Hagia Sophia, also known as Turkish Ayasofya, Latin Sancta Sophia, Church of the Holy Wisdom or Church of the Divine Wisdom, was a cathedral built at Constantinople in the 6th century C.E. (532–537) under the direction of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I. The great architectural beauty is an important monument both for Byzantine and for Ottoman Empires. It was built as a church, and then converted into a mosque, finally becoming a museum at the Turkish Republic now.
The original church on the site of the Hagia Sophia is said to have been built by Constantine I in 325 on the foundations of a pagan temple. It survived a fire twice with some damages on its structure, once in 404 and the second time in January 532. It went through an earthquake in 558 and suffered a partial collapse on the dome and was restored again in 562. After the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmed II had it repurposed as a mosque, with the addition of minarets (on the exterior, towers used for the summons to prayer), a great chandelier, a mihrab (niche indicating the direction of Mecca), a minbar (pulpit), and disks bearing Islamic calligraphy. Kemal Atatürk secularized the building in 1934, and in 1935 it was made into a museum.
Art historians consider the building’s beautiful mosaics to be the main source of knowledge about the state of mosaic art in the time shortly after the end of the Iconoclastic Controversy in the 8th and 9th centuries.
Hagia Sophia was beautifully decorated with mosaics within the centuries during Byzantine period. These mosaics depicted Virgin Mary, Jesus, saints and emperors or empresses. The history of the earliest mosaics is unknown as many of them were destroyed or covered during Iconoclasm. The known ones start from the reestablishment of orthodoxy and reach its height during the reigns of Basil I and Constantine VII.
During the fourth crusade in 1204, Latin Crusaders sacked many Byzantine buildings including Hagia Sophia. Many beautiful mosaics were removed and shipped to Venice. After the Ottoman occupation of Constantinople in 1453, with the transition of Hagia Sophia into mosque, the mosaics were covered whitewashed or plastered. With Fosatti brothers’ restoration in 1847, the mosaics got uncovered and were copied for record. But they still remained covered until 1931 when a restoration and recovery program began under the leadership of Thomas Whittemore.
In 1934, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk ordered that Hagia Sophia would become a museum, the recovery and restoration expanded then. However, many of the great mosaics that Fosatti brothers recorded had disappeared probably with the earthquake in 1894.
- ("Hagia Sophia Mosaics")
Reference
Hagia Sophia. (n.d.). Retrieved October 27, 2017, from http://www.hagiasophia.com/
The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica (Ed.). (n.d.). Hagia Sophia. Retrieved October 27, 2017, from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hagia-Sophia
Hagia Sophia Mosaics. (n.d.). Retrieved October 27, 2017, from http://www.hagiasophia.com/listingview.php?listingID=2
