The president’s decision to turn Istanbul’s Byzantine cathedral back into a mosque seeks to erase the past
“Solomon, I have outdone thee.” So remarked Justinian, the Roman emperor who commissioned Hagia Sophia, the great cathedral at the heart of Constantinople, now Istanbul. Throughout its history it has been a source of wonder and debate. Now, the decision by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to turn it back into a mosque has reawakened many of the historical and religious ghosts that haunt its sublime spaces.
Completed in 537, Hagia Sophia was at once the culminating architectural achievement of late antiquity and the first Byzantine masterpiece. Most remarkable was the huge dome at the heart of the building. “It seems not to be founded on solid masonry, but to be suspended from heaven,” wrote the great historian Procopius. A millennium later, the Ottoman historian Tursun Beg was equally awestruck: “What a dome, that vies in rank with the nine spheres of heaven!”
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