Why Go To The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey?
​The Hagia Sophia is one of the great landmarks in Istanbul, a city not short of great landmarks. The Hagia Sophia stands just inside Europe, close to Asia, and one of the iconic views of it is from the other side of the Golden Horn, an inlet on to the Bosphorus. From here, the Hagia Sophia dominates a horizon that inludes the Topkapi Palace and the Blue Mosque.
From the outside, the Hagia Sophia is big. Very big. A great dome caps the immensely bulky orange grey building. Four sleek, rocket-like minarets stand guard at its extremities. It has an industrial feel to its design, with hints of power station chic. It's not exactly elegant. It's utilitarian overtones are broken up by domes, arched windows and an occasional sloping roof. The more you look at it, the more it looks like a lot of little buildings squeezed up against one another, with a great mother building hidden somewhere underneath.
​Inside, the Hagia Sophia is vast. Utterly vast. It's size is more obvious and more awe-inspiring on the inside. Away from the sometimes bright and oppressive Istanbul sunshine, there's a dimmer, darker, welcoming cool - it's quiet and still and it reeks of history.
The Hagia Sophia was built as a church in 537CE and remained the biggest such building for nearly a thousand years. For anyone who doesn't know, a thousand years is a Very Long Time. It was converted into a mosque in 1453 and, since 1935, it's been a museum. But it's not your average hundreds-of-things-in-glass-cases-with-tiny-labels museum. It's a museum that preserves a space and, perhaps, a mood. We'll never know if it's precisely the same mood that was there a thousand years ago, but then, as now, it must have been dimly lit and cool inside. It must have awed those who entered for the first time, looked up at the domed ceiling and saw sunlight bleed through high, arched windows. The Hagia Sophia must have mesmerised people for hundreds of years by the sheer enormity of its space.
One of the first things you notice on the ground floor are two giant, egg-like urns. For the most part they are pleasingly plain and what impresses, apart from their size, is the natural beauty of the marble blocks they're sculpted from. One of the great mysteries, to me at least, is how did they make them so shiny? Shiny marble is ever present as you walk around the Hagia Sophia. It's on the floor and on the walls and it's used to great artistic effect throughout.
The bronze covered 'weeping column' or 'miracle column' of Saint Gregory stands in one corner of the Hagia Sohpia. The column came all the way from Ephesus. It apparently has healing properties if you put your thumb inside a special thumb hole and rotate it (your thumb, not the column). Does it work? Does it heal your thumb or other body parts? I don't know, but when I visited there was a long queue of excited thumb-rotaters trying it out.
Looking up from the ground floor, you can't miss the large wooden discs bearing verses from the Koran. They're hung at Upper Gallery level and they are striking - their black and gold punctuates the yellows and greys of the rest of the interior.
Walking round the Upper Gallery, you feel almost detached from the rest of the building. You can look down on the people at ground level, marvel at the lengths of chain that the lights are hung from and look at lots of religious mosaics, including what's left of the famous Deësis mosaic with its glittering golden background. But one of the best things about the Upper Gallery is not the view of the inside, it's the view of the outside. From some of the windows you get great views of the Blue Mosque, and you can't get these views anywhere else.
Despite the many smaller details - the intricacy of the carved stonework, the quality of the mosaics, the decorative flourishes at the top of the stone columns - it's the big stuff that is really memorable about the Hagia Sophia. The building, the space it contains and, bigger even than these and still gently echoing throughout the interior, the ambition of the original designers and constructors all those centuries ago - these are the reasons to visit the Hagia Sohpia in Istanbul.
Have you been to the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul? What did you think of it? What reasons would you give if someone asked you why they should visit it?