After breakfast we headed toward the Hagia Sophia for our tour with a tour guide. We met him & the rest of our group of about 6 people. We really liked the people in our tour group. 2 were from America & 2 were from England & we all hit it off right off the bat. All of us were big historians so it made learning the history SO much more interesting. The Hagia Sophia is a mosque, but was a former Christian church, & a big cultural & historical site in Instanbul. It was completed in 537 AD. It was an Eastern Orthodox church from 360 AD to 1204 & then became a Catholic church after the 4th crusade. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, it served as a mosque until 1935 when it became a museum. It because a mosque once again in 2020. The museum remains on the 2nd floor of the building & has an active mosque on the first floor which is not open to visitors. The Hagai Sophia was build by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I as the Christian cathedral by the Byzantine Empire between 532-537 (yes, the entire thing was constructed in the 6th century in less than 5 years!). It became the world’s largest interior space & one of the first to to have a fully pendentive dome. It remained the world’s largest cathedral for nearly 1000 years until the Seville Cathedral was completed in 1520.
Our tour here lasted about an hour & we enjoyed walking around the 2nd floor of the building & just admired how incredible it was for it’s time period. The ceilings were once encrusted with gold, silver, & jewels like rubies, emeralds, sapphires, & more. It was plundered during the Ottoman conquest so very few of the precious stones still remain (we could only see a few). The inside has been replastered & repainted several times over the years to help tourists imagine what it looked like in the 6th century when it was built. There are still original beams of wood holding part of the structure of the columns up. These beams are carved intricately & are beautiful. There is a carved marble doorway on one side that is spectacular, & I loved the still present mosaics of Jesus Christ, the mother Mary, John the Baptist & more. Only partial mosaics remain, but they are beautiful. I loved the painted angels with 6 wings on the ceiling. For years, there were plaster masks over the center of each painted angel until one day during restoration, one of the plaster masks fell off to reveal the face of an angel. Only that angel’s face remains uncovered to this day. The plaster masks still hide the other angel’s faces. The dome of the church is huge. It was the largest of its kind for 1000 years. The sheer weight of this dome has modified the structure of the building over time. You can see pillars bending at odd angles under the weight of the dome. Arches & ceilings are changing shape & shifting under the weight. It’s crazy. One big earthquake could bring this building to the ground. The 1st floor is now an active mosque & hosts many visitors & regular Islamic worshippers daily. We could only look upon it from the 2nd floor, but it had beautiful teal carpets & many light fixtures to brighten it. The stain glass windows in it were beautiful. After our tour, we made our way outside & found one more remaining Christian mosaic hidden in an alleyway to the side of the church. It was beautiful. I’m SO glad we had the opportunity to see the Hagia Sophia in all it’s glory.
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