Hagia Irene: The Church That Became an Arsenal
Why is it significant?
In the first court of the palace, among the plane trees, stand in front of the red-brick church sunk below the level of the path, its dome low and its walls patched in many centuries.
Key Facts
| Place | Hagia Irene: The Church That Became an Arsenal |
|---|---|
| Address | Cankurtaran, Topkapı Sarayı Birinci Avlu, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.00970, 28.98110 |
| Part of Walk | Sultans' Gates: Topkapı, Gülhane & the Sublime Porte in Istanbul |
| Generated | Generated |
In the first court of the palace, among the plane trees, stand in front of the red-brick church sunk below the level of the path, its dome low and its walls patched in many centuries. Hagia Irene, the Church of Holy Peace, is one of the very few Byzantine churches in Istanbul that was never turned into a mosque.
A church stood here even before Constantine built Hagia Sophia next door, and in 381 an earlier Hagia Irene hosted the second great council of the Christian Church, the Council of Constantinople. Like its big neighbour, it burned in the Nika riot of 532, and Justinian rebuilt it. After an earthquake in 740 it was rebuilt again, and that is largely the building you see.
Inside, in the half-dome of the apse, there is a simple black cross on a gold ground and nothing else. That is a rare survivor of the age of Iconoclasm, when the emperors banned images of Christ and the saints, and only the cross was allowed. Most such decoration was replaced when the images came back. Here, because the church soon became something else, it was simply left alone.
When Mehmed the Second built his palace around it, Hagia Irene sat inside the first court, and the Ottomans used it as an arsenal for weapons and armour. In the nineteenth century those old weapons and a growing collection of antiquities were put on display here, and this storeroom became the seed of the first museum of the Ottoman Empire... the ancestor of the great archaeological museum you will see in a few minutes.
Today it is a museum again, and its acoustics are famous: it often hosts concerts, especially during the city's music festival. Continue along the first court, a long, slightly rising avenue, to the gate with two pointed towers at the end. That gate was where the sultan's private world began.