Hagia Sophia is consecrated
After five years of building, the emperor Justinian consecrates the largest church in the world. The vast dome rests on pendentives above a square space.
Hagia Sophia became the model for the churches of the Orthodox world and later for the Ottoman mosques.
In January 532 the Nika riots broke out in Constantinople. They began among the supporters of the city’s chariot-racing factions and ended with much of the centre in flames, including the older church of Hagia Sophia. The emperor Justinian put down the revolt bloodily and only a few weeks later began building a new church on the same site. It was to show that imperial power was unshakeable and that he was God’s chosen ruler. As architects he appointed not ordinary master builders but two learned men, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, both versed in geometry and mechanics. The name means Holy Wisdom and refers to Christ, not to any saint.
Construction went very quickly. The walls are of brick laid in thick beds of mortar, and the space is covered by a great dome carried on four massive piers by means of pendentives, the curved triangles that make the transition from square to circle. To the east and west, half-domes extend the space, so that the church is both a centrally planned building and a longitudinal one. A ring of windows at the base of the dome makes it seem to float freely. The walls were faced with marble in many colours from all over the empire and the vaults with gold mosaic. The dome was too shallow, however, and collapsed in 558 after earthquakes. Isidore’s nephew, Isidore the Younger, built a new and higher dome, which was consecrated in 562.
The historian Procopius, who lived under Justinian, described how the dome seemed to hang from heaven on a golden chain. When the Ottomans took the city in 1453, Sultan Mehmed II turned the church into a mosque and added minarets. Hagia Sophia then became the building that Ottoman architects, not least Sinan, tried to surpass in their mosques. In 1934 the Turkish Republic made the building a museum, and in 2020 it became a mosque again. Here, too, there is an unexpected Nordic trace. On a balustrade in the gallery someone has carved runes that are usually read as the name Halfdan, probably a Norseman in the emperor’s Varangian Guard or another Viking Age traveller.