Posted on 05/29/2007 8:44:54 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
It is an ancient thing, battered and scarred. It rises above Istanbul yet seems hunkered down, protecting itself from the abuses of nature and from an even crueler tormentor, the civilized world. Since its completion as a place of worship in A.D. 537, Hagia Sophia (AH-yah so-FEE-ah) has suffered as few other buildings on earth have—at least those that remain standing. I recently asked director Mustafa Akkaya, who looks after it, if he found it lovely, and he replied, "I say it is the most beautiful building in the world." Earthquakes, pillagers, and zealots do nothing to enhance conventional beauty, so I suppose that as the centuries pass and the building deteriorates, fewer and fewer people will feel as he and I do.
To me Hagia Sophia is the noblest structure on earth, as disfigured as some brutish prehistoric creature of indeterminate age that endures even as others of its ilk have passed from existence. Its colors are a faded array of ocher and brown, dust and rose. It has so many bricked-up windows and portals that it looks to me as though every emperor and sultan who ruled over it decided the guy before him didn't know what he was doing. I find it hard to imagine a building as magnificent as Hagia Sophia being tinkered with over and over again, but omnipotence has always had an odd effect on the people granted it.
I tend to scoff at those who claim to have sentimental attachments to inanimate objects, unless they are talking about their great-great-grandfather's black-walnut chest that crossed the Atlantic in a sailing ship. Nevertheless, I can sense the pain of Hagia Sophia. Whenever I walk into the building—first a church, then a mosque, now a museum—I apologize silently for the defilements, insults, and betrayals. Most are the work of man. Nature is also guilty of its share of bad deeds, but here I cannot level blame, except at gods I do not understand.
I can think of only one reason why I feel this way. My heart always goes out to the defenseless, and from the first time I saw Hagia Sophia, nearly 20 years ago, I knew it was in need of a hero. Too bad, for the sake of the building, it turned out to be me. On the face of it, Hagia Sophia should not move me. I am not from Europe or Asia, and it looks over both. I am not a Christian, nor am I a Muslim. I am no scholar of Byzantium, that's for sure. Yet Hagia Sophia affects me in ways no other building ever has.
I have traveled three times to Istanbul, and I believe nothing can deter me from returning, certainly not the recent multiple terrorist attacks. The bombings—on synagogues, a bank, a consulate—seemed designed to punish Turkey for its temperate politics and nonsectarian policies. These are uncommon virtues among Muslim nations, and I would go back just to express my appreciation, even if the city didn't stir me so and the kabobs weren't so good.
Istanbul is a repository of wonders all the more startling for the casualness with which they are displayed, but whenever I am there, Hagia Sophia is where I spend a disproportionate amount of my time. I do not ceaselessly gape at fragments of late-Byzantine mosaics, although I never fail to climb up to the galleries and pay my respects to the Deesis Mosaic, much as I would never visit Paris without stopping in to see the Winged Victory. The depiction of a grim, stately, omnipotent Jesus Christ in this thirteenth-century mosaic is to me both compelling and chilling, quite unlike any other I know. Mostly, I just stand awestruck on the irregular marble floor, looking up at a dome more than 100 feet across and more than 200 feet high, wondering how it could possibly have been built. I understand that I am supposed to feel this way about the Pyramids, but they are just piles of stones, whereas the roof of Hagia Sophia is a cloud.
I do not remain locked in a state of awe and contemplation the entire time I am on the museum grounds. I also like the snack bar. It is among the most naturally agreeable sanctuaries in the city, cooled by breezes off the Bosphorus, shaded by plane trees, safe from carpet hustlers trying to drag you to the shop of their second cousin who is offering a rare kilim just in from Azerbaijan.
I will now do Hagia Sophia an injustice by compressing its history into a few sentences. It was built in less than six years, thanks to a novel construction technique pioneered by the Orthodox Christian emperor Justinian I: He looted foreign lands of marble columns and other ready-made materials. Upon completion, Hagia Sophia was so grand that it required a staff which included 60 to 80 priests and 75 to 100 doorkeepers.
Nature got in the first licks. A series of earthquakes between A.D. 553 and 557 brought down the original dome, which was by all accounts even loftier than the current one. Subsequent water seepage caused the loss of an enormous number of the 30 million gold-painted tiles that once covered the interior walls—visitors in the mid twentieth century reported hearing the tinkle of ancient tiles dropping to the marble floor. Earlier, Mark Twain wrote that guides picked gold tiles from the walls to hand out as souvenirs.
In 1204, soldiers of the Holy Roman Empire's Fourth Crusade, an extraordinarily debased lot, captured Constantinople and stripped the church of all the gold, silver, books, vestments, relics, and icons they could carry away. (This particular Crusade was all about conquest and looting anyway.) Hagia Sophia was the first victim of friendly fire.
Fatally weakened by the Crusaders, the city ultimately fell to Sultan Mehmet II, who transformed Hagia Sophia into a mosque in 1454. He and other Ottoman rulers subsequently added four minarets, which give a welcome sense of loftiness to what is, I'm sorry to say, a somewhat squat building. They also altered the interior in a manner I would describe as sacrilegious, although I'm certain they were merely following the accepted pillage-and-plunder conventions of the day. The Ottomans, to their credit, merely covered up the Christian depictions that offended them, doing less damage than the Crusaders had.
To my personal list of desecrators I add the well-regarded Swiss architects Gaspare and Giuseppe Fossati. Their uninspired nineteenth-century Ottoman-ordered alterations included replastering and repainting as well as hanging huge painted wooden shields, replete with Arabic writing, high on the tiled walls. They are as jarring as billboards along a country road. To me, the Fossatis were the Ringling Brothers of architects, their appallingly bright yellows and blues making much of the present interior resemble an Islamic big top.
Hagia Sophia ceased being a mosque in 1932 by decree of Kemal Ataturk, the man who transformed Turkey into a secular republic and, for all practical purposes, ended the argument over whether Hagia Sophia should be Christian or Muslim: He made it a museum. Today, admission is steep (almost $12) and some of the secondary buildings remain closed to the public. No official tours are offered, exhibits are barely adequate, and the gift shop could use a marketing manager.
Fundamentalist Muslims in Turkey have petitioned the government to make Hagia Sophia a mosque once again. (A friend of mine living in Turkey, an exceedingly pragmatic Muslim, says that the last thing the city needs is another working mosque, since hardly anybody prays at those currently in operation.) The Ecumenical Patriarchate, headquarters of the Greek Orthodox Church, remains in Istanbul against all odds—one of its patriarchs, or church leaders, was hanged for treason in 1821 after backing Greek efforts to overthrow the Ottomans. The Patriarchate fervently wants Hagia Sophia to be a church again.
A representative of the Patriarchate told me that a more reasonable aspiration is for the Turkish government to permit the celebration of a liturgy there once a year, which would bring honor, goodwill, and tourism. The Church is unlikely to get even that. The representative (who asked that his name be withheld) pointed out that the official designation of the Greek Orthodox Church by the Turkish government is Fener Rum Patriarchate, which essentially reduces it to a neighborhood religious organization (Fener is the name of an Istanbul quarter). While I was there, the Patriarchate was involved in a dispute with local government officials over the ownership of some minor apartment buildings, which hardly bodes well for its claims to Hagia Sophia itself.
I found a guide outside the gates of the museum. He was mingling with the carpet dealers, which should have warned me off. The stooped fellow gave his age as 75, his name as Mustafa Barlak, his provenance as Bulgarian Turk. He looked and acted like Abe Vigoda, who played Detective Phil Fish on the seventies TV show Barney Miller. When I complained that he took nothing seriously, he said, "People like the legends and the stories. Don't blame me."
Barlak explained that the oil-burning chandeliers in Hagia Sophia were hung low in order to enhance the little light they do provide. "Thomas Edison wasn't with us then." He described a tilted marble column as the "Turkish Tower of Pisa." Not in his repertoire were the most enduring and evocative legends of Hagia Sophia. It is said that two priests were celebrating Mass when the Ottomans broke through the doors, whereupon the priests melted into the walls, carrying with them precious artifacts; they will not return until Constantinople is again a Christian city. Another story has it that the original altar is at the bottom of the sea and will rise when Constantinople becomes Christian once more. Christians in Turkey are nothing if not hopeful.
My guide's tutelage was yet another reason for me to pity Hagia Sophia. Even where tours are concerned, it suffers like no other building on earth. Barlak had few things to say about the magnificent mosaics for which Hagia Sophia is renowned—although he did point out that the eyes of Jesus in the Deesis Mosaic follow you as you walk away. He said little about the mosaics because he believed that I, like most Americans, would be bored. He might have been right. Byzantine mosaics are grim pieces of work, and we Americans prefer lighthearted art.
Mustafa Akkaya, the director of the museum, has a different theory as to why mosaics haven't caught our collective attention. (I didn't want to torture him by pointing out that Americans do like mosaic tiles—if they're part of bathroom or kitchen decor.) "The art you love is easily transportable," he said. "Mosaics cannot be lifted and taken away." I amended his theory to suggest that Americans tend to value only what they have a reasonable expectation of buying, and the finest mosaic art tends to be firmly affixed to walls.
Hagia Sophia's mosaics are primarily fragments. The few that survive have been restored, to the credit of Turkish administrators. Most are in the galleries, reached by walking up a crude curving ramp. (The Christian emperors rode up in chariots pulled by ponies.) I like to imagine what Hagia Sophia must have looked like a thousand years ago, when the interior was surely a wonder unequaled anywhere on earth. Apparently, the marble floors were once highly polished and the walls ablaze from the golden tiles. Now the museum is gloomy. I've always been astonished at how little light is allowed to enter houses of worship, when one would expect the opposite.
I knocked on Christian doors, curious to learn if the loss of Hagia Sophia still rankled, or perhaps even burned. The Ecumenical Patriarchate was not the only organization reluctant to speak on the record. The mere fact that after millennia the Church of Divine Wisdom can inspire so much discomfiture was a revelation.
I went to the Roman Catholic Church of St. Anthony three times before a member of the clergy would see me. On my second visit, a priest thrust a promotional pamphlet into my hands and firmly shut the door in my face. I imagined him standing with his back to the door, breathing deeply, praying that the inquisitor would not return to torment him yet again. On my third visit, I cornered a kindly priest who took me to a small room, folded his hands, and told me that he would speak to me if I did not use his name or his words. He said that the controversy over Hagia Sophia was a Greek Orthodox matter, not a Roman Catholic one. His nervousness disappeared only when I told him that the Patriarchate didn't seem any more interested in speaking openly about Hagia Sophia than he did. At this, he actually grinned.
Several other church leaders did not return my calls after I left messages explaining the nature of my inquiries. The only one who welcomed me was the Reverend Benjamin van Rensburg of the Union Church of Istanbul, who pointed out that political realities made the designation of Hagia Sophia as a museum a sensible decision. He said that however controversial the matter might be today, it is not as serious as it was just after World War I, when the defeat and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire made Muslims intensely concerned that Hagia Sophia would be reconsecrated as a church. Akkaya, the museum director, said that Ataturk's decision to create a museum was one of the most important and critical moments in the Westernization of modern Turkey, because it allowed Hagia Sophia to represent two cultures and two religions. The accomplishment seems all the more noteworthy today, considering the deteriorating state of Muslim-Christian relations throughout the world.
I find myself standing pretty much alone among devout believers in Hagia Sophia because I can accept whatever religion it happens to represent. I'm certain that both Muslims and Christians would be comfortable with my form of devotion. I do not pray for Hagia Sophia simply because I don't think that way. But I do worry about it all the time.
If only the British would have allowed it!
At that time Constantinople was still 1/3 to 1/2 Christian (Greek and Armenian), and Eastern Thrace and the City could have very easily been given to the Greeks as war booty without many problems.
The paucity of reward and support for the Greeks after WWI is the direct cause of the present problems.
The British never could understand what to fight for besides their own wallet.
Glad you brought this up. Imagine a Turkey with the western end belonging to Greece and the eastern end belonging to Kurdistan.
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