Hagia Sophia
I only had one touristy request when we visited Istanbul last year. There might even had been a clause issued with my art history degree at Wofford stating that any visit to the city had to include a trip to Hagia Sophia. I remember bumbling through the floor plans and apses of every Byzantine church of significance in the dank slide room during my first survey course my freshman year. All the facades blur together in my brain now, but Hagia Sophia can never be forgotten - not even if one's first glimpse of her was a murky slide. Mihran took me there last year on a Monday, the only day the church turned mosque turned museum is closed. This year we called ahead for hours and visited the afternoon of our first full day in the city. It was very hot that day and I will always remember the quiet coolness of the stone as we entered. The doorways made a part of me that I thought was long gone rush with a little thrill. The carvings around the doorways made me sigh. And even though the dome was obscured by restoration scaffolding by the time I reached the center, I was crying. Nothing made by man should be so beautiful.
Built in the 6th century, Hagia Sophia, or Church of the Holy Wisdom, cost 320,000 pounds of gold. The great dome collapsed in 558 and was rebuilt in 562, remaining until recently the largest self supporting dome of its kind in any part of the world - most interestingly in a region with a history of massive earthquakes. I had read many accounts of the mystical quality of the light within Hagia Sophia. Forty windows beneath the dome and the many windows scattered throughout the structure give the building a since of openness and light seldom seen in heavy Byzantine architecture. The light is unearthly. I tried to use my flash as little as possible - and was unable to use it at all on the protected mosaics unearthed with care from underneath plaster when the building was converted to a museum in 1935. The light in these photos is, for the most part, natural. Every corner I turned in the building brought light from a new angle, or from a seemingly unidentifiable source. The half dome apse mosaic of Virgin and Child below seemed as if it were lighted from within.
This is a cool fact. When the church was converted to a mosque under Ottoman rule, four minarets were added at each corner of the building's exterior. Only two minarets are architecturally similar but all contribute to the structural integrity of the building itself. Without the minarets, the building would have most likely collapsed with all the seismic activity it has endured over the ages.
