Justinian's Hagia Sophia

chapter 8 Looking, Listening and Learning: Justinian’s Hagia Sophia Brian Croke Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is one of the world’s most recognisable, most photo- graphed and most visited buildings. Each year, millions of people find there an extraordinary museum that for centuries was a mosque. What tends to amaze them most is that this impressively large and cavernous building dates from the sixth century, having survived a succession of earthquakes, invasions, wars and political threats to its fabric. What tends to be overlooked, however, or at least underappreciated, is that Hagia Sophia was originally designed and built in under six years (February 532–December 537) as a Christian church, the prime liturgical space for a Roman imperial capital, Constantinople. Hymns and homilies had acquired a new home. Although simply a new church, re- placing the one on the same site that fire had unexpectedly destroyed beyond repair during the riots of January 532, it transcended its predecessor by pro- truding as a Christian symbol well above the imperial urban skyline.1 A contemporary such as Procopius from the flat port town of Caesarea in Palestine could therefore assert that its summit, the height of a modern fifteen-storey building, was so elevated that it constituted a ‘watch tower’ over the whole city.2 So striking was the new Hagia Sophia, so Procopius says, that if the people of Constantinople had been shown in advance a model of what it might look like, they would have prayed for the obliteration of the current church.3 Modern visitors may now be more numerous, but Hagia Sophia has al- ways been a unique marvel. Across the centuries, ‘heaven on earth’ has been a common reaction of the dumbfounded, since first being proclaimed in the hymn commemorating the reopening of the repaired Hagia Sophia in December 562.4 Many have tried to capture the grandeur of this sacred space in words and sketches, then lithographs and photographs, then colour film, 1 Dark and Kostenec 2019, 126–127. 2 Procopius, Buildings 1. 1. 27. He may well have looked out from a window below the dome after reaching it from the staircase of the buttress, as elucidated by Dark and Kostenec 2019, 24–33. 3 Procopius, Buildings 1.1.22. 4 Encaenia Hymn 5 (trans. Palmer and Rodley 1988, 141 and Gavril 2012, 101). © Brian Croke, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004439573_010 140 Croke now 3-D computer modelling. Even Hagia Sophia’s most accomplished in- quisitors find that it “can still take one’s breath away, even after repeated vis- its, and remains one of the supreme architectural experiences of all time”.5 Hagia Sophia is also one of the world’s most studied buildings. Yet, it has al- ways been difficult to rediscover and comprehend its original primary pur- pose as Constantinople’s “great church”. Obstructing this quest are not only current regulations,6 but also the grimy overlay of centuries throughout the building, the periodic repairs to the original church, physical additions in its transformation to a mosque in the 15th century, both external (minarets, but- tresses) and internal (disks—originally squares—with Islamic names). More obvious are the effects of the blocking up of many of its windows and the lost mosaic decoration.7 For nearly a century, scholarly projects have sought to recover both the church’s structural elements and its mosaics. Right now, an explosion of research, of a sort unimagined even a generation ago, is transforming our understanding of not only how it was constructed, but also how the original church looked and sounded, and what must have been its impact on a sixth-century congregation. Supported by contemporary technology and inter-disciplinary scholarship, then published in a variety of monographs and specialist scien- tific journals where humanities scholars rarely tread, this research is beginning to uncover the original sixth-century church in an unprecedented fashion. In addition, closer attention to the key contemporary textual witnesses to the original church, especially Procopius and Paul the Silentiary, is playing a role in this process, while the explosion of interest in the hymns of their older co- eval Romanos has begun to focus attention on the prime role of Hagia Sophia as a performative space for the regular liturgy at Constantinople. As summed up by the foremost modern student of Byzantine liturgy, Robert Taft, “In no liturgical tradition is liturgical space such an integral part of the liturgy as in the Byzantine, and in no tradition has one edifice played such a decisive role as Justinian’s Hagia Sophia”.8 For clergy, cantors and congregation alike, the shape and space of the great church at Constantinople unveiled in 537 created new opportunities and possibilities. 5 Mainstone 1997, 14, with Nelson 2004 on the various representations of the church since the 18th century. 6 Dark and Kostenec 2019, 8. 7 Mango 1985, 64; Schibille 2014a, 55–57; Teteriatnikov 2017, 244 (a list of the closed windows compiled by Thomas Whittemore in the 1930s). 8 Taft 1980/1981, 47, cf. Taft 1978, 182: “A knowledge of the layout of [Hagia Sophia] is absolutely essential for any understanding of the Byzantine mass. As the cathedral church of this rite, it not only served the cult of the city; it formed it”..

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