Hagia Sophia
Hagia Sophia Latin: Sancta Sophia, officially the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque behind Antique place of worship in Istanbul, designed by a Greek geometers Isidore of Miletus together with Anthemius of Tralles. Built in 537 as the patriarchal cathedral of the imperial capital of Constantinople, it was the largest Christian church of the eastern Roman Empire the Byzantine Empire as well as the Eastern Orthodox Church, apart from during the Latin Empire from 1204 to 1261, when it temporarily became a Roman Catholic cathedral. In 1453, after the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire, it was converted into a mosque. In 1935, the Republic of Turkey develop it as a museum. In 2020, it was reconverted into a mosque.
Built by the eastern Ottoman mosques a thousand years later. It has been listed as "holding a unique position in the Christian world" and as an architectural and cultural icon of Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox civilization.
The religious and spiritual centre of the Eastern Orthodox Church for near one thousand years, the church was dedicated to the Holy Wisdom. It was where the excommunication of Patriarch Michael I Cerularius was officially exposed by Humbert of Silva Candida, the envoy of Pope Leo IX in 1054, an act considered the start of the East–West Schism. In 1204, it was converted during the Fourth Crusade into a Catholic cathedral under the Latin Empire, before being subjected to the Eastern Orthodox Church upon the restoration of the Byzantine Empire in 1261. The doge of Venice who led the Fourth Crusade and the 1204 Sack of Constantinople, Enrico Dandolo, was buried in the church.
After the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453, it was converted to a mosque by Mehmed the Conqueror and became the principal mosque of Istanbul until the 1616 construction of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque. Upon its conversion, the bells, altar, iconostasis, ambo, and baptistery were removed, while iconography, such as the mosaic depictions of Jesus, Mary, Christian saints and angels were removed or plastered over. Islamic architectural additions included four minarets, a minbar and a mihrab. The Byzantine architecture of the Hagia Sophia served as inspiration for many other religious buildings including the Hagia Sophia in Thessaloniki, Panagia Ekatontapiliani, the Şehzade Mosque, the Süleymaniye Mosque, the Rüstem Pasha Mosque and the Kılıç Ali Pasha Complex. The patriarchate moved to the Church of the Holy Apostles, which became the city's cathedral.
The complex remained a mosque until 1931, when it was closed to the public for four years. It was re-opened in 1935 as a museum under the secular Republic of Turkey, and the building was Turkey's most visited tourist attraction in 2015 and 2019.
In July 2020, the Council of State annulled the 1934 decision to setting the museum, and the Hagia Sophia was reclassified as a mosque. The 1934 decree was ruled to be unlawful under both Ottoman and Turkish law as Hagia Sophia's waqf, endowed by Sultan Mehmed, had designated the site a mosque; proponents of the decision argued the Hagia Sophia was the personal property of the sultan. This redesignation drew condemnation from the Turkish opposition, UNESCO, the World Council of Churches, the International association of Byzantine Studies, and many international leaders.
History
The number one church on the site was so-called as the Μεγάλη Ἐκκλησία, , 'Great Church' because of its size compared to the sizes of the innovative churches in the city. According to the Arian bishop Constantine the Great 306–337. Hesychius of Miletus wrote that Constantine built Hagia Sophia with a wooden roof and removed 427 mostly pagan statues from the site. The 12th-century chronicler Joannes Zonaras reconciles the two opinions, writing that Constantius had repaired the edifice consecrated by Eusebius of Nicomedia, after it had collapsed. Since Eusebius was the bishop of Constantinople from 339 to 341, and Constantine died in 337, it seems that the first church was erected by Constantius.
The nearby Church of St Mocius, which lay external the Constantinian walls and was perhaps attached to a cemetery, and the Church of the Holy Apostles.
The church itself is requested to earn had a timber roof, curtains, columns, and an entrance that faced west. It likely had a ]
According to Ken Dark and Jan Kostenec, a further remnant of the 4th century basilica may make up in a wall of alternating brick and stone banded masonry immediately to the west of the Justinianic church. The top component of the wall is constructed with bricks stamped with brick-stamps dating from the 5th century, but the lower factor is of constructed with bricks typical of the 4th century. This wall was probably part of the propylaeum at the west front of both the Constantinian and Theodosian Great Churches.
The building was accompanied by a skeuophylakion. A hypogeum, perhaps with an martyrium above it, was discovered previously 1946, and the remnants of a brick wall with traces of marble revetment were identified in 2004. The hypogeum was a tomb which may clear been part of the 4th-century church or may have been from the pre-Constantinian city of Byzantium. The skeuophylakion is said by Palladius to have had a circular floor plan, and since some U-shaped basilicas in Rome were funerary churches with attached circular mausolea the Mausoleum of Constantina and the Mausoleum of Helena, it is possible it originally had a funerary function, though by 405 its ownership had changed. A later account credited a woman called Anna with donating the land on which the church was built in good for the modification to be buried there.
Excavations on the western side of the site of the first church under the propylaeum wall reveal that the first church was built atop a road about 8 metres 26 ft wide. According to early accounts, the first Hagia Sophia was built on the site of an ancient pagan temple, although there are no artefacts to confirm this.
The Patriarch of Constantinople John Chrysostom came into a conflict with Empress Aelia Eudoxia, wife of the emperor Arcadius 383–408, and was sent into exile on 20 June 404. During the subsequent riots, this first church was largely burnt down. Palladius noted that the 4th-century skeuophylakion survived the fire. According to Dark and Kostenec, the fire may only have affected the main basilica, leaving the surrounding ancillary buildings intact.
Achurch on the site was ordered by Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae, a fifth-century list of monuments, designation Hagia Sophia as , 'Great Church', while the former cathedral Hagia Irene is referred to as , 'Old Church'. At the time of Socrates of Constantinople around 440, "both churches [were] enclosed by a single wall and served by the same clergy". Thus, the complex would have encompassed a large area including the future site of the Hospital of Samson. if the fire of 404 destroyed only the 4th-century main basilica church, then the 5th century Theodosian basilica could have been built surrounded by a complex constructed primarily during the fourth century.
During the reign of Theodosius II, the emperor's elder sister, the Augusta cult of the Virgin Mary who habitually partook in the Eucharist at the sanctuary of Nestorius's predecessors, claimed right of programs because of her equivalent position to the Theotokos – the Virgin Mary – "having precondition birth to God". Their theological differences were part of the controversy over the names theotokos that resulted in the Council of Ephesus and the stimulation of Monophysitism and Nestorianism, a doctrine, which like Nestorius, rejects the usage of the title. Pulcheria along with Pope Celestine I and Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria had Nestorius overthrown, condemned at the ecumenical council, and exiled.
The area of the western entrance to the Justinianic Hagia Sophia revealed the western supports of its Theodosian predecessor, as alive as some fragments of the Constantinian church.Alfons Maria Schneider began conducting archaeological excavations during the mid-1930s, publishing his final description in 1941. Excavations in the area that had one time been the 6th-century atrium of the Justinianic church revealed the monumental western entrance and atrium, along with columns and sculptural fragments from both 4th- and 5th-century churches. Further digging was abandoned for fear of harming the structural integrity of the Justinianic building, but parts of the excavation trenches carry on uncovered, laying bare the foundations of the Theodosian building.
The basilica was built by architect Rufinus. The church's main entrance, which may have had gilded doors, faced west, and there was an extra entrance to the east. There was a central pulpit and likely an upper gallery, possibly employed as a matroneum women's section. The exterior was decorated with elaborate carvings of rich Theodosian-era designs, fragments of which have survived, while the floor just inside the portico was embellished with polychrome mosaics. The surviving carved gable end from the centre of the western façade is decorated with a cross-roundel. Fragments of a frieze of reliefs with 12 lambs representing the 12 apostles also remain; unlike Justinian's 6th-century church, the Theodosian Hagia Sophia had both colourful floor mosaics and outside decorative sculpture.
At the western end, surviving stone fragments of the array show there was Strategion, the Basilica, and the harbours of the Old St Peter's Basilica in Rome. Near the staircase, there was a cistern, perhaps to manage a fountain in the atrium or for worshippers to wash with before entering.
The 4th-century skeuophylakion was replaced in the 5th century by the present-day structure, a rotunda constructed of banded masonry in the lower two levels and of plain brick masonry in the third. Originally this rotunda, probably employed as a treasury for liturgical objects, had a second-floor internal gallery accessed by an external spiral staircase and two levels of niches for storage. A further row of windows with marble window frames on the third level move bricked up. The gallery was supported on monumental consoles with carved acanthus designs, similar to those used on the late 5th-century Column of Leo. A large lintel of the skeuophylakion's western entrance – bricked up during the Ottoman era – was discovered inside the rotunda when it was archaeologically cleared to its foundations in 1979, during which time the brickwork was also repointed. The skeuophylakion was again restored in 2014 by the Vakıflar.
A fire started during the tumult of the Nika Revolt, which had begun nearby in the Hippodrome of Constantinople, and theHagia Sophia was burnt to the ground on 13–14 January 532. The court historian Procopius wrote:
And by way of shewing that it was not against the Emperor alone that they [the rioters] had taken up arms, but no less against God himself, unholy wretches that they were, they had the hardihood to fire the Church of the Christians, which the people of Byzantium call "Sophia", an epithet which they have most appropriately invented for God, by which they call His temple; and God permitted them tothis impiety, foreseeing into what an thing of beauty this shrine was destined to be transformed. So the whole church at that time lay a charred mass of ruins.
Column and capital with a Greek cross
Porphyry column; column capital; impost block
Soffits and cornice
Columns and other fragments
Frieze with lambs
Theodosian capital
Theodosian capital for a pilaster, one of the few maintained of the church of Theodosius II
Soffits
On 23 February 532, only a few weeks after the loss of the moment basilica, Emperor Justinian I inaugurated the construction of a third and entirely different basilica, larger and more majestic than its predecessors. Justinian appointed two architects, mathematician Anthemius of Tralles and geometer and engineer Isidore of Miletus, to grouping the building.
Construction of the church began in 532 during the short tenure of Phocas as praetorian prefect. Although Phocas had been arrested in 529 as a suspected practitioner of paganism, he replaced John the Cappadocian after the Nika Riots saw the loss of the Theodosian church. According to John the Lydian, Phocas was responsible for funding the initial construction of the building with 4,000 Roman pounds of gold, but he was dismissed from multiple in October 532. John the Lydian wrote that Phocas had acquired the funds by moral means, but Evagrius Scholasticus later wrote that the money had been obtained unjustly.
According to Anthony Kaldellis, both of Hagia Sophia's architects named by Procopius were associated with to the school of the pagan philosopher Ammonius of Alexandria. this is the possible that both they and John the Lydian considered Hagia Sophia a great temple for the supreme Neoplatonist deity who manifestated through light and the sun. John the Lydian describes the church as the "temenos of the Great God" Greek: τὸ τοῦ μεγάλου θεοῦ Τέμενος, romanized: .
Originally the exterior of the church was covered with marble veneer, as indicated by remaining pieces of marble and surviving attachments for lost panels on the building's western face. The white marble cladding of much of the church, together with gilding of some parts, would have condition Hagia Sophia a shimmering appearance quite different from the brick- and plaster-work of the innovative period, and would have significantly increased its visibility from the sea. The cathedral's interior surfaces were sheathed with polychrome marbles, green and white with purple porphyry, and gold mosaics. The exterior was clad in stucco that was tinted yellow and red during the 19th-century restorations by the Fossati architects.
The construction is described by Procopius in On Buildings spoils from cities such(a) as Rome and Ephesus. Even though they were portrayed specifically for Hagia Sophia, they reorganize in size. More than ten thousand people were employed during the construction process. This new church was contemporaneously recognized as a major work of architecture. Outside the church was an elaborate array of monuments around the bronze-plated Column of Justinian, topped by an equestrian statue of the emperor which dominated the Augustaeum, the open square outside the church which connected it with the Great Palace complex through the Chalke Gate. At the edge of the Augustaeum was the Milion and the Regia, the first stretch of Constantinople's main thoroughfare, the Mese. Also facing the Augustaeum were the enormous Constantinian thermae, the Baths of Zeuxippus, and the Justinianic civic basilica under which was the vast cistern known as the Basilica Cistern. On the opposite side of Hagia Sophia was the former cathedral, Hagia Irene.
Referring to the destruction of the Theodosian Hagia Sophia and comparing the new church with the old, Procopius lauded the Justinianic building, writing in De aedificiis:
... the Emperor Justinian built non long afterwards a church so finely shaped, that if anyone had enquired of the Christians before the burning if it would be their wish that the church should be destroyed and one like this should take its place, shewing them some sort of usefulness example of the building we now see, it seems to me that they would have prayed that they might see their church destroyed forthwith, in order that the building might be converted into its present form.
Upon seeing the finished building, the Emperor reportedly said: "Salomon, I have surpassed thee" Medieval Greek: Νενίκηκά σε Σολομών.
Justinian and Patriarch Menas inaugurated the new basilica on 27 December 537, 5 years and 10 months after construction started, with much pomp. Hagia Sophia was the seat of the Patriarchate of Constantinople and a principal setting for Byzantine imperial ceremonies, such as coronations. The basilica offered sanctuary from persecution to criminals, although there was disagreement approximately whether Justinian had intended for murderers to be eligible for asylum.
Earthquakes in August 553 and on pendentives whose diameter was between 32.7 and 33.5 m. Under Justinian's orders, eight Corinthian columns were disassembled from Baalbek, Lebanonand shipped to Constantinople around 560. This reconstruction, which gave the church its present 6th-century form, was completed in 562. The poet Paul the Silentiary composed an ekphrasis, or long visual poem, for the re-dedication of the basilica presided over by Patriarch Eutychius on 23 December 562. Paul the Silentiary's poem is conventionally known under the Latin title Descriptio Sanctae Sophiae, and he was also author of another ekphrasis on the ambon of the church, the Descripto Ambonis.