I promised to tell more about Hagia Sophia, my favorite site in Istanbul. I couldn't bear to lump it in with everything else, it was too special. This post won't be long, but I felt like Hagia Sophia (or according to my dad, the "grand Sophie") deserved its own space, and hopefully by the end I'll have managed to communicate even fractionally why. Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque are situated directly facing each other, the Blue Mosque the clear attempt to upstage the older, originally Christian Hagia Sophia. Though both are beautiful, Hagia Sophia is serene, intimate and warm while the Blue Mosque is ornate, distant and polished. Maybe with my western preconception of what a holy building should look like, the openness and lightness of the Blue Mosque just didn't resonate as much as the more bulky, dark Hagia Sophia. But it felt to me like Hagia Sophia was this incredibly wise and elegant dowager queen, whose maturity made her so much more magnetic and commanding than the comparatively modern and sleek Blue Mosque.
Anyhow, Hagia Sophia was built in the 530's ad by Emperor Justinian in the Byzantine style. The building served as a church from the time of its construction up until 1450's when it was converted to a mosque. In the 1930's it was turned into a museum. As our guide Ata explained, Istanbul has plenty of mosques, it would be a shame not to share the beauty of the Christian art discovered beneath the whitewashing. Hagia Sophia is incredible as an architectural feat, as a parable of compassion and tolerance, and as a work of art.
What I mean by calling Hagia Sophia an architectural feat is that it was the largest cathedral in the world until the 1520's completion of the Seville Cathedral. Doesn't that just blow your mind?! I can't wrap my head around the fact that builders in the 500's were able to build something no one else could surpass until the 1500's. Do you know how hard the French and Italians and English worked to rediscover the technology to build domes? The duomo in Florence (1300's) was left incomplete and dome-less for at least a hundred years until Brunelleschi came along. The brilliance of the mathematician builders of Hagia Sophia awes me in the same way as the single piece dome of the Pantheon.
As I mentioned earlier, Hagia Sophia represents a true story of compassion and understanding between religions. This story exemplifies one of the beautiful truths about Islam. When I was in Religions of the book at UPS, I leaned that out of the three Abrahamic Faiths (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam), Islam is the only one that recognizes the others as legitimate paths to God and salvation. At its root, and for all but the extremist Muslims, Islam is very accepting of Christianity. In the case of Hagia Sophia, this fortunately translated to the preservation of the Christian art when the building was transformed into a mosque. Instead of chipping off the beautiful, intricate Byzantine mosaics, the sultan simply ordered them plastered over, where they were preserved and protected. This was even more remarkable considering the strong iconoclastic movement at the time (that continues to influence modern Muslim decoration, not the lack of images, as opposed to designs and words, in the Blue Mosque). Ata even showed us an stone baptismal pool that was moved into one of the courtyards (as opposed to destroyed or removed from the premises). These gestures of respect and compassion made me love the building even more. Although Turkey, like most countries in the world today, has not faithfully followed this peaceful trajectory, the story of the Hagia Sophia remains a powerful reminder of what we should aspire toward.
And finally, I mentioned Hagia Sophia is remarkable due to its beautiful decorations. All the Byzantine mosaics sparkling in the natural light had me craning my neck and lagging behind for the entire tour. The most beautiful mosaic in the building, and hands down that I've ever seen was the one of Jesus, John and Paul, shown in part 2 pictures above. The faces of Jesus and John are so expressive and powerful, it's hard to comprehend how little tiles could make an image that touching. My dad got a kick out of the fact that when he was taking a picture of the mosaic, the facial recognition technology on his camera picked out Jesus's face, something he had never had happen while photographing any other work of art. Ok, that was a little longer than I had intended, but I hope you enjoyed the mini tour about my favorite place in Istanbul!
Katie
Katie
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