Hagia Sophia: Between Monument and Memory
Interior of Hagia Sophia, with the calligraphic roundels bearing the eight holy names. Wikimedia Commons.
On July 10th, Turkey’s Council of State annulled the 1934 decree, which, eight decades ago, had paved the way for the conversion of the iconic Hagia Sophia from a mosque into a museum. Following the court’s decision, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, announced the reconversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque, opening it for Muslim prayer and transferring the jurisdiction of the building from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism to the Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanat). Two weeks after, on July 24th, thousands of worshippers participated in a ceremonial public Friday prayer that completed the building’s transformation, but this did not put an end to the controversy surrounding the building.
Hagia Sophia, originally built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I in the mid-sixth century, stood as the largest church of Christendom for several centuries. Its figural mosaic depiction of the Virgin and Child and the archangels Michael and Gabriel, which were recovered during the 1934 restoration of the building, stand witness to this crucial episode of the life of the building. Under the same dome, the calligraphic inscriptions and roundels that bear the eight holy names in Islam, as well as the pencil minarets and other Ottoman additions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, recall the next chapter of Hagia Sophia’s life as an Ottoman mosque. In 1453, following Mehmet II’s astonishing conquest of Constantinople, the Ottoman sultan ordered the conversion of the Christian church into a mosque, a change that stayed in place until 1934 when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s government transformed Hagia Sophia into a museum. Since then, Hagia Sophia has been regarded as an emblem of a multicultural Istanbul, a meeting point of two seemingly opposing religions: Christianity and Islam.
Mosaic of the Virgin Mary and Christ at the center, with Justinian I and Constantine I presenting models of Hagia Sophia and the city. Wikipedia Commons.
The Turkish government emphasized its commitment to maintaining the status of the building as a UNESCO world heritage site by preserving its Christian icons and ensuring accessibility for non-Muslims and tourists alike. Despite this, Christian religious figures from Pope Francis to the Archbishop of Istanbul—as well as political figures from the European Union, the United States and Greece—were quick to express concern and regret over Turkey’s decision to reconvert the building into a mosque. Turkey’s action is widely seen as a fractious and confrontational gesture that presents Islam as a geopolitical rival.
Despite their different ideologies, Ataturk’s decision to convert Hagia Sophia to a museum and Erdogan’s reconversion of it back to a mosque share one central trait. They are each the outcome of one man’s political dreams and ambitions that leave little room for public opinion. Ataturk’s was a vision of a secular, modernized Turkey, aligned with western values that triggered resentment among Turkey’s conservative religious groups. Erdogan’s attempt to imagine and recast the future of Turkey in light of its Islamic-Ottoman past has distressed its secular population and religious minorities.
Erdogan and his party are using Hagia Sophia to express Turkish-Muslim hegemony by triggering national pride and memories associated with the glory days of an expansive Turco-Muslim empire. Indeed, Hagia Sophia of Istanbul is only one among multiple other churches-turned-mosques-turned-museums in Turkey that in the last two decades have lost their museum status. Furthermore, buildings and their architecture have, in recent times, been used as tools that provide concrete form to an ahistorical conceptualization of the Ottoman Empire. Adoption of Neo-Ottoman style as the formal architectural language for state-sponsored mosques—not only inside Turkey, but also in Eastern Europe (i.e. Mitrovica, Kosovo) or Central Asia (i.e. Ashgabat, Turkmenistan)—speaks to the political rhetoric that is capitalizing on the Ottoman legacy to pursue imperial ambitions.
Most importantly, Erdogan is using this opportunity to energize his religiously conservative base at a time when his government is in a precarious political and financial position. Indeed, in his televised speech, Erdogan taps into the symbolic capacity of the building. Repeatedly addressing his audience as “my dear nation,” Erdogan reminds them about the conquest of Istanbul and conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque by Mehmet the Fatih (Conqueror) and refers to it as “one of the most glorious chapters in Turkish history.” By doing so, Erdogan not only feeds into Turkish nationalist rhetoric, fusing nationalist and religious sentiments, but also puts himself on par with Mehmet the Fatih, the Ottoman Sultan who breached the impossible walls of Constantinople and consummated his victory by taking over the properties of the Byzantine emperor—among them Hagia Sophia.
Like many of his Muslim and Christian counterparts, Mehmet’s takeover and conversion of a religious building should be understood as an act of establishing supremacy in an age when political rivalries were often spelled as religious wars. About two centuries earlier, but as part of the same chain of Christian-Muslim conflicts that plagued the medieval world with the Reconquista and the Crusades, King Ferdinand III of Castile converted the majestic Mosque of Cordoba into a Catholic church. This building, founded and expanded during the more than five centuries of Muslim dominion in Cordoba (756–1236), is still under the control of Spanish Church authorities. Regardless of the global recognition of the early phase of the building’s life as a mosque, the status, title, and function of the building continues to be a contested issue in contemporary Spain. Despite campaigns and formal requests to the Vatican, Muslim prayer is not permitted inside the building, and the Catholic entity that owns and manages the building has attempted to eliminate the word “mosque” from the name of the building. Indeed, the period of Reconquista in the Iberian Peninsula witnessed the conversion of many synagogues and mosques into Catholic churches—a large number of which still continue their life as solely Christian spaces of worship.
Last year, India too evinced the resurgence of longstanding conflicts over the sixteenth-century Babri Mosque, which was located on a sacred Hindu site, where archeological reports attest to the discovery of the remains of a Hindu structure. From the destruction of the Babri Mosque by an angry mob in 1992 to recent controversies surrounding the ownership of the site, cases such as this fully display the complexities of identity and memory politics.
Buildings and sites have multiple lives. Their histories and legacies extend beyond their foundation, construction, and initial function. Over time their lives mesh with the lives of the people who use, maintain, alter, or transform them. Their endurance over decades, centuries, and sometimes millennia turn them into palimpsests that embody the coexistence of multiple episodes of history, intertwining them into the identity, history, and memory of the groups of people that pass through them at various historical junctures.
In this context, Hagia Sophia is one among many buildings whose complex, multi-layered history has been reduced to a banner of supremacy and dominion of one religion over the other. Unfortunately for our world, the many examples of such contested sites and buildings and the controversies surrounding them demonstrate a regrettable state of affairs—that not only the government of Turkey, but the world at large is not yet ready to accept the multi-confessional status of these sites and recognize them as part of a collective world heritage.
Whether in Cordoba, Ayodhya, or Istanbul, it is time governments set aside the troubled histories of past confrontations and takeovers and strive for healing and reconciliation, by advocating to open the doors of these sites to all faiths who are invested in them. But, in a world that is once again stricken by the rhetoric of the clash of civilizations and religious hostilities—where Muslims have been depicted as backward terrorists and compelled into feeling humiliated, suppressed, and powerless—the satisfaction that comes with an opportunity to demonstrate power and establish dominance is not incomprehensible, even when popular sentiments are manipulated for political gain.
Until the day we are all ready to recognize these sites as our collective heritage and realize their liberating potentials as sites of peace, tolerance, and conversation, our first priority and concern should be the preservation of Hagia Sophia as a precious historical document. As the open letter penned by scholars of Byzantine and Ottoman art and culture points out, amidst the regional political competitors that are using Hagia Sophia for their propaganda, our biggest concern should not be the function of the building but its stewardship. Now, more than ever, it is necessary to ensure that despite and amidst ongoing political confrontations, the building, its historical material evidence, and artwork are carefully preserved and accessible to all.
Sahar Hosseini is an assistant professor of architecture history at the University of Pittsburgh. She studies buildings and urban landscapes as a window into society's life and culture.
Hagia Sophia from the south, where Ottoman additions, including pencil minarets and mausoleums of three Ottoman sultans, are visible. Wikimedia Commons.