Hagia Sofia: Monument to Memory

I’ve dreamt of visiting Hagia Sophia ever since my Introduction to Art History course as an undergraduate. And as a stood under that dome that measures 184 feet from floor to ceiling, my heart leapt within my chest. Craning my neck to see the 12th century mosaics, the 16th century Muslim medallions and the 19th century loggia in this state owned and operated secular museum, I was struck again by the curious nature of this place, of Hagia Sophia, of Istanbul, of Turkey. The museum is like the country: it is a stratigraphy of cultures, languages and religions that simply lie atop one another without any sort of absorption or amalgamation. A monument is a thing that is meant to be remembered; that’s the Latin root of the word, after all. Hagia Sofia was built atop Constantine’s 4th Century church, which was destroyed by fire and replaced by a 5th century church. This is apparent before you enter the monument by the excavation at the entrance, but also by the statuary garden filled with columns and capitals that graced earlier churches. Justinian I (whose image I wear on my neck each day I walk through the streets of Istanbul, a coin minted in this very city some 1500 years ago) built Hagia Sofia in a little less than six years with thousands of slaves. The building was begun only a couple months after he slaughtered some 3500 of his own subjects for treason. After they’d rioted in the Hippodrome, he lured them back into the race track with promises of negotiating terms and then locked the doors and slaughtered them all in a couple of bloody, desperate hours. The exotic marbles that cover the walls boldly proclaim Justinian’s reconquest of the Roman Empire: porphyry from Egypt, giallo antico from Numidia, luna marble from Ionia, carerra from Italy. Justinian’s megalomania was apparent from his quip upon entering the completed structure: “Solomon, I have surpassed you!” Besides a few earthquakes to weaken its walls, Hagia Sofia remained intact until the Crusaders defiled it by burying the Ventian Doge Henricus Dandolo in it in the 13th Century.

Mahmet II took the city in 1453 after the walls of Constantinople had withstood some 29 sieges, only to fall to the newfangled technological innovation, gunpowder. Though Mahmet had all the mosaics with human images covered with plaster, he allowed the Virgin and Child above the apse to remain, adding only the mihrab that pointed toward Mecca. The sultans brought relics from around their Empire, especially the marble vase that was made in the 3rd C. BC in Smryna and installed in the nave. Ancient Greek, Byzantine, Ottoman piled one a top another, no conversation between the great civilizations, just triumphant proclamations of the superiority of the present over the past, a desire to reclaim what had gone before in order to make the glorious past inevitably point to a still more glorious present.

Hagia Sofia was so glorious that it must be preserved (then rehabilitated with the addition of minarets) and then bested by the Blue Mosque, another tribute to the ego of a sultan. Ahmed was fourteen in 1609 when he ordered its construction and twenty-seven when it was completed. He died a year later. This mosque trumped Hagia Sophia even in its six minarets.

Fast forward to Ataturk in the 1920’s, who ordered Hagia Sofia to become a secular museum and strictly forbade any worship to occur under that massive, beautiful, dizzying dome. Another refashioning, another triumphant proclamation, another megalomaniac. Ataturk (hallowed be his name) might have forbidden worship in this place, this secular museum, but when I stepped into this monument to memory, I remembered. And in my own non-denominational way, I worshipped there. I raised a paean in my heart to the muse of memory.