Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque
Sixth-century Byzantine great church, later mosque and museum, now a working mosque open to visitors.
Hagia Sophia was completed in 537 for the emperor Justinian I as the great church of Constantinople, replacing two earlier basilicas on the site. Its designers, the mathematicians Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, carried a shallow dome roughly thirty-one metres across on pendentives above a rectangular hall, a solution that gave the interior its celebrated sense of weightless space. The building served as the cathedral of the Byzantine capital for nearly nine centuries and set the pattern for domed church architecture across the Orthodox world.
After the Ottoman conquest of 1453 the church was converted into a mosque, gaining four minarets, a mihrab, a minbar and, in the nineteenth century, the huge calligraphic roundels installed during the restoration led by the Swiss-Italian architects Gaspare and Giuseppe Fossati. It opened as a museum in 1935 and was returned to use as a mosque in 2020. Gold-ground mosaics from the ninth to twelfth centuries survive in the galleries, and the whole complex forms part of the Historic Areas of Istanbul World Heritage Site.
Highlights
- Central dome on pendentives, about 31 metres across and 55 metres high
- Byzantine gold mosaics including the Deesis panel in the south gallery
- Ottoman additions: mihrab, minbar, sultan's lodge and calligraphic roundels
- Marble revetments and carved capitals from the sixth-century building
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