Hagia Sophia and the Architectural Secret That Has Safeguarded Its Purpose for Centuries
Understanding the Art and Architecture of the Crown Jewel of the Byzantine Empire
The unusually cold spring of 542 found Constantinople, then the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, battling the first pandemic in its history. Dead bodies piled up in the cobblestone streets. It was the first large-scale appearance of the plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia Pestis, which would eventually claim millions of lives. The pandemic even crept into the Great Palace. As the Emperor Justinian burned with fever, palace doctors did not know what to do. The only defenses the people had were ointments, quarantining, and asking for help from the divine.
Ten years earlier Justinian, a cruel but industrious emperor, started to build what was the greatest gift of his reign to the divine: the church of Hagia Sophia. The grand construction, which would become the largest cathedral in the world for almost one thousand years, would change architecture forever.
The structure was so sophisticated, its very design manifested its devotion to Christianity — namely, by orienting the building towards the first light of dawn after the longest night of winter, which symbolizes Christ’s birth. In fact, every brick of the structure points to its purpose as a church, which is why any subsequent religious conversions over the course of the following centuries — including most recently on July 24th, 2020, when Turkey converted the Hagia Sophia into a mosque — are so problematic. The entire purpose of the building is embedded in the church’s architectural plan.
In Greek, Hagia Sophia translates as the church of the “Sacred Wisdom” of God, and accordingly Justinian’s architects wanted to create an intelligent architectural design. What they lacked in medical science, they made up for in mathematics. Justinian summoned two brilliant Greek mathematicians Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles to design the architectural plan. Isidore was not known as an architect but rather as a well respected university professor who was an admirer of Archimedes and Euclid, two of the most exceptional minds of classical antiquity, and systematically collected their work. Anthemius’s scientific work explored how light enters through small apertures, something which turned out to be a key element in Hagia Sophia, whose longitudinal axis was made to coincide with the sunrise of the winter solstice — a symbol of light in the heart of darkness.
Anthemius passed away early on during the construction of Hagia Sophia and after an earthquake broke the dome, Isidore’s nephew, Isidore the Younger, was called in. Their biggest triumph was their use of pendentives, or a concave triangular structure, to suspend the huge dome in mid-air above its square base. In simple terms, the massive dome could be held up without the use of bulky columns interrupting the extensive area underneath — making the dome the largest in the world.
The construction was built heavy with precious stones and metals so that it would become the crown jewel of the Byzantine Empire. The interior of the great church, from the floor to the walls, was decorated with marble brought from the Cycladic islands of Greece and the Mediterranean. Marble held a special place in the aesthetic values of the empire, so symmetrical designs formed from the natural lines of the marble were as important as paintings. Above the sea of marble was a heaven of gold; millions of gold pieces studded the arches and the ceilings to form exquisite mosaics. The faces of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, the Archangels and emperors were constructed to look at viewers individually, as well as to gaze to eternity. They were illuminated by either beams of light streaming from the rows of windows piercing through the dome, or by candles in the evenings.
An unprecedented amount of gold coins was spent so that this church would represent the glory of God. When Hagia Sophia was officially inaugurated the celebration lasted for days; thousands of deer, oxen, sheep and hens, as well as bags of wheat, were distributed to the poor.
For years, the Hagia Sophia served as the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. “For Greeks, it symbolized the center of their world,” the historian Roger Crowley writes “Its very structure was a microcosm of heaven, a metaphor for the divine mysteries of Orthodox Christianity.” In the year 987, according to the Russian Primary Chronicle, Vladimir the Great, leader of the Kievan Rus’ — a realm that stretched from modern-day Russia, Belarus and Ukraine to the Baltic Sea — was looking to take his people away from paganism and chose the best religion for his people. His grandmother Olga of Kiev (who would later become Saint Olga) had been trying to convert the family to Christianity for years. Vladimir sent emissaries to learn about other religions. When they reached Hagia Sophia they reported that they were so taken aback by the majestic beauty of the great church that they couldn’t tell if they were still on earth or in heaven.
In 1453, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, who converted Hagia Sophia into a mosque. In the years that followed, the mosaics were plastered over, the marbles were covered with carpets, and many of the windows designed to bring in beams of light were covered. Minarets were erected. The building, however, is forever aligned to the East, as is the custom for Christian churches, and specifically as the patriarchal cathedral of the imperial capital, to the sunrise of the winter solstice. Unable to reposition the building to turn it towards Mecca, as is customary for mosques, the Ottomans had to place the mihrab, the niche that is normally in the middle of the qibla wall and shows the direction of Muslim prayer, a bit to the right in the apse, a detail that disturbed the symmetry of the building.
The Ottoman empire eventually gave way to the modern republic of Turkey, and its founder Ataturk turned the mosque into a museum, in a symbolic move towards secularism. In July 2020, during a pandemic in which 6,417 Turks have died and 271,705 have fallen ill, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan turned the Hagia Sophia again into a mosque. He announced it on Twitter along with the words “Hayırlı olsun” a Turkish expression of good luck when you are presenting a gift. His supporters called it the “right of the sword,” an expression that means something taken by force and alludes to the conquest of Constantinople.
Justinian survived his plague. His image was memorialized in the golden mosaic of the vestibule of Hagia Sophia. He is dressed in his imperial attire and is offering the Virgin Mary a symbolic depiction of Hagia Sophia itself — the greatest gift. A millennium and a half later, the latest conversion back into a mosque prescribes that the remaining golden mosaics, instead of being preserved in the context of a museum, are covered by curtains so that they are not visible during Muslim prayer. The shiny marbles have been covered with carpets and any Christian artifacts that can be removed will be taken to a city museum. In August 2020, the Turkish government ruled for another Byzantine museum, the Chora Monastery, to be turned into a mosque. The mosaics of the Chora Monastery, which along with Giotto’s work in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy, constitute the two great forerunners of the Rennaisance, are also expected to be covered with veils during Muslim prayer.
As the years will go by, perhaps the only thing that will be left is a beam of light hitting the windows of the Hagia Sophia apse in a perfect straight line during every dawn of the winter solstice, slowly making its elegant way to the Royal Door — otherwise known as the Door of Repentance where even emperors had to bow before entering.
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Olga Alexopoulou is a painter living in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums from Tokyo to New York. In 2018, she created a new blue pigment called Quantum Blue, with a small team of scientists at the Berkeley Laboratory in California. She was born in Athens, Greece and attended the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford University.
