Gold among the ruins

An image highlighting the gold

Golden blooms leading to Hagia Sophia 

Ornamentation is as valuable as gold 

Exotic gold mosaics adorn the walls

Even gold on the vaults

Gold above the domes

We were close to Hagia Sophia so in we went, along with so many tourists I feared that their combined weight might finally bring the Cathedral down. Though this is its third incarnation.

This one built by Justinian himself after a bloody riot of racing fans out on the grounds of the Hippodrome in 532AD. A race team supporting the nobility clashed with a team supporting the common people. Fanaticism and riots ensued as the commoners began calls to depose the Emperor. Justinian, tucked up in his palace, was all aflutter, and all for fleeing the city by the gates, but his wife, Theodora, made him stand and deliver, whereupon the city came to be reduced to rubble, and 30,000 bodies soon lay dead among its smouldering ruins.

To celebrate his survival Justinian set about building the most expensive cathedral in Christendom. Stone, marble and coloured columns from all corners of the empire were hunted down. There were two architects in charge of construction. In those days they were more mathematicians, who needed to work out how best to support the massive dome being installed, and how best to utilise their team of 5,000 workers apiece. It is said Justinian wanted the walls lined with gold, but his astrologers warned him that greedy enemies might be enticed to plunder it. Instead he decorated the walls in exquisite golden mosaics: 130 tons of tiny gold pieces. It is astonishing his astrologers didn’t warn him that the very weight of that gold might contribute to its collapse.

Today the Hagia Sophia is not as it was. When the Ottomans rode into Constantinople in May of 1453 the city became Muslim and the Cathedral was converted into a mosque. Icons of Christianity were covered in Islamic calligraphy. So it is all a little bit ugly now with a bit of this covered with a bit of that, shored up with a bit of the other. 

 But the massive dome is still there, and you can see how it stays standing from outside, where great blocky supports have been laid up against the structure, using a hodgepodge of available material, including spires pasted as buttressing, to keep the walls from collapsing in under the weight of the dome, the gold, and, these days, the crowd traipsing through.

Upstairs where faded remnant mosaics look down from their lofty height, giant stone flagstones are cracking into fragments, crumbling almost to dust in parts. As the eons evolve, the building gets older, and the weight is almost too heavy to bear. We were not unhappy to walk outside, safely, into the main drag.

oooOOOooo

Vastness lit in gold 

Hagia Sophia atop the flowers