Hagia Sophia ‘time tunnel’ linked Ottoman and Roman Empires

Narratives of conquest don’t fully explain the lasting legacy of Hagia Sophia, a cathedral-turned-mosque-turned-museum in Turkey that is once again a mosque, argues historian Ali Yaycıoğlu.

With the conversion last month of the architecturally stunning edifice into a working mosque, Turkish President Recep Erdoğan fulfilled a long-held hope of many Turkish Muslims and of his own political party.

On July 24, for the first time in nearly 90 years, Muslim worshippers prayed together there, as the imam held a sword—a reminder to many of the conquest of the building throughout Turkish history.

The Roman Emperor Justinian built the monumental structure in the sixth century as the world’s largest cathedral. Later, it became the central building of Greek Orthodox Christianity and the Eastern Roman Empire, known as Byzantium.

Hagia Sophia came under Catholic control for a few decades in the 13th century during the Crusades before the Byzantine emperor took Constantinople back.

Then, in 1453 after the Ottoman Empire had gained control, it became a mosque. After the founding of the modern state of Turkey, Hagia Sophia was converted into a museum in 1934.

For Yaycıoğlu, an associate professor of history specializing in the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey at Stanford University and a native of Ankara, Turkey, conquest narratives—the notion that one conquering group claimed Hagia Sophia from the last and made it fully its own—belie the impact each had upon the other.

Here, Yaycıoğlu discusses the building’s significance:

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