Hagia Sophia

What you are looking at

Hagia Sophia is a church built in five years by an emperor who wanted to outdo Solomon. It was the largest enclosed space in the world for nearly a thousand years, and its dome taught every later architect in Istanbul, Sinan included, what a dome could be. The building has been a cathedral, a mosque, a museum and, since July 2020, a mosque again.

The name means Holy Wisdom, not a saint. Two earlier churches stood on the site, the second burned in the Nika riot of January 532, and Justinian began the third thirty-nine days later. That is the building you see.

Five years, ten thousand workers

Justinian gave the job to two scientists rather than builders: Anthemius of Tralles, a mathematician, and Isidorus of Miletus, who had edited Archimedes. Procopius, who watched it happen, says ten thousand workers labored under a hundred foremen. Columns came from Ephesus and Baalbek, and colored marble from Egypt and Thessaly.

The church was dedicated on December 27, 537. The nave is 32 m wide and 70 m long; with the two narthexes the building runs 100 m. Only three churches in Europe, St Peter's, Seville and Milan, cover more ground, and all were built centuries later.

The dome, twice

The first dome was too flat. Earthquakes in 553 and 557 cracked it, and it fell in 558, bringing down the eastern half dome with it. Isidorus the Younger, the nephew of the original architect, rebuilt it steeper on forty ribs with forty windows at the base, and that dome was finished in 562.

It rises 55.6 m above the floor and, after fourteen centuries of repairs, is no longer round: the diameter varies between 30.9 and 31.2 m. Two half domes on the east-west axis and a system of arches and vaults carry the weight down to four piers. The heavy buttresses outside are later, some Byzantine and some Ottoman, and they are the reason the building is still standing.

The mosaics

Justinian's decoration was gold and geometric, with no figures, and much of it survives in the vaults of the narthex. Figurative mosaics were destroyed or never made during iconoclasm, between 726 and 843, the same ban that left Cappadocia's cave chapels with plain painted crosses. Everything with a face that you see today dates from 867 onward.

Over the Imperial Door in the inner narthex, an emperor, probably Leo VI, kneels before Christ enthroned. Over the southwest entrance, Constantine offers the city and Justinian offers the church to the Virgin. In the apse, the Virgin and Child of 867 still look down the length of the nave.

The best panels are in the south gallery upstairs. The Deesis, made after the Byzantines retook the city in 1261, shows Christ between the Virgin and John the Baptist on a panel 6 m wide. The lower half has gone, but the faces are the finest surviving Byzantine mosaic work anywhere.

Beside it are two imperial panels. In the Empress Zoe panel her husband's face was replaced twice as she remarried, and the Comnenus panel of 1122 shows John II with the Hungarian-born Empress Irene. Both emperors hold bags of gold, the church's endowment, which is why they were allowed on the wall at all.

The upper galleries

A stone ramp, not a staircase, leads up from the inner narthex so that the empress could be carried up in a litter. The west gallery, lit from the great windows, was the women's area, and the bay with green breccia columns and a marbled floor marked the empress's seat. Look at the parapets: among centuries of scratched names there is a runic inscription left by a Viking guardsman.

The wooden tie beams between the arches are original sixth-century work, carved with patterns. The gallery vaults were repainted in the restoration of 1847 to 1849 by the Fossati brothers, Swiss architects working for Sultan Abdülmecid, who also uncovered and recorded the mosaics before plastering them again.

1453 and after

The city fell on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, after a fifty-three-day siege. Mehmed II rode to Hagia Sophia the same afternoon, found it neglected, with doors lying in the courtyard, and declared it a mosque. Friday prayers were held that week.

The Ottomans added what a mosque needs and left the rest. A wooden minaret went up first, replaced by the brick one on the southeast; the three stone minarets came under Bayezid II and Selim II, the latter two designed by Sinan, the architect whose own mosques fill the city.

Inside, a mihrab was set slightly off axis to point to Mecca, and a minbar and a sultan's loge were added. The eight great calligraphic roundels with the names of God, the Prophet and the caliphs were hung in the nineteenth century. Five sultans are buried in the garden, in tombs that reused the baptistery and added new domed chambers.

Museum, then mosque again

In 1934 the Turkish Republic made the building a museum, and the plaster came off the mosaics for the first time since the Fossatis. For eighty-six years the church and the mosque were visible together, which is how most of the world's photographs of the interior were taken. On July 24, 2020, a court ruling returned it to use as a mosque.

For visitors the practical change came in January 2024. The prayer hall on the ground floor is now for worshippers; foreign visitors enter by a separate gate, buy a ticket and follow a route through the upper galleries. That route passes every major mosaic, so you lose the floor of the nave but not the art.

How to visit

Go at opening or in the last hour, and never at Friday noon. Dress as for any mosque: covered shoulders and knees, a head covering for women, shoes off in carpeted areas. The ticket line and the security line are separate; the queue you see from the square is usually the second one.

Ninety minutes is enough. Then cross the square for the Blue Mosque, walk five minutes to the Basilica Cistern, or go through the outer gate of Topkapı Palace, which begins directly behind the church. Hafız Mustafa, the confectioner founded in 1864, has a shop on Divanyolu two minutes from the square, the closest good baklava and Turkish delight to the site.

If Byzantine art is the reason you came, keep an afternoon for Chora at the land walls. Justinian's other great church, St John at Ephesus, is a ruin you can walk through, and the rock churches of Cappadocia show what the same faith built without an emperor's budget. For where all this sits in the longer story, see the history of Anatolia.

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