The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (12 page)

Everyone knew that the golden chain was broken, the angel was departed, and that the next day would be the last day of the Roman
Empire. It was too late for sectarian divisions, too late to blame the emperor for having asked the Italians for aid, too late to shun the Omphalos. And so on 28 May 1453 they gathered in Hagia Sophia to pray one last time. When the service was over, the emperor collected his Senate and his generals around him, and, weeping, he made one last desperate plea: “Hurl your javelins and your arrows against them, so that they know that they are fighting with the descendants of the Greeks and the Romans.” Then he went out to defend the city. The people raised their voices to heaven in desperate prayer, but heaven no longer heard them.

O
N THE OTHER
side of the city walls the armies of Islam had also seen the signs, and they were ready. They had been waiting for them for some time.

In 628, the emperor Heraclius had received a letter from an unknown desert tribesman. It read:

In the name of Allah the most Beneficent, the most Merciful: this letter is from Muhammad, the slave of Allah and his apostle, to Heraclius . . . Peace be upon the followers of guidance. I invite you to surrender to Allah. Embrace Islam and Allah will bestow upon you a double reward. But if you reject this invitation you will be misguiding your people.

The emperor laughed. He had just defeated the king of Persia in battle, and he had no intention of surrendering to anyone, or embracing Islam, or Allah, whatever they might be. But within eight years half his empire had fallen to the desert tribesmen, and within another thirty the armies of Islam were encamped by the walls of the city whose name they mispronounced as Istanbul. It took four years to drive them off. They returned four decades later, and they even started to till the soil around the city as if it were their own, until the Rumi—the Romans—of Istanbul drove them away again.

Since Muhammad had written his letter to Heraclius, the armies of Islam had spread their faith as far west as Spain, as far east as India,
as far north as the walls of Vienna, and as far south as the deep Sahara; but there was one city that resisted their advance. Istanbul was, they said, the “bone in the throat of Allah.”

A bone in the throat of Allah it might have been, but the armies of Islam knew that Allah would swallow Istanbul one day. They told one another a story about the dome they saw from the sea, riding over the city like a ship in full sail. Ayasofya, as they called it, had been built in time out of mind, they said, by one of the emperors of the Rumi or by Solomon himself; but on the night of the birth of the prophet Muhammad, the dome of the great church had collapsed. Attempts to rebuild it were unsuccessful until the Rumi sent emissaries to see the prophet, and he gave his consent to the reconstruction. He told the emissaries to rebuild the dome with a mortar composed of sand from Mecca, water from the sacred well of Zem Zem, and his own spittle. They returned to Istanbul with this miraculous mixture, and ever since the dome of Ayasofya had held firm, waiting for the day when the armies of Islam would take possession.

In January 1453, Mehmet of the tribe of Osman raised a horsetail on a lance in the courtyard of his palace in Erdine, and in so doing called the people of his empire to arms. On 23 March they set out, and at the beginning of April they made their camp before the walls of Istanbul. They had been waiting ever since. Now Mehmet, the sultan, saw the darkened moon and the flame ascending from the great dome, and he remembered the prophecies; he knew that the time for waiting was over. At half past one in the morning he gave the order to attack. By sunrise his troops had planted the standard of the prophet Muhammad on the walls of Istanbul.

Constantine, the last emperor of Constantinople, had disappeared; his body was found later, identifiable only by his crimson shoes embroidered with the imperial eagle. Those of his subjects who could neither escape nor hide raced to the great church, where, amid tinkling bells and clouds of incense and a chanted drone, they reminded one another about prophecies of their own. The armies of Islam will be turned back at the Column of Constantine in the Forum, they said, and then an avenging angel will drive them out of the city all the way to Persia. The emperor, resurrected, will ride up to Jerusalem, and the empire will be taken up to heaven.

But none of these prophecies came to pass. Instead the people heard the crash of weaponry on the Beautiful Doors of Hagia Sophia, which once upon a time had been the doors of the temple of Zeus at Pergamon. As the soldiers burst in, the priests picked up the sacred vessels and the sacraments they were using. The eastern wall of the apse opened up, and they disappeared into it, never to be seen again until the emperor rides once more to Jerusalem and the empire is restored.

Anyone who resisted was slaughtered on the spot, and the rest were herded together and led out of the church like cattle to market. The soldiers of the armies of Islam fanned out across the church, ripping out lamps and furnishings. They took sacred vestments for saddle cloths, and they cut up icons for the gold and the gems that covered them. All good Muslims abhor images of living things, for, as they say, Allah is the only creator; it is blasphemy to usurp his creative will, even if only in the service of art. The mosaics and the icons of Hagia Sophia had presumed to depict angels and prophets, the living and the dead, and so they were all abhorrent blasphemies and superstitious idols. They deserved the indignities the soldiers heaped upon them.

By the time the sultan Mehmet arrived in the middle of the afternoon, the building had been cleared of almost everything that had adorned it. As he entered, he came across a soldier who was trying to pry a sheet of marble from the wall. The sultan flew into a rage, shouting, “The gold is thine, the marble, mine!” And he beat the man about the head and cast him out of his service.

When he had spent his fury, having achieved everything that the armies of Islam had hoped to do for eight hundred years, the sultan cast a spell. He commanded a muezzin to mount the pulpit and to make the call to prayer. Then he walked into the sanctuary of Hagia Sophia, climbed on the altar table, and bowed down and prostrated himself in the direction of the center of the world.

But the center of the world was no longer the porphyry Omphalos upon which the last Constantine had stood the day before. This was a stone of quite a different sort, which had fallen from a cloudless sky to an empty desert in time out of mind. The Bedouin, who from time to time passed by that way, saw the stone, and they worshipped it, because
it had fallen from heaven to earth. They built a temple of timber around it, carved with the beasts of the desert and the birds of the air. Over the years a city grew up around this temple, and they named the city Mecca.

One day, a merchant walked up into the stony hills around Mecca. The angel Gabriel appeared to him, and spoke, and commanded him to write down what he heard. Three years later, Muhammad began preaching. “God is One,” he said, “and Muhammad is his prophet.” But the people of Mecca, who had worshipped many gods—and a large black stone—for time out of mind were enraged, and they drove Muhammad out of their city. Muhammad fled to the city of Medina, and he continued to tell people about what the angel had said. Eventually he returned with a band of followers, and this time the people of Mecca listened to him.

To this day, once in a lifetime, all Muslims must dress themselves in white cotton and make a journey to the city where the angel Gabriel first spoke to Muhammad. When they arrive there, they walk to the black stone which the pagan ancestors of Muhammad worshipped long ago, and they prostrate themselves before it, and they pray.

And every day, five times a day, all Muslims—wherever they are—must prostrate themselves on the ground in the direction of the black stone, which they call the Kaaba. Every mosque is nothing more or less than a device that shows all good Muslims, wherever they may be, the
qibla
, the direction in which the Kaaba might be found. Every mosque is defined by nothing more or less than a niche—the mihrab—that points to the black stone that fell from heaven to earth.

T
HE EFFECTS OF
the sultan’s spell were slow, for it took many years for the Roman to become the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople to become Istanbul, and the church of Hagia Sophia to become the Ayasofya Mosque.

Mehmet had a wooden minaret erected in front of the great church, so that the muezzin could climb it and sing out the call to prayer. His son Beyazit replaced this minaret with a tower in stone. Over the next two centuries this tower was joined by three more, which, with the first, described a cube of song around the dome. Inside, wherever they
could reach them, Ottoman craftsmen covered the mosaics of emperors and saints with whitewash; and to hide the six-winged seraphs that supported the dome, they hung huge roundels, on which were written suras of the Holy Koran in letters larger than a man.

At the end of the sixteenth century, two fountains were erected at the western end of the building, for all Muslims must wash themselves before performing their prayers. Water tinkled from two ancient alabaster urns, which the sultan Murat had brought from Pergamon, and around them the faithful sat on the carved Ionic capitals of some long-vanished pagan shrine, washing their feet.

A woven garden of carpet spread out over the white marble floor so that the faithful could prostrate themselves in prayer. Timber pews were erected here and there in the nave, like kiosks in a garden of tulips. The most prominent of them all belonged to the sultan himself; it was raised on marble columns and concealed the ruler in a latticed cage of gold. In the 1590s the sultan Murat had the
minbar
, or pulpit, placed against the southern pier of the apse, a little kiosk with a conical hat at the top of a steep stair, and in the apse itself he placed the mihrab. To either side of it he placed two gigantic candles, which the sultan Suleyman had captured from a monastery in Hungary.

Every single element of the Ayasofya Mosque was oriented to the black stone in Mecca. Every single element, that is, except the building itself. When Hagia Sophia was built, it was oriented, like all Christian churches, between the rising and the setting sun. To the west was the world of death and suffering; in the direction of the rising sun was the altar, where the rising of the Son was celebrated. But the Kaaba lies not due east from Istanbul, but southeast, and therefore the orientation of Hagia Sophia and of Ayasofya did not align. The mihrab of Ayasofya sat some ten degrees off the center line of the apse of Hagia Sophia; the steep stairs of the
minbar
were not perpendicular to the wall against which they stood; and so was it also with the pews. Even the carpets were oriented toward the mihrab of Ayasofya, so that they lay diagonally across the floor of Hagia Sophia; and when the mosque was filled with the rows of the faithful, they formed another carpet—as magnificently embroidered, to be sure, as the first—that extended outward from the mihrab, and thus from Mecca itself. Inch by inch, degree by degree, year by year, detail by
detail, the descendants of Sultan Mehmet oriented Hagia Sophia toward the black stone. In an echo of what the Christians themselves had done to the Parthenon, the Muslims had turned the church into their mosque.