Inside history
Turkey, 537 – Present
Take a look at the awe-inspiring Hagia Sophia
The site of Hagia Sophia has been a holy place for centuries. Constantine I built a church on the foundations of a pagan temple in 325 CE and this was restored and then extended several times. However, after the church was destroyed by fire during the Nika Riots in 532, Emperor Justinian I had a grand vision. Wanting to restore the empire to its former glory, he decided to build the greatest church the world had ever seen.
Justinian hired a pair of famed mathematicians, Anthemios and Isidore, to design it. In 537, just under six years later, the Hagia Sophia (meaning ‘Holy Wisdom’) was completed. Its enormous dome relied on a revolutionary design that made it the largest in the world for almost a millennium.
Despite its incredible design, the centuries were hard on the awe-inspiring church and subsequent Byzantine emperors used repairs as opportunities to add their name to it. Some were beautiful additions — for example, Justinian’s successor Justin II covered the walls with intricate mosaics. However, not every ruler was a patron of the arts. In 726, Emperor Leo III, following a civil war, forbade religious icons and this iconoclasm continued until 842 and saw the destruction of religious icons in churches across the land.
As the Byzantine Empire slowly collapsed, Islamic ones like the Ottomans replaced it. This threat prompted Western Christian nations to crusade and reclaim the ‘Holy Land’. The Crusades never achieved long-term success, however, and even catalysed the fall of Constantinople in 1453 when Ottoman sultan Mehmed the Conqueror took the city. Fortunately, he was struck by the beauty of Hagia Sophia and he made Constantinople his capital. Hagia Sophia (now called Aya Sofya) was converted into a mosque and its Christian art was covered or replaced with Islamic calligraphy. Hagia Sophia’s beauty would inspire the next generation of Ottoman art.
When the Ottoman Empire fell after World
War I, the secular nation of Turkey was created and Hagia Sophia became a museum, which you can still visit today in modern-day Istanbul.