June 1 Almost 2 Millenia - from church to mosque to museum

Death and destruction, violence and the ago-old fight for dominance. Everywhere we go we tread in the footsteps of conquerors and the conquered. But there we were 1 June 2018 also in the wake of stars - Tom Hanks, Liam Neeson, and the James Bond greats! Que? Think Sky Fall, From Russia with Love, Inferno, Taken 2.  We visited Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace and the Basilica Cistern - all featured in those movies. Such astonishing places! 

Hagia Sophia is overwhelming in all its amazing dimensions. What stands today is the third church built on the site. The first was built by Constantine the Great in the C4th. That church was destroyed but rebuilt by his son; this and the first church were made of, or roofed with, wood and that led to their demise. The second church was burned to the ground during the Nika riots in the mid C6th. (I’ll tell you about the Nika riots some other time or you could look it up. If you think of today’s soccer rioting crowds, multiply that by a factor of ten or more and that’s the Nika riots) Some fragments of that second church have been excavated and more excavation is in progress - I took a shot through a fence. 

Hagia Sophia (Church of Holy Wisdom) was the seat of the Orthodox Church for almost 1000 years until the mighty Crusaders attached and plundered the church replacing the Patriarch with a Roman bishop. And the rest of that story of the schism between orthodox and catholic is history. 

Then Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror marched into Constantinople and claimed this beautiful structure as his imperial mosque and among other changes he made to the church, he built minarets and covered the glorious gold mosaics. Thankfully 500 or so years later the amazing Atatürk secularised Hagia Sophia and turned it into a museum and restoration began. 

It is awesome, magnificent, glorious, astonishingly beautiful and has withstood so much insult including earthquakes. She is a mighty monument and I wake each morning with her taking up half of the sky from our window. And sometimes the hauntingly beautiful adhan (call to worship) echoes from one of her minarets and holds me spell bound for a while. 

This slippery marble slope takes you to the women section on the second level. 











This is Haga Sophia’ cat. She has her own Facebook page!

Excavations for the original church