Aya Irini, winter 1990.
Probably the greatest venue for choral music in the world. Having said that, the acoustics are wildly variable. Try and get tickets under the centre of the dome. I heard the Thomas Tallis Choir here in the late 1990s and the sound was heavenly. I stood at the back for another concert not long afterward and the echo was vile. For a place called the Church of Divine Peace, its early years were a bit messy. A riot in 346 over whether or not the Nicene Creed constituted correct doctrine killed 3000 people. It (with Aya Sofya) was burned down in the Nika Revolt in 532.
Interior in 2014
The current church is from about 532-537 apart from reconstructions necessitated by fire, earthquakes and the doings of men. In 2013, it reopened as a museum with the minimalist décor of iconoclastic times.
Most of the column bases are wrongly used capitals
The decoration is limited to an inscription and a simple cross above the altar. (41.009888,28.981225) There is an excavation west of the church which looks like another church but is apparently the remains of the Hospice of St Samson.
Aisle of Aya Irini
The St Samson site from the south.
One can see why Aya Irini is so light inside.
Excavation of the Hospice of St Samson.
Posted June 19, 2014 Posted by Adam in Uncategorized
Mosaic of the Virgin and Child in the apse, 867 AD. This appears to be the first mosaic completed after the iconoclastic period.
Many people have written about this church (41.007982, 28.978812) much better than I can. Try here (from p253), Richard Davey’s account of Sancta Sophia towards the end of the 19th century. Or for a contemporary account of the church in Justinian’s time, go here. It was written by Procopius, probably in fear of his life if he wasn’t grovellingly effusive.
Ayasofya after a light snowfall.
The outside of the building looks squat and blocky because of the massive buttresses that were added during its long history. These do a marvellous job of holding the thing up so it seems curmudgeonly to complain. But try standing on the Galata end of the Metro bridge across the Golden Horn. Gaze at Aya Sofya. Imagine it without the minarets and buttresses. From the constraints of utilitarian practicality emerges the elegant, finely proportioned marvel that once crowned Byzantium. Two of its mosaics are among the finest that art has to offer the world.
At night, Aya Sofya looks like a spacecraft in a 1950s movie
The Deësis (Entreaty) mosaic, from immediately after the end of the Latin occupation. Christ Pantocrator considers the fate of humanity on Judgement Day. The Virgin Mary and John the Baptist are giving helpful advice out of shot on the left and right respectively.
The queues to get in are awful. Try about 4pm on a cold day. No more people are allowed in after 4:30 and it can get almost lonely in there. The resident cats are friendly. The mosaic of the Virgin and Christ child above the sanctuary is astonishing.
Another view of the Virgin and Child in the apse, taken 25 years after the one above.
Northern aisle of Ayasofya.
Inner narthex
In winter, the Aya Sofya cats like the warmth of the floodlights
Mamboury traces the history of Ayasofya from a basilica built by Constantine I in 325. Freely puts the date of completion of the first church as 360 during the reign of Constantine’s son, Constantius. Whatever its construction date, it was smacked down by the violence of public opinion in 404. John Chrysostom, the Patriarch at the time, won the favour of the populace and the ire of the rich with his suicidally tactless rants against the Byzantine court. The Empress Eudoxia, after a highly entertaining public debate regarding Eudoxia’s moral fibre and the wisdom of having a giant silver statue of her erected provocatively close to Sancta Sophia, banished John Chrysostom (Now St John, so the verdict of history is clear) to Armenia. The church perished in riot and fire.
Capital from the Theodosian church.
Theodosius II had put up another great basilica by 415, some of the foundations of which are still visible to the west of the current church. This was destroyed on the first day of the Nika Revolt in 532. The famously self-glorifying Justinian I and his controversial wife, Theodora, had been polarising public opinion for the five years of his reign with his ruinously expensive empire restoration plan. Things reached crisis point at the chariot races. At the time, the two main factions, the Blues and the Greens, had a rivalry something like that of Red Star Belgrade and Partizan Belgrade in the final years of the Yugoslav Republic. The ramifications of this friction went far beyond the races and underlay the political life of Constantinople.
In January 532, Justinian was planning the execution of several Blues and Greens over murders committed during a previous Hippodrome riot. Two (one Blue and one Green) escaped and holed up in a church. The two factions demanded that the renegades be pardoned. Justinian responded to the unrest by providing Bread and Circuses, announcing a day of chariot races on the 13th. The race meeting began with partisan chants relating to the factions but as the day went on, the shouting became coordinated into cries of Nika! or ‘Conquer!’. The crowds began an assault on the Great Palace, lit fires and burned the Theodosian church down.
Justinian emerged from conflict with fifty thousand slaughtered citizens and no political rivals. He was now free to tax the remaining populace as much as he wanted to finance his grandiose engineering projects. The grandest of all was the new Sancta Sophia. Visitors to Selçuk (near Ephesus) have pondered over how a wonder of the world, the immense Temple of Artemis, could have disappeared so completely. A bit of foundation and a forlorn column put together from odd bits of stonework are all that remain. The answer lies in Justinian’s quest for building materials for his new flagship building. Mamboury reports that the starting point in construction was the arrival of eight big porphyry columns from the Ephesus temple. These had originally been taken from a temple in Heliopolis. The whole empire was pillaged for the finest materials, whether or not they were already parts of buildings. This is similar to Süleyman’s policy regarding the construction of the mosque that bears his name.
Capitals with Justinian's monogram.
Synods were held behind this marble door.
Green porphyry column with intricate capital
Justinian’s masterpiece was begun immediately after the riots and dedicated in 537. The immense foundations were sunk deep into the rock and a series of cisterns was incorporated into the basic design. The dome is obviously the whole point of the building. It was built of very light brick in contrast to the poured concrete construction used for its predecessor in circular grandeur, the Pantheon in Rome.
It was a glorious construction, a finger thrust in the face of practicality, economics and the world in general. The magnificent dome lasted twenty years, when one of Constantinople’s earthquakes shook it to the ground. Isidore the Young, a nephew of Isidore of Milet, the original architect, rebuilt the dome with a higher profile and somewhat less trust in divine protection.
Face of the devil - from the revetment in the south gallery.
The omphalion, where Byzantine emperors were crowned.
Subsequent earthquakes necessitated further modifications as the centuries passed. Buttresses were necessary to strengthen the church but over time they began to obscure the pure lines of the original design. The first of these were on the north and south of the church and were probably added by Isidore the Younger. Massive flying buttresses were added late in the 9th century.
This is said to be the burial site of the Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, who led the Venetians in the sack of Venice when he was blind and 90 years old.
The worst disaster to befall Sancta Sophia was the Latin invasion of 1204. Three days of awful desecration were followed by neglect as the isolated Latin Empire ran out of money and support. Anything moveable had been looted or melted down. The fabulous collection of relics was shipped off to the west and artifacts in gold, silver or bronze were melted down into unidentifiable additions to the fortunes of the Crusaders. By the time Michael VIII Palaiologus retook Constantinople in 1261, Sancta Sophia was in a poor state. The new regime was not exactly rich but the symbolic importance of the church meant that it was a priority for restoration. Andronicus II had four great buttresses built in his restoration in the early 14th century. As the fortunes of Constantinople slowly wound down, the great church again fell into disrepair.
Walk-in font.
Sancta Sophia remained the spiritual centre of the empire so that when Mehmet II’s army besieged the city, many people gathered inside. Hence, when the Ottoman army smashed its way into Constantinople in 1453, the slaughter in the church was terrible. After three days of pillage, a time which seemed to be something of a rule in those days, Sultan Mehmet entered the hastily tidied church and ordered its conversion into a mosque.
Murad III had this Hellenistic marble urn brought from Pergamon.
The cat gets a bit lonely after 5pm.
Entrance to nave from interior narthex
Two bursts of iconoclasm in the 7th and 8th centuries would have destroyed most representational art in the church so the mosaics now present are from after 843. Many date from the restoration carried out under Basil II after the earthquake of 989. The acquisitive Latins packed up several of the more spectacular gold mosaics and some may now be seen adorning churches in Italy, particularly that warehouse of plunder, Basilica San Marco in Venice.
Gallery mosaics: left, Empress Zoe mosaic (11th C), right, Comnenus mosaic (12th C)
The invading Muslims were kinder to the sacred artworks than the Christian iconoclasts and crusaders. They painted or plastered over them, a move that tended to preserve rather than destroy. The mosaics stayed beneath the plaster until the arrival of the Fossati brothers in the 1840s. These Swiss architects built nearly every important building constructed in the Tanzimat era, the period of sweeping reforms of the Ottoman Empire. Sultan Abdulmecit hired them to renovate Ayasofya, which they did in two years with the aid of 800 workers. While their brief did not include the restoration of the mosaics, they did document them carefully. The surviving records show several mosaics that no longer exist.
May 2016. The scaffolding no longer covers the mosaics of the bishops in the blind arches on the south side of the nave.
An archangel lurking up near the ceiling.
In 1895, Clara Erskine Clement reported that she was offered as a souvenir a handful of mosaic pieces, as did Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. This sort of treatment was routine and undoubtedly resulted in the disappearance of mosaics already in a state of decay. The Byzantine Institute of America began restoring the mosaics in 1931. This rather touching 1936 letter from Royall Tyler, one of the founders of the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine art collection, to Mildred Bliss Barnes, gives a good impression of the scope of the work that was being done then.
The most recent intervention has been a full restoration of the dome, supported by the World Monuments Fund. This immense task lasted from 1997 to 2006. Scaffolding is still a common sight inside Ayasofya as parts of it are continually needing attention. The font was recently uncovered in the baptistry. In 2009, a covering was removed from the face of a mosaic of a seraph on one of the pendentives of the dome.
14th century mosaic of a seraph
Justinian I (left) presents the church and Constantine I offers the city of Constantinople to the Theotokos. From the time of Basil II.
In 1935, Atatürk took the rather provocative step of turning Ayasofya from a mosque into a museum. However, the south-eastern part of the Ayasofya complex, near the Topkapı Palace gate, is (as of 2014) open as the Ayasofya Camii. It appears to be a kind of study area for visiting Islamic scholars.
Ayasofya Camii - something thought to have disappeared in 1935
Posted June 19, 2014 Posted by Adam in Uncategorized
Küçük Aya Sofya in winter, 1990
In the 1990s, this was a peaceful backwater where the caretaker’s rather large family used to play. Now it’s more in the mainstream of sights and tour groups visit. So it should be because this is an unusual and lovely building (41.0029644,28.9726008).
The caretaker's family
The architects must have had some odd conditions to deal with. Perhaps because it had to be sandwiched between existing buildings, the shape of the church is unique. It is the shape of an irregular octagon inserted crookedly into a not-quite-rectangle. The elongated dome has some similar aspects to that of the larger Aya Sofya but it’s a bit of an engineering triumph to make such a lovely thing on the unpromising structure. It seems to have been built at some time around 530. The monograms of Justinian and Theodora can still be seen on the capitals of some columns.
Monogrammed column capital
This is a unique place. For some reason, it is here that I feel most as if I am in a Byzantine church. The conversion to a mosque has done little to change the character of the building. Overall, there is an impression of austerity but the details are sumptuous. The decoration on the capitals seems sharper here, the upstairs galleries more intimate. Even now it is on the beaten track, it is still a lovely church.
Classic Byzantine gallery
Eastern side of the interior.
The pump works, the pool fills. Looks like a font.
Posted June 19, 2014 Posted by Adam in Uncategorized
View of St Mary Chalcoprateia from the roof of the Carpet Shop
Mamboury claims to have identified this in 1912. It seems to have been founded in about 460, which makes it significantly older than the existing Aya Sofya and about the same age as the Monastery of St John of Studion. It may have been a synagogue that served the coppersmiths’ district and was converted later. It is difficult to find now. It is behind the new Dongyang hotel and part of its wall forms the back of a carpet shop (41.009682,28.978189) The shopowner allowed me to clamber through a trapdoor and onto the roof in exchange for some furniture-moving labour. The walls of the apse are well preserved, probably because nobody can get to them. There are the remains of a spiral staircase, probably from a minaret during its brief Muslim history.
Spiral staircase in the church
The church was once a large basilica, famed for containing the girdle of the Virgin Mary, since looted and now in a monastery on Mt Athos. St Mary Chalcoprateia served as the Patriarchate between the destruction of the second incarnation of Aya Sofya in the Nika rebellion of 532 and the building of the third.
A capital in the Archaeological Museum, probably from St Mary Chalcoprateia.
That’s the remains of St Mary Chalcoprateia sticking out above the carpet shop.
North wall
Still an imposing wall from ground level
Southern and south-western walls meet at an obtuse angle
Doorway in south wall
The surviving hulk is probably the remains of an apse at the eastern end of the former basilica. There are several other remains associated with St Mary Chalcoprateia.
Wall on north side of Zeynep Sultan Camii Sokak
The lower section of this wall appears to be of Byzantine origin.
There is apparently an octagonal Chapel of St Jacob located beneath the Zeynep Sultan Hotel. Pictures of this are on this page of the Mon Kassia blog posted in 2012 by Tatiana Senina. The chapel appears to have been part of the complex attached to St Mary Chalcoprateia.
Posted June 19, 2014 Posted by Adam in Uncategorized
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