Hagia Sophia: The Church of Holy Wisdom

Why is it significant?

Stand in the square between the two giants and turn towards the one that looks older and heavier, the colour of faded apricot, propped up by massive buttresses like an old man leaning on his sticks.

Key Facts

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Stand in the square between the two giants and turn towards the one that looks older and heavier, the colour of faded apricot, propped up by massive buttresses like an old man leaning on his sticks. That is Hagia Sophia, the Church of Holy Wisdom... and for almost a thousand years it was the largest church in the Christian world. Everything you will see on this walk orbits around it. The building in front of you is the third church on this spot. The second one burned in 532, during the Nika riot, when the racing factions of the Hippodrome nearly toppled the emperor Justinian. He answered by building something nobody had ever seen. Two learned men rather than ordinary builders, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, designed it, and it was dedicated in December 537, less than six years after work began. The story goes that Justinian walked in and murmured that he had outdone Solomon. The secret is the dome, more than thirty metres across and floating some fifty-five metres above the floor. A ring of forty windows runs around its base, so the light seems to pour in underneath it, and a writer of the time said it looked as if it hung from heaven on a golden chain. It did not float forever: an earthquake brought the first dome down in 558, and the replacement, built steeper and higher, is the one above you today. Look for the small things too. On a marble parapet in the upper gallery, someone scratched runes that are read as a Norse name, Halfdan... most likely a Viking serving in the emperor's Varangian Guard who got bored during a very long service. And people still push a thumb into a hole in a bronze-clad column, the so-called weeping column, which legend says grants wishes and cures. On the 29th of May 1453, after a siege of fifty-three days, Sultan Mehmed the Second entered the city, and Hagia Sophia became a mosque. Minarets rose around it, and many mosaics were covered with plaster rather than destroyed, which is partly why some survive. In 1934 it became a museum, and in July 2020 it was turned back into a mosque. Now walk west across the tram line, to a stump of stone that once measured the whole empire.