The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (11 page)

These were often brutal conversions, but it is thanks to them that any theaters, bathhouses, or fora have survived at all. We have inherited hybrid buildings, double-coded with both their original and their subsequent purposes. The Theater of Marcellus in Rome, for instance, is both a theater and a palace; the Forum of Trajan both a marketplace and a fortress.

Ayasofya in Istanbul was once Hagia Sophia, the great church of the Roman Empire, and the place where that empire made its last stand. Its conversion into a mosque is a late example of the appropriation of an
antique building. The terms of that appropriation were particularly controversial, and still are, since it involved nothing less than moving the center of the world.

The Ayasofya we possess today is both church and mosque, both an antiquity and a very modern problem. It stands as a testament to the simultaneous reverence and scorn with which the inhabitants of the Dark Ages treated the buildings they had inherited from their classical forebears.

O
NCE UPON A TIME
the center of the world was Constantinople, mistress of Europe and Asia and the Middle and the Euxine seas; and at the center of Constantinople stood the church of Hagia Sophia, which means, in Greek, “holy wisdom.” At the center of Hagia Sophia, which was the center of Constantinople, which was the center of the world, there was a purple stone called the Omphalos, which was the navel of them all.

On 28 May 1453 the emperor of the Romans, who was called Constantine, was standing on the Navel of the World. He raised his eyes to the mosaic of Christ Pantocrator, the Last Judge, in holy and hopeful pleadings. This mighty judge resided at the apex of a dome some 100 feet in diameter and some 185 feet high, which was pierced with countless windows and set with thousands of oil lamps. This dome was supported on four gigantic arches, the junctions between which were inhabited by six-winged seraphs. To the east and west these arches were supported on semidomes as wide as the dome itself. These were also pierced with windows and were themselves supported on three smaller semidomes—a cascade of vaults so breathtaking that people told one another that it must be hung from heaven on a golden chain. These vaults were filled with a mosaic pantheon of angels, prophets, prelates of the Orthodox Church, and the families of the emperors; and above the altar, in the most holy vault of them all, was depicted the Virgin Mary accompanied by two angels.

Now, as the emperor Constantine stood on the Omphalos, the open space beneath the image of the Virgin was filled with clergy, so many of them that their jeweled robes seemed to be nothing more or less than the mosaics of the walls set into motion. Before these priests stood the altar, and in front of the altar there was a silver screen set with icons. From time to time one of the priests would appear in the door of this iconostasis in a cloud of incense. Bells would shake, and the people gathered on the other side of the screen would prostrate themselves before him. The rest of the time they stroked and kissed
the solemn faces of the saints, encrusted with silver and blackened by centuries of adoration.

And the priests and the congregation used the words they always used at the acclamation of emperors:

For the glory and elevation of the Romans

Hearken, O God, to your people

Many, many, many,

Many years upon many,

Many years for you, Constantine, Emperor of the Romans.

And Constantine imagined, for a moment, that he was the first Constantine, whose Christian empire had stretched from Caledonia to Arabia, Mauretania to Armenia, who had founded Constantinople, and who had built the original Hagia Sophia in the year of Our Lord 360.

T
HAT FIRST CHURCH
had been shaken to its foundations by an earthquake fifty years after it had been built, and it had then been rebuilt by the emperor Theodosius; but the Hagia Sophia in which this last Constantine stood had been born in another tremor, of a political nature. In January 532, five years after the emperor Justinian had taken the purple, a riot between the Blues and the Greens in the Hippodrome spilled out onto the streets of Constantinople. For a week the emperor was confined to his Sacred Palace as the mob rampaged through the city. On the night of 12 January, they burned Hagia Sophia to the ground.

Justinian was in despair, and he had boats made ready to take him away; but his empress was made of sterner stuff. Theodora’s father had been a bear-baiter for the Greens, her mother had been a prostitute, and so had the empress, some said. She was used to the hurly-burly of the Hippodrome, and the crowds did not terrify her. “Purple makes a fine shroud,” she snorted, and she counseled the emperor to stay and die if necessary. Justinian, more afraid of his wife than of the mob, sent his general Belisarius to the Hippodrome. Trapped between the
banks of seats, some thirty-five thousand rioters were slaughtered there on 18 January, and order was restored.

Then Justinian called Isidore, a mathematician of Miletus, and Anthemius, an architect of Tralles, and had them devise a new Hagia Sophia to replace the one that had been burned down in the riots. Only a month later, on 23 February, the foundation stone for the new church was laid, and from then on work on the basilica proceeded with an unnatural speed. Some whispered that Justinian was a devil; others said that angels were helping the workmen, watching over the building site and ensuring that their tools were not stolen. It was said later that Justinian tricked one of these angels to stay and watch over the church once it was finished.

Two days after Christmas 537, the emperor went in procession to Hagia Sophia. When he entered the new building, Justinian stepped out in front of all of his court; he stood under the magnificent dome, hung from heaven on its golden chain, guarded by the angel he had bewitched, and he cried out, “Solomon, I have outdone thee!” It was a hubristic moment; for as Procopius, the secret historian of Justinian’s reign, observed at the time, the dome “seems somehow to float in the air on no firm basis, but to be poised aloft to the peril of those inside it.” Nemesis was duly served: twenty years later there was an earthquake, and that magical floating dome, its heavenly chain momentarily severed, collapsed in a heap of brick and a cloud of dust.

Justinian was not one to be discouraged. He summoned the son of the mathematician of Miletus, also called Isidore, and within three years the church was complete again. This time the dome was even taller than it had been before. At its reconsecration, Paul, the silentiary of the court, stood beneath it and declaimed, “Wondrous it is to see how the dome . . . is like the firmament which rests on air,” wisely and quickly adding, “though the dome is fixed on the strong backs of the arches.”

Hagia Sophia was subsequently subjected to numerous tremblings of the earth, shaken in 896, and 1317, and 1346; but it always withstood the shocks and became even more magnificent than before. After each earthquake emperors, architects, and engineers added more masonry to the building, so that the dome would remain standing; and while the interior retained its celestial splendor, the outside of the
church came to resemble a labyrinthine Babel that never quite reached the heaven to which it aspired.

In the iconoclastic fury of the eighth and ninth centuries the church was stripped of its images, but in the tenth century they were returned from banishment even more beautiful than they had been in the first place: Christ Pantocrator, Mary, the saints, the angels, and the emperors were woven into embroideries of mosaic on dome and vault and wall. The emissaries of Prince Vladimir of Kiev visited the restored church and reported, “We knew not whether we were in heaven or earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations.”

In 1206, when the Venetians sacked Constantinople and carried off the bronze horses and the treasures of the Hippodrome, they also attacked Hagia Sophia. They broke into the church, murdered the people they found taking sanctuary inside, and set a prostitute on the imperial throne. In a final insult, they buried Enrico Dandolo, the doge of Venice who had contrived Constantinople’s misfortune, in an aisle of the church. (His tombstone is still there.) But in 1261, the Romans returned to Constantinople, and the emperor Michael Palaeologus proceeded directly to Hagia Sophia to be ceremonially acclaimed like all the emperors before him—above the Omphalos, the Navel of the World, under the dome that was suspended from heaven by a golden chain.

I
N
1453,
STANDING
in the same place as all his predecessors, surrounded by his people and his priests, enveloped in a cloud of incense, the last emperor Constantine forgot, for a moment, that he was a petty despot whose empire extended no farther than the walls of his city. He forgot that the jewels in his crown were made of glass, and that there was no more money. He forgot that the patriarch of the Orthodox Church had fled into exile, disgusted by Constantine’s alliance with the pope; and he forgot that the aid promised from Italy in return for that alliance had never arrived. He forgot that, until this night, his subjects had shunned him and his church of Hagia Sophia
because he had sold their souls to the Western barbarians who had been the downfall of the city so many times before.

He forgot, for a moment, that Constantinople had been under siege for nearly two months; and he forgot that in the previous three days there had been three terrible portents. The first sign was an eclipse of the full moon that sent everyone to their beds in terror. When they awoke in the morning, the emperor attempted to rally the people by carrying the Hodegetria in procession. This icon of the Virgin possessed magical powers: it directed processions of its own accord and was said to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Constantinople. Constantine hoped it would do the same this time. But as the acolytes carried the Hodegetria out into the street it fell to the ground, and when the people ran forward to pick it up the icon stuck fast. As they attempted to lift it, rain began to pour, and the procession had to be abandoned. The Virgin of the Hodegetria, it seemed, had deserted her people. This was the second sign, and the people went to their beds in redoubled terror.

The first to see the third sign were out at sea, because when the citizens of Constantinople awoke on the third day they found their city swaddled in a fog so thick that the dome of Hagia Sophia could only dimly be seen. For centuries, ships had used the dome to guide them into the city, for at night the thousands of oil lamps guttering within it shone out over the water; and the sailor, in the words of Paul the Silentiary, would not “guide his laden vessel by the light of Cynosure, or the circling Bear, but by the divine light of the church itself.”

That night the lights of the dome of Hagia Sophia were lit as usual and shone out over the waters; but soon they began to behave very strangely. The monk Nestor Iskander later recalled seeing

a large flame of fire issuing forth; it encircled the entire neck of the church for a very long time. The flame gathered into one; its flame altered, and there was an indescribable light. At once it took to the sky. Those who had seen it were benumbed; they began to wail and cry out in Greek: Lord have Mercy! The light itself has gone up to heaven.