Hagia Sophia

Hagia Sophia is a building in Istanbul. Wikidata dates its construction to 532 CE. ¹

The construction date of 532 rests on Wikidata alone. The history below rests on the Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 1 (AYA SOFYA).

Aya Sofya, the largest mosque in Constantinople (Istanbul), was once the leading metropolitan church of eastern Christendom. It was known generally as the Megale Ekklesia up to 1453. Around 400 it was called Zoola, without the article, and from the fifth century it was known as Hagia Sophia. According to the most recent research, the original church was not built by Constantine the Great himself, but by his son, in accordance with the emperor's last wishes, after the son's victory over his brother-in-law Licinius. It was built in the form of a basilica and consecrated on 15 February. ²

The first basilica, with a wooden roof, went up in flames in June 404 on the occasion of the expulsion of John Chrysostom. The rebuilt church stood undamaged for more than a century, until the night of 13 January 532, when it burned again, together with much of the city and the imperial archives, during the riots of the rival hippodrome factions. The emperor Justinian at once resolved to rebuild it in a splendour never seen before. Even before the fire, materials from old monuments in the provinces, where heathen works of art had been left to decay, were to be sent to the imperial residence; after the fire these materials were largely used in the rebuilding. Two architects were put in charge, the first of them named Anthemius. The emperor required that the new building be proof against both fire and earthquake, so they chose a dome-and-cupola design as the surest means of escaping these dangers. ³

The magnificent building opened on 27 December 537 with enormous pomp, and the proud Justinian is said to have exclaimed, "Solomon, I have surpassed you!" Even during his own reign, however, the eastern part of the dome collapsed in an earthquake on 7 May 558, and the ambo, the tabernacle and the altar were smashed. The dome had been designed too flat, so it was raised by more than 20 feet and the supports of the great pillars were strengthened. The church reopened on 24 December 562. Its setting was grand: to the south lay the Augusteum, with an equestrian statue of Justinian, used for national festivities; to the north, within the walls of today's Saray, stood court churches, noble monasteries and the palaces of court officials; and to the east, towards the sea, stood the imperial palace. ⁴

The church covered an area that is almost square: its internal length is about 75 metres, excluding the main apse to the east, and its breadth is about 70 metres. The floor is laid out in the form of a cross, and above it rises the almost hemispherical pendentive dome, to a height of 56 metres. The outside walls alone could not have carried it, so it was supported by four great pillars, which were braced by smaller arches and their pillars, structurally important though less conspicuous. To the east and west of the dome stand two further semi-domes, each covering three semicircular chambers. Of greatest importance for the shaping of the interior was the two-storey arrangement of the side chambers next to the central aisle, where the galleries, as was customary in Byzantine churches, were reserved for women. The weight of the building is carried by 107 columns, of green marble in most cases and in some of red porphyry.

The walls and vault of the original building were of brick throughout. The sanctuary, the bema, lay east of the central part of the church and was divided from it by a tall screen adorned with pictures and openwork pillars; it held the altar and its canopy and led into the main apse. In the days of Justinian there were 425 priests, who also served three other churches, and 100 doorkeepers.

For the medieval visitor the interior made an overwhelming impression through its wealth of ornament: marble used lavishly everywhere, pictures of Christ and of the Mother of God, of the Prophets, Apostles and other saints that turned the walls into a sea of colour, the mighty seraphim in the spherical triangles of the main dome, and the gold mosaic that covered dome and walls with a splendour never seen before. The mosaic decoration was probably not finished until the last years of Justinian and into the reign of Justin II.

The first major repairs were made under Basil II. Part of the dome collapsed in an earthquake on 26 October 986, and the emperor had the damage repaired; the flying buttresses on the western façade probably date from that time. In 1204 the church was severely damaged during the Latin sack of Constantinople. ⁵

The conquest brought large changes to the interior, following the rules of the victorious religion. The mosaics that had covered the walls and vaults, and which their Greek makers had intended to last for ever, were hidden under a grey lime-wash. Evliya Celebi, writing in the seventeenth century, still mentions the mosaics, a few of which must have remained visible in his time. The screen between the clergy and the laity was torn down, and the rich decoration of the bema was stripped. Byzantine churches faced Jerusalem, whereas the prayer had to be performed facing Mecca; since the conquest the Turks have prayed towards the south, not towards the eastern wing of the mosque. The article describes the moment of entry, when a leader of the conquering army pronounced the confession of faith and, with his followers, prostrated himself before the one God, and so the church was dedicated to Islam. ⁶

From the time of Mehmed II a preacher, carrying a wooden sword, ascended the pulpit on Fridays, on every afternoon of Ramadan and at the Bayram festivals, and two flags always stood beside the pulpit. Mehmed II built the great buttresses against the south wall and the first of the tall, slender minarets. Selim II built the two buttresses in the north and the second minaret at the north-east corner; his son Murad III was responsible for the other two. Murad III also carried out thorough repairs, corrected the minor defects that had come to light with time, and embellished the bare chamber. He placed two huge alabaster urns near the main entrance, each holding 1,250 litres, and donated two large estrades (mastaba): one from which the Qur'an was recited through most of the day, and one for the prayer leaders. At great expense he gilded the half-moon that crowned the dome, which had replaced the cross, so that the Muslim subjects of the Porte could behold the emblem of their faith from as far off as the summit of Bithynian Olympus. ⁶

In the second half of the sixteenth century the churchyard immediately south of the mosque was converted into a mausoleum for the sultans. The oldest tomb is that of Selim II. His son Murad III and his grandson Mehmed III are buried there too, together with the nineteen brothers whom Mehmed III had killed on his accession. A few decades later the dethroned sultan Mustafa I died suddenly, and no suitable grave could be found at once; the old baptistry on the southern side of the narthex, which the Turks had used for oil storage since the conquest, was taken over for the purpose. Later the nephew of Mustafa I, Sultan Ibrahim, was buried there as well. The large oil stores were then kept in the hall and courtyard on the north side of the baptistry.

Sultan Murad IV (1623-1640), whose reign saw a certain measure of general revival, had the bare walls embellished in a memorable way by the great calligrapher Bicakci-zade Mustafa Celebi with large gold-lettered quotations from the Qur'an; some letters, such as the alif, were as much as ten ells long. Those painted verses are outshone by the clear, boldly drawn names of the first four caliphs, written by Teknedji-zade Ibrahim Efendi. A magnificent minbar dates from those years. Ahmed III erected the enclosed raised throne for the ruler, the maqsura, on the north side of the main apse. Mahmud I (1730-1754) donated the large sultan's loggia on the first floor of the gallery, a fountain and a school in the courtyard on the south side, the large soup kitchen (imaret) in the north and, above all, the valuable library in the mosque itself, which was built on an older foundation already in the building. ⁶

From the time of Murad IV, the conqueror of Baghdad, there was a perceptible decline in the maintenance of the mosque, which coincided with the general decline of the empire. In 1847 Sultan Abd al-Medjid commissioned the Italian brothers Fossati as architects to renovate the building, to avoid the threatened collapse of some parts and to give the whole a more dignified appearance. The work took two years. The lime-wash was left only in the places that had depicted human forms; elsewhere the walls came back into prominence with the disclosure of their old splendour. The red and yellow striped paint on the outside dates from that restoration. The restoration covered all the minarets except that of Mehmed II, which had dealt the final and decisive blow against the Byzantine empire; the Italian architects were eventually allowed to make this minaret as high as the others. The eight round tablets inscribed by the calligrapher Mustafa Izzet Efendi were put into the mosque under Abd al-Medjid. ⁶

The mosque has not suffered from earthquakes since the tenth century. The article credits this largely to the buttresses which the last Byzantines and the Turks put up against three sides of the walls, so that this gigantic building, standing on seismic ground, has served mankind longer than any other building in Europe. The storms that blow from the Balkans or from the sea, on the other hand, seem to be increasingly dangerous to the mosque. ⁷

Immediately after the conquest the Turks took over the many legends that had grown up about the origin and excellence of the church in the last years of Byzantine rule, and reworked them in Muslim terms. A history of Aya Sofya (library of Aya Sofya, No. 3025) was written very shortly after the victorious entry by Ahmad b. Ahmad al-Gilani, in Persian and on a Greek model, at the order of Mehmed II. It was later translated into Turkish by Ni'mat Allah (died 969/1561-2). According to Katib Celebi, a second Persian work was written for the same ruler by the astronomer and cosmographer 'Ali b. Muhammad al-Kushdji, but it can no longer be identified. A further version of 888/1483-4, by an anonymous author, survives in Berlin as an appendix to an Ottoman history, the Tawarikh-i Kostantiniyya, written three years later; it is more interesting, though similar in thought and sources. ⁸

In the Tawarikh-i Kostantiniyya the story runs that a very wealthy woman, the wife of the great Konstantin, died young and ordered in her testament that a church be built taller than any other building in the world. An architect came from the lands of the Franks, dug down forty ells to reach water, built the church except for its dome, and fled; the building stood untouched for ten years until he came back and put on the dome. The marble was said to have been brought from many countries, the four mottled pillars from Mount Qaf, and the great doors from planks of Noah's ark, which Solomon had already used in his buildings in Jerusalem and Kyzikos. The total cost was said to be 360,000 gold bars. Under Heraclius, described as a contemporary and secret follower of the Prophet ﷺ, the dome is said to have crashed, but the pious ruler rebuilt it at once. ⁸

The Tawarikh-i Kostantiniyya wa Aya Sofya of 'Ali al-'Arabi Ilyas, who was then a teacher in the service of the grand vizier 'Ali the Fat (died 28 June 1565), dates from the time of Suleyman the Great. Its earliest edition is of 970/1562-3; two years later the author added a few details and issued it under a different title. The article calls it the best Turkish authority on the history of the mosque, though it is in many respects unreliable from our point of view, because it gives various versions. The legends that continued to be woven around Aya Sofya changed from one epoch to the next, and their spiritual peak was in the seventeenth century. At that time the place was shown where the Arab heroes of the first century AH were said to have prayed during their siege of Constantinople, and the place in the centre of the nave from which Khidr supervised the building of the church. In the southern gallery a hollowed stone was pointed out as the cradle of Christ. ⁸

An anecdote that young theologians still told in much later years concerned Husayn-i Tabrizi and his professorship at the mosque: a mystic, to whom Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror had held out his hand, had to kiss the palm instead of the back of it, and promptly asked for the appointment as mudir of Aya Sofya. The "Damp Pillar" (yash direk) and the "Cold Window" (so'uk pencere) near the qibla gained great fame as places of pilgrimage, where miracles happened within the holy walls in the time of Abd al-Hamid II. At the Cold Window Shaykh Ak Shams al-Din expounded the Qur'an, and until very recently people were convinced that the fresh air entering through that window was beneficial to the depth of theological knowledge.

In Ramadan the mosque made an interesting picture when princes and officials assembled for the afternoon prayers. At the tarawih prayers, said an hour and a half after sunset, there was less ceremony, and the dome was lit by innumerable lamps arranged in a circle. The greatest splendour came on the twenty-seventh night, the Laylat al-Qadr (Turkish Kadir gecesi), when the Qur'an is said to have descended from heaven to earth. Earlier rulers often attended the ceremony, but Sultan Abd al-Hamid II honoured the mosque with his presence, if at all, only in the middle of Ramadan, when he came by boat to pay honour to the relics of the Prophet in the ancient castle of his ancestors, in a short visit known as the Day of the Holy Mantle. ⁸

In the summer of 1906 the Minister of Education ordered thorough repairs in the library building, which was looked after by five khodjas, each of whom officiated one day of the week.

In 1934 President Kemal Atatürk decreed that the building cease to be a place of Islamic worship and be placed under a museum administration. The lime-wash that had covered the figures in the mosaics was then removed, and in 1936 several pictures reappeared: above the southern narthex door, an enthroned Madonna and Child, with the emperors Constantine, holding a model of the town he founded, and Justinian, holding a model of the church of St Sophia; over the central door from the narthex into the church, the old Emperor's Door, Christ enthroned, with an emperor at his feet in adoration, identified as Leo VI or, more likely, Basil I; and finally a Madonna in the curve of the apse. ⁸

The article's bibliography names Procopius and Paulus Silentiarius as the most trustworthy Byzantine sources for the time of Justinian, and lists among the later works Pierre Gilles, De topographia Constantinopoleos (Lyons, 1561), Charles du Cange, Historia Byzantina (Paris, 1680), and J. von Hammer, Constantinopolis und der Bosporus (Pest, 1822). ⁸