Hagia Sophia

Hagia Sophia was built in 532-537 on the orders of Emperor Justinian: in five years Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus raised a dome about thirty-one metres in diameter to a height of fifty-five. The device on which the whole building rests is a dome on pendentives supported by two half-domes, so that the interior seems not roofed over but opened upwards. Forty windows at the base of the dome give an even, diffused light, and it was because of it that contemporaries wrote that the dome seemed suspended from heaven on a golden chain. For almost a thousand years this was the principal cathedral of the Christian world; after 1453 the church became a mosque, in 1935 a museum, and since 2020 it has again been in use as a mosque. Of the Byzantine decoration there survive the marble facing of the walls, the carved capitals and the gold mosaics of the upper levels, and beside them hang eight enormous round medallions bearing the names of Allah, the Prophet and the first caliphs, written in the nineteenth century. The dome partly collapsed twice, at the end of the tenth century and in the middle of the fourteenth, and both times it was put back together. The chandeliers hang on long cables almost down to the floor, and from below the whole structure can be taken in at once.

On the map