims or Christians, who, confined in their faith, praise or curse its conversion into a place of worship. And yet their obstinacy, resentment and satisfaction are constitutive of the symbolic appeal of the building, perhaps even more than all the beauties that can be admired there, than all the selfies (veiled or not) that have been taken there, in its brief museum function. The transformation into a mosque is in no way an outrage. In fact, it only adds a layer to the thick millenary mille-feuille known as Hagia Sophia. It won’t put an end to it. On the contrary, it can only enrich it.

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Translation: Chloé Baker (1) From the French translation by Louis Cousin, 1685. (2) Robert G. Ousterhout, « From Hagia Sophia to Ayasofya: Architecture and The Persistence of Memory », İstanbul Araştırmaları Yıllığı / Annual of Istanbul Studies, 2, 2013. Chistophe Catsaros is a critic of art and architecture. He writes a blog on the city, art and politics on the website of the daily newspaper Le Temps.