Hagia Sophia
Ἁγία Σοφία — Hagia Sophia · aye-YEE-ah so-FEE-ah
In brief
Hagia Sophia — "Holy Wisdom" — is the Great Church built by the emperor Justinian in Constantinople and dedicated in 537. For nearly a thousand years it was the cathedral of the Ecumenical Patriarch and the wonder of the Christian world, its vast dome seeming to float above the worshippers. It is dedicated not to a saint named Sophia but to Christ, the Wisdom of God. Its later history runs in a well-known sequence: cathedral, then a mosque after 1453, a museum in 1935, and a mosque again in 2020.
Justinian's Great Church
In 532 riots left the earlier church on the site in ashes, and the emperor Justinian seized the chance to build something unprecedented. His architects, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, raised the new church in an astonishing five years; it was dedicated on 27 December 537. Its enormous central dome, pierced at its base by a ring of windows, seemed — as the court historian Procopius wrote — not to rest on its supports at all but to hang suspended, as if by a golden chain from heaven. When the first dome partly collapsed after an earthquake, it was rebuilt higher and finished in 562.
The church was consecrated to Hagia Sophia, the Holy Wisdom of God — that is, to Christ Himself, whom Scripture calls "the wisdom of God." By tradition Justinian, entering his finished masterpiece, is said to have cried that he had outdone Solomon's Temple; the story is old and beloved, though we cannot be sure of his exact words.
The heart of Byzantine worship
For centuries Hagia Sophia was the patriarchal cathedral of Constantinople and the setting for the Divine Liturgy at its most magnificent, its walls shimmering with gold mosaic and the light of countless lamps. Its beauty became part of the Church's missionary story: by the account of the Russian Primary Chronicle, the envoys sent by Prince Vladimir to find the true faith stood at worship here and could not tell whether they were in heaven or on earth — a scene the chronicle tells as the turning point in the conversion of the Rus.
It was also the stage for one of Christendom's saddest moments. In 1054, on the altar of this very church, papal legates laid the bull of excommunication that is remembered as a milestone of the Great Schism between East and West.
Cathedral, mosque, museum, mosque
When Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, Sultan Mehmed II converted the church into a mosque; minarets were added and the figural mosaics were in time plastered over. It served as a principal mosque of the city for centuries.
In 1935, under the secular Turkish Republic, the building was opened as a museum, and much of its ancient Christian mosaic work was uncovered and restored to view. In 2020 a court decision reversed the museum status, and Hagia Sophia was reclassified as a mosque, which it remains. Through every change of use, it has stood as one of the supreme monuments of Orthodox Christian worship and of the civilization that built it.