Hagia Sophia as a Living Event Space
Much has been written on President Erdoğan’s decree that turned Hagia Sophia from a museum back into a mosque. The decision is consistent with his Neo-Ottoman policies, which aim to consolidate the ruling party’s nationalist and Islamist electoral base and divert attention from social and economic problems with a spectacle of military and religious reconquest. While the 1934 conversion of the mosque into a museum turned the building into a “symbol of accountability and reconciliation in the face of historical violence,” the recent transformation fueled bigotry on both sides by reenacting the religious wars.
Interior view of Hagia Sophia by Louis Haghe after a drawing by-Chevalier Caspar Fussati
Hagia Sophia was built on the site where two other scarcely documented, and hence today mostly unknown, churches were destroyed. The first one, built in 360 AD and known as Magna Ecclesia, burned down in the riots resulting from the conflict between the empress and patriarch. The second church was built in 415 and incorporated the remnants of Magna Ecclesia, but it too was destroyed due to the conflict between the royalty and the patriarch, who banned the emperor's sister Augusta Pulcheria from the building. The current structure was built as the patriarchal cathedral of Constantinople during the reign of emperor Justinian I, between the years 532 and 537. Once opened, it was the largest church in the Eastern Roman Empire and remained the largest Eastern Orthodox church for about a thousand years. However, in 558 AD, an earthquake led to the collapse of the cupola and destroyed a great number of imperial artifacts, including the altar. The dome was reconstructed in 563 and was elevated six meters above the original, but it had to be restored a number of times due to subsequent earthquakes.
Natural forces and internal political conflict were not the only sources of transformation visible in and through the church. As a result of the Fourth Crusade, Hagia Sophia was converted into a Roman Catholic church in 1204, until the reinstitution of the Byzantian Empire in 1261. Historian Richard Winston calls this period the “Iconoclast controversy.” “Over the next few years,” Winston writes, “the city was almost denuded of Christian relics, many of them from Hagia Sophia, which found their way to all parts of the West.” Then in 1453, it was converted into a mosque during the Ottoman expansion, and it remained so until the Republic of Turkey opened it as a museum in 1934. When it became a mosque, most of its mosaic icons were whitewashed, the cross at the dome was replaced with a crescent, Islamic calligraphy was established over the pendentives, and minarets were erected. The reconstructions continued during the Ottoman era, most notably by the famous Fossati restoration that uncovered a good deal of the mosaics in 1848, and more was unearthed once it was opened as a museum. Today, with the presidential decree, the building’s transformation is most noticeable in the new carpet covering the marble floor and curtains concealing the mosaics.
What is remarkable about Hagia Sophia’s transformations is the ways in which it was architecturally transformed in line with the politico-spatial turning points in the region’s history. This is important not only because tracing those modifications is informative from an art-historical perspective, but also because these architectural changes have the power to reinforce, and even ignite, historical change. One way to approach that double significance is through sociologist Robin Wagner-Pacifici’s conception of “living event spaces.”
Briefly summarized, Wagner-Pacifici defines “events” as the world-changing happenings that result in ruptures in history. Though events occur at specific moments in time, she argues for an expansive spatio-temporality that is not limited to chronology. Events like the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and 9/11 memorialize certain spaces, and those spaces are part of the ongoing transformations instigated by those events. Hence, she advocates for conceiving those spaces as “living event spaces” as opposed to “finished” monuments that commemorate those points in chronological time. I would like to suggest that Hagia Sophia is such an event space that continues to live in relation to the region’s historical events and takes part in the continuous making of those historical turning points.
When Justinian I’s architects Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles built Hagia Sophia as the most magnificent church of its time, it even outdid the Pantheon in certain features, such as the usage of pendentive architecture on its dome. As a result, it not only marked but also arguably enabled the rise of the Eastern Roman Empire. When Sultan Mehmet II invaded Constantinople and replaced the cross on the dome with a crescent, renaming the building as the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque, the architectural modifications not only reflected the Ottoman conquest and whitewashed its Byzantian origin, but also gave Mehmet II the holy authority of the conqueror of the promised land and facilitated Ottoman hegemony over and beyond the Islamic Empire. When Mustafa Kemal Atatürk turned the mosque into a museum and unearthed some of the buried mosaics, it not only transformed the building into what architecture historian Esra Akcan calls a “monument of secularism” but also changed the visitors from Muslim subjects of the Sultan to learned citizens of the world heritage in line with Atatürk’s modernizing policies.
So, the question for Hagia Sophia today is twofold. We are all curious as to what exactly will change after Erdoğan’s reopening of it as a mosque. We already know some of the architectural modifications: curtains over the Virgin Mary icons, carpet over the omphalion, and the removal of the state’s most lucrative museum entrance. What other changes will follow? Yet, the other question is arguably even more pressing. What powers will the new Hagia Sophia bestow on a ruler who already has not hesitated to lock journalists, parliamentarians, and human-rights activists behind bars; to close down dissenting media outlets; to fire and prosecute academics; to ban political assemblies; to reignite the infamous war against terror; and to wage proxy wars abroad? The question remains open but indicates another turning point in the region’s history.
Emre Çetin Gürer received his PhD in Philosophy from Villanova University. He has been teaching philosophy courses since 2014. His research areas are aesthetics, critical space theory, philosophy of history, philosophy of race, urban justice, counter-mapping, and social movement studies. Currently, he works at Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul, Turkey.
