HAGIA SOPHIA

HAGIA SOPHIA. The original church of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) was a basilica built during the reign of Constantius II ca. 360, and then rebuilt in 415. After the second church had burned down during the Nika riots of 532, the Emperor Justinian (q.v.) engaged the architects Isidore of Miletos and Anthimos of Tralles to design and build a cathedral worthy of the imperial capital. The result was the present building completed in 537. Its splendor is said to have elicited from the emperor the cry: “Solomon, I have surpassed you!” The building features an enormous dome, 180 feet high, built over the plan of a cross. Its architecture (q.v.) provided the template for the classical Byzantine churches to come, although none would ever approach its scale. Converted into a mosque by Sultan Mohammed II after the conquest of Constantinople, Hagia Sophia was the Ottoman Empire’s banner of victory over Christian Byzantium (qq.v.) and served again as a template, this time for the series of impressive mosques punctuating the skyline of Turkish Constantinople. With the regime of Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s, the building was declared a secular museum, an act that has permitted art restorers to recover some of the mosaics that had filled it prior to the Ottoman conquest.