Kenan Malik: Hagia Sophia is too complex for Erdoğan's cleansing
Solomon, I have
outdone thee.” So remarked Justinian, the Roman emperor who commissioned Hagia
Sophia, the great cathedral at the heart of Constantinople, now Istanbul.
Throughout its history it has been a source of wonder and debate. Now, the
decision by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to turn
it back into a mosque has reawakened many of the historical and
religious ghosts that haunt its sublime spaces.
Completed in 537,
Hagia Sophia was at once the culminating architectural achievement of late
antiquity and the first Byzantine masterpiece. Most remarkable was the huge
dome at the heart of the building. “It seems not to be founded on solid
masonry, but to be suspended from heaven,” wrote the great historian Procopius.
A millennium later, the Ottoman historian Tursun Beg was equally awestruck:
“What a dome, that vies in rank with the nine spheres of heaven!”
Bethan
McKernan - Ayasofya: the mosque-turned-museum at the heart of an ideological
battle
Beneath the dome are
40 windows through which sunlight suffuses the interior, illuminating gold
mosaics and conjuring, for believers and non-believers alike, a sense of
ineffable mystery.
Hagia Sophia was the seat of the Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople, and the spiritual heart of Byzantium. After the city was captured by the Ottomans, in 1453, Constantinople became Istanbul and Hagia Sofia a mosque, Ayasofya. In 1935, under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, it was turned into a museum…..
