Scott Margeson

Urban Design Politics, Spring 2016

© 2016 Scott Margeson

The Shifting Design Politics of the Hagia Sophia

For the casual visitor to Istanbul, the great domes and delicate spires of the Hagia Sophia

represent a triumph of architecture: grand, soaring, and eternal. And in a sense, this is right. The

building is an edifice of graceful engineering that has persisted in place for a millennium and a half,

and offers the same sense of awe to people today as to visitors in the 6th century. But to stop our

analysis at the Hagia Sophia’s extant physical form would tell only half the story. Indeed, the

building itself is like a rock that has impassively weathered many centuries, but its symbolic

meanings are more like a core sample extracted from a rich, multi-layered sediment.

In fact, it’s hard to find a more useful example of the various ways that physical form and

political symbolism give voice to one another. The Hagia Sophia was birthed in a furious burst of

political ambition, and continued to constitute a message to the world for the next 14 centuries

(although the content of that message was to vary, as we shall see). It was not only the subject of,

but also a booster for, a long and varied succession of powerful forces. Yet the enduring, politically

naive appeal of the structure itself is proof that the building has also outlived most of these forces,

and in some ways risen above them.

The Hagia Sophia, both as a political structure and a physical one, was born in the ambitious

mind of one man. Justinian I became Byzantine emperor in 527, and quickly ran into domestic

trouble. His extortionate taxes incurred his citizens’ wrath, and by 532, discontent in the capital of

Constantinople had boiled over into open revolution. The Nika Revolt started with Hippodrome

factions, then spread to include local soldiers and politicians. They set fires that destroyed the bulk

of the city center, mostly consisting of government buildings and churches.

Justinian, on the verge of losing control of the capital after a week of revolution, finally

reacted with extreme force, and the loyalist army factions he tapped massacred as many as 30,000

of the revolutionaries (Kleinbauer 9-10). Just as the rebels’ burning of specific sites in the city took

advantage of spatial considerations to symbolically attack his reign, Justinian’s subsequent

rebuilding project was intended to demonstrate his strength and shore up his political dominance.

This is particularly evident in light of the astonishing speed with which he moved to restore

the city. His highest priority was apparently the rebuilding of the Hagia Sophia, a two-century old

cathedral that had been burned in the chaos. Construction began just a month after the bloody

crackdown and was completed a scant 6 years later (Kinross 30). The design far exceeded the old

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church. In place of the relatively ordinary wood-domed basilica that had been there, Justinian used

his ample funds to construct a dazzling architectural marvel.

The emperor was no stranger to the use of building projects as an extension and expression

of his own political power. According to the contemporary historian Procopius of Caesarea,

Justinian was involved in the construction of hundreds of fortresses, public works and monuments

all across the empire as well as its newly subjugated territories, including churches at over 700

sites (Kleinbauer 13). Thus Procopius calls him “Builder of the World.”

In rebuilding the Hagia Sophia, the new emperor found the perfect outlet for expressing his

numerous political aims. First, he intended to further the power of the Orthodox Church. Second, he

wanted to elevate the image of a unified Byzantine empire, in contrast to its widely varied subject

populations. Finally, it was his intention to demonstrate that both state and church were beholden

to his own personal authority (Kleinbauer 12). The awe-inspiring new basilica, built by the state on

behalf of God, stood for both earthly rule and Heavenly, and therefore accomplished all three goals.

Although the symbol was not ultimately powerful enough to unite the empire on its own, Justinian

for a time portrayed himself as unifier of church and state, and the leader of a dominant empire.

There is evidence that Justinian was quite savvy about capturing this symbolism. For

example, he is reported to have broken ground himself, by placing the central foundation stone

with his own hands. He also (apocryphally) indulged rumors that the church’s design had come to

him personally in a dream. Finally, he called on the orthodox Patriarch to pray for the building

project (Kinross 30). This would have added religious legitimacy while continuing to demonstrate

his personal influence.

So the Hagia Sophia’s political meaning at birth is clear. But beyond the symbolism, there

are also inherent meanings evident in the design itself. The first is a meaning by way of reference,

as Catherine Elgin would categorize it (40): Hagia Sophia’s bold fusion of two precedent

architectural styles. One was the central plan, a direct descendant of buildings like the Roman

Pantheon and the Mausoleum of Diocletian, while the other was the rectangular form, common to

Western churches and exemplified in basilica form by the Basilica Julia (Potter). The Hagia Sophia

asserted its place in architectural history by simultaneously exemplifying both styles at once. The

architecture is thus one of the Hagia Sophia’s enduring meanings that clearly transcends the realm

of pure politics.

The other meaning derived from the physical design is one of denotation. Elgin notes that it

is rare for buildings to depict directly (34-36), but here one of the Hagia Sophia’s most important

features was its extensive series of tile mosaics. Not original to the church of Justinian’s time, these

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were added throughout the subsequent era and eventually came to cover the interior in gorgeous

images, a collection doubling as several centuries’ worth of political messages. They included

commemorations of imperial victories, prominent images of Christ and Virgin Mary, and depictions

of Byzantine emperors, frequently combining more than one of these themes in a single image

(White 48-79). This content would have suggested the power and endurance of the Byzantines, as

well as the synonymy of the church with the empire. All were done by a variety of fine artists, all in

exquisite detail, and some can still be seen and appreciated today.

Not all of the Hagia Sophia’s meanings were as enduring as its physical structure. One irony

of design politics is that building projects, particularly those on the scale of a civilization, generally

outlive those who would use them to project their own status. Unlike with Shelley’s Ozymandias,

some works of the forgotten mighty don’t crumble, but are simply repurposed.

In the mid-15th century, the waning Byzantine Empire, which had carried on for nearly a

millennium after the fall of Rome’s western half, finally met its own end. The Ottoman Turks

launched an invasion, and the Byzantine emperor Constantine XI could not get western help to

repel the Muslims. The capital of Constantinople was surrounded, sieged, and in 1453 finally

conquered by Sultan Mehmet II. This did not portend, as might be imagined, the destruction of the

great Christian basilica, at least not in a physical sense.

Actually, the jewel of Constantinople was one of Mehmet’s most desired prizes, and was his

first destination upon entering the captured city (Matthews 81). The cross-cultural appeal of the

Hagia Sophia’s beauty and incredible engineering ensured that it would outlive its original purpose,

and before long the greatest church in Eastern Christendom had become the greatest mosque in the

Ottoman Empire.

This task was helped by a widely known legend that the prophet Muhammed himself had

donated expertise, materials and even his saliva to helping rebuild one of the Hagia Sophia’s

collapsed domes. While factually implausible, this tale would have added a retroactive veneer of

Islamic legitimacy to the coveted building (White 82).

Naturally, the religious and cultural conversion also expressed itself through physical

design. The basilica was outfitted with a sultan’s box on the interior, as well as a mihrab which had

to be installed on an axis about 10 degrees off from the rest of the structure in order to align with

Mecca. Mehmet II also began new exterior construction, eventually resulting in four near-

symmetrical minarets artfully integrated into the existing structure, from which the muezzins

issued the five-times daily call to Muslim prayer. The large metal cross on the great dome’s summit

was replaced with a crescent, and other Christian paraphernalia such as the icons, altar and throne

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were all removed (Kinross 102-3). Many of the incredible mosaics were inadvertently preserved for

posterity when they were plastered over in compliance with the Islamic tenet against

representational images, although the highest were especially difficult to reach and so remained

uncovered for centuries (Matthews 88).

These design alterations were symbolically massive but physically superficial (with the

possible exception of the minarets). The unaltered structure of the Hagia Sophia continued to

amaze and inspire, even after a thousand years - and even across a completely different culture. In

fact, there is considerable evidence that Ottoman architecture, and Islamic architecture more

generally, was deeply influenced by the newly captured crown jewel of Istanbul.

Up until the conquest of the Byzantines, domes had been prominent in major Ottoman

buildings, but they were generally single domes, or circular bays surrounded by cellules. In the

years after the fall of Constantinople, by contrast, there was a sudden profusion of references, direc t

and indirect, to the novel design of Hagia Sophia. Commonly adopted themes included domes with

much wider spans; additional semi-domes of the same diameter as the main dome; exposure of the

main lateral arches; and the use of buttresses, galleries and horizontal sections of piers. None of

these had been seen in Ottoman architecture prior to the mid-fifteenth century (Ahunbay 180-192).

Of course, there had been a strong influence on Christian architecture over the past

thousand years as well. But what is remarkable here is the speed with which the Hagia Sophia’s

architectural propositions propagated upon contact with a foreign sensibility, happily taking root in

a completely different political soil. Traces of its influence can be seen as readily in the Ali Pasha

mosque of Sarajevo as in the Basilica of St. Mark in Venice.

Once again, the physical structure of the Hagia Sophia outlasted the pretensions of its

owners. Like the Byzantines before them, the Ottomans watched their territory and influence

undergo a steady erosion, characterized by diplomatic and military losses. This came to a head in

the early 20th century. In 1908, the revolutionary Young Turks successfully rebelled against the

sultan and installed a constitution; in 1914, the Ottomans entered the Great War on the side of

Germany; and in 1919 the nation found itself occupied by the Allies and in danger of being carved

up and doled out.

That was the opportunity facing a young Mustafa Kemal (the future Ataturk), who

successfully united the Turkish people against the rule of both the foreigners and the sultanate

simultaneously, importing a brand of European enlightenment governance in their place (Kinross

122-127). After five weary years of civil war, he emerged victorious, the nation was made whole

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(albeit without its conquered territories), and he set about banishing reactionary Islamic forces and

setting up the modern, secular Republic of Turkey.

Secularism proved no more of an existential threat to the Hagia Sophia than Islam had. Once

again, its new owners kept it, but converted its meaning into something more aligned with their

values. In this case, it lost its religious identity entirely, and came instead to stand for the modern

values of shared knowledge and reverence for history: it was converted into a museum in 1934, and

remains so today.

Thus, the Hagia Sophia’s current function is to look back on its own journey through the

ages. Such introspection reveals that its political meanings have been immense, but ultimately

mutable. By contrast, it is those meanings that transcend politics which have endured, and which

continue to dazzle visitors and influence far-flung places today. Surely, even the Viking Varangian

Guard who carved their graffiti into the Hagia Sophia’s marble in the 11th century knew that they

were making their mark, however small, on something timeless.

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Works Cited

Ahunbay, Metin, and Zeynep Ahunbay. “Structural Influence of Hagia Sophia on Ottoman Mosque

Architecture.” Hagia Sophia From the Age of Justinian to the Present. Ed. Robert Mark and Ahmet

Cakmak. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Print.

Elgin, Catherine. “How Buildings Mean.” Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences.

Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1988. PDF.

Lord Kinross, and Eds. Newsweek Book Division. Hagia Sophia. New York: Newsweek, 1972. Print.

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. “The Church of Justinian.” Hagia Sophia. London: Scala Publishers Ltd, 2004.

Print.

Mainstone, Rowland J. Hagia Sophia: Architecture, Structure, and Liturgy of Justinian’s Great Church.

New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988. Print.

Matthews, Henry. “From the Fifteenth Century to the Present Day.” Hagia Sophia. London: Scala

Publishers Ltd, 2004. Print.

Potter, M. Joseph and Edmund Dickensen. “Hagia Sophia.” Salem Press Encyclopedia 2015. Web:

accessed March, 2016.

White, Anthony. “Mosaic Decoration of the Byzantine Period.” Hagia Sophia. London: Scala

Publishers Ltd, 2004. Print.

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Images

Hagia Sophia, exterior, in 2007 (S. Margeson)

Hagia Sophia, cut-away axonometric (W. Kleinbauer)

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Hagia Sophia, interior (T. Aydogmus)

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Interior: Islamic additions to original construction (T. Aydogmus)

Mosaic detail: Christ seated between Emperor Constantine IX and Empress Zoe (T. Aydogmus)