Hagia Sophia in Constantinople

The story

A church that burns twice

Hagia Sophia was not the first church of that name at Constantinople. According to the story told in the most recent sources, the first was inaugurated on 15 February 360, under the emperor Constantius II, and was largely destroyed by a fire around 404. A second church was opened on 10 October 415 by the emperor Theodosius II. This one burned down too, in January 532, during the Nika riot, when the factions of the hippodrome set fire to half the city.

The name “Hagia Sophia” is not that of a saint. In Greek, Hagia Sophia means “Holy Wisdom”, that is, the wisdom of God. For this reason people also speak of the “church of Divine Wisdom”.

Justinian's building site

As soon as the revolt was put down, the emperor Justinian decided to build a church much larger and more beautiful than the earlier ones. The building site was opened on 23 February 532 and the new church was inaugurated on 27 December 537: a little more than five years. For a building of that size this was an incredible speed. It is said that more than ten thousand people worked on it.

Justinian entrusted the design to two scholars of mathematics and geometry: Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus. Anthemius died a few years after the work began; the building went on under Isidore's direction. They had to solve a very difficult problem: how to hold up an enormous dome above a square space.

The dome that seems to hang

The great dome has a diameter of about 31 metres (the present dome). It does not rest on a continuous wall, but on a ring of forty windows. Anyone who enters the church sees light coming in all around the base of the dome, which therefore seems very light, almost hanging in the air. The weight, in reality, comes down onto great piers and onto arches and half-domes, which carry the thrust to the ground.

The materials too had to be precious: the largest columns are of granite, about 19 or 20 metres high and a metre and a half across; the heaviest weighs more than 70 tonnes. Eight columns with Corinthian capitals were brought from Baalbek, in present-day Lebanon.

When the church was finished, according to a story handed down, Justinian exclaimed: “Solomon, I have surpassed you!”. Solomon was the biblical king who had built the great temple at Jerusalem. It is probably a legendary phrase, but it shows well the emperor's pride.

The dome that falls

The dome, however, was too daring. On 7 May 558 an earthquake brought it down. It was rebuilt by a nephew of Isidore, called Isidore the Younger, who made it about six metres higher: today inside the church is 55.6 metres high. The work finished in 562 and the church was consecrated again at the end of December of that year.

Almost a thousand years of history, then another religion

For centuries Hagia Sophia was the main church of the Byzantine Empire. In 726, with the edicts of the emperor Leo III, the period of iconoclasm began, that is, the struggle against religious images, which were removed from churches. After the Fourth Crusade, in 1204, the crusaders occupied Constantinople and made Hagia Sophia a Catholic cathedral, until in 1261 it returned to the Byzantines.

On 29 May 1453 Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II and the church became a mosque. Minarets were added later. Between 1847 and 1849 it was restored by the Swiss architect Gaspare Fossati, with about eight hundred workmen. In 1931 it stopped being a place of worship and on 1 February 1935 it opened as a museum. On 10 July 2020 a presidential decree reopened it to Muslim prayer, and the first public Friday prayer was held on 24 July. Since 1985 it has been part of the Historic Areas of Istanbul, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, together with other monuments.

Why it is so important

Hagia Sophia remains one of the greatest feats of engineering of antiquity: an enormous dome, built in less than six years, rebuilt after an earthquake and still standing almost fifteen hundred years later.