The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (13 page)

S
EVENTY YEARS AFTER
Mehmet’s spell had been cast, the court poet Saduddin described Ayasofya as “this ancient building . . . lit with the rays of true belief and filled with the sweet smelling breath of the Law”; and he described how, after nearly a century of Islamic worship, “the rapture reflecting interior, illuminate with the proclamation of unity, began to flash like a polished mirror.” His words echoed nothing so much as the classical hexameters that Paul the Silentiary had declaimed eight hundred years earlier, for while the people of Islam and the sons of Osman had cast a spell upon Hagia Sophia, Hagia Sophia had also cast a spell on them. By the early sixteenth century, the court poet Idris-i Bidlisi could claim that Ayasofya was equal in sanctity to the Kaaba itself, and the writer Cafer Çelebi called it “the victorious Shah of them all,” in which prayer was a hundred times more valuable than in any other mosque.

Sultan Selim II addressed himself to the repair of the building in 1572. He completed the set of four minarets around the dome and demolished many of the humble outbuildings that crowded the site. He also issued a fatwa in which he stated that anyone who opposed the repair of Ayasofya on the grounds that it had been a church would be executed as an infidel. In the end he had himself buried in the precincts of the great mosque, inspiring many of his successors to do the same. In 1595, Murad III had a domed tomb built in the garden, and soon afterward Muhammad III added another one. In 1622, Mustapha I had the old Christian baptistery converted into his final resting place, and a few decades later the mortal remains of the sultan Ibrahim joined him there under its ancient dome. Today, the great dome of Ayasofya rises above a veritable town of its smaller imitators.

And as Constantinople turned into Istanbul, and Hagia Sophia into Ayasofya, so also the tribe of Osman resembled less and less the wild horsemen from whom they were descended, and became more and more like the Romans whose empire they had appropriated. Before the
conquest of Constantinople, the mosques of the Turks had been central Asian in character. A typical prayer hall in these mosques was no more elaborate than the open courtyard of a caravansary, and it was entered through a high tiled door flanked by minarets, which resembled a beautiful carpet slung between two lances. These buildings were designed to recall the simple house of mud and timber in Medina where Muhammad had preached while he was in exile. But the prayer hall of the “Fatih” mosque—the Mosque of Victory—that Mehmet constructed in Istanbul after his conquest was not a courtyard but a gigantic interior. In it, four colossal piers supported four arches, which supported a magnificent dome pierced with windows and bathed in light, and the building resembled nothing so much as the great church of the Romans.

It was a soldier in the service of the sultan Suleyman who brought this new architecture, appropriated from the ancient splendors of Constantinople, to perfection. Sinan was a Janissary, one of the murderous personal guard of the sultan, but his superiors took notice of his great talent for all forms of drawing, building, and engineering. After his military service was over, Sinan entered the ministry of works, and in 1538 he was made chief architect to the sultan himself.

Sinan’s endless ingenuity was applied to bridges and aqueducts, fortifications and theology schools, tombs and gardens. Most beautifully of all, Sinan designed mosques, and most magnificent of these was the one he built for the sultan Suleyman. The Suleymaniye Mosque was built, like Hagia Sophia, at tremendous speed: it took just seven years between the laying out of the foundations to the topping out of the dome in 1557. (Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, begun at around the same time, took some two centuries to complete.) To build his mosque, Sinan ransacked the antiquities of Istanbul: supporting the aisles of its interior are columns from the old imperial box in the Hippodrome, from the temple of Bacchus in Baalbek, and from a monument to the emperor Arcadius in the ancient Forum.

But Sinan appropriated more than antique fragments, for the very form of the Suleymaniye Mosque stole away and transmogrified the form of Ayasofya. Its vast interior is sheltered by a dome some eighty feet in diameter, and, as in Ayasofya, this dome is supported on four arches. As they are in Ayasofya, the side arches are closed with ranks
of arched windows and marble colonnades, while the two end arches are closed with semidomes that are supported on three more semidomes themselves.

But the Suleymaniye Mosque differed from Ayasofya in one crucial respect: its mihrab lay in the dead center of the easternmost apse, precisely on the line of symmetry of the whole building. Unlike in Ayasofya, all the parts of the Suleymaniye Mosque—and the gardens all around it, and the colleges and pilgrims’ rests that surrounded the gardens, and the tomb of Suleyman himself—were oriented to the black stone in Mecca.

In his later years, Sinan dismissed the Suleymaniye as an “apprentice work”; and while it was vast and beautiful, it was merely the overture to a long and prolific career. Istanbul is studded with the mosques of Sinan, from the Rüstem Pasha Mosque in the bazaar, dazzling blue with
iznik
tiles, to the pale radiance of the Mihrimah Mosque by the city’s ancient walls. All of them are variations on the themes of Ayasofya: a dome that glows with light, supported on a cascade of vaults, as the circle of heaven negotiates its way to the square of the earth. Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles would have understood—and would have envied—the mosques of Sinan.

In the centuries after Mehmet cast his spell, Hagia Sophia became a mosque, and every mosque became a Hagia Sophia. The skyline of Istanbul is the masterpiece of Sinan, but also the last testament of Justinian and his wife, Theodora, who told him not to leave the city.

I
N
1922,
IN
the last days of the Ottoman Empire, a new potentate was anointed in the courtyard of the imperial palace, next door to Ayasofya. It was a quiet affair. “What a travesty it is!” one traveler wrote. “Instead of the solemn ritual in the Mosque of Eyoub and a Sultan girded with the sword . . . here is a delegation of . . . deputies notifying an elderly dilettante that he has been elected by majority vote like any other leader.” The ceremony wasn’t much to see: “A little ring of curious sightseers and correspondents crowds around, there is a short prayer, and a comic Palace dwarf, with some eunuchs, give a note of local colour.”

Local color was all it was; the last sultan had fled to exile in Malta,
and his successor was not even allowed to take the sultan’s title. He was restricted to using the title
caliph
, leader of the faithful. He wrote to the real ruler of his country, Mustapha Kemal, asking for an increase in his meager allowance, and received a curt reply: “The Caliphate, your office, is no more than an historical relic. It has no justification for existence. It is a piece of impertinence that you should dare to write to one of my secretaries.” Soon enough the caliph was sent into exile like his predecessor. Mustapha Kemal, once an obscure officer of middling rank, was given the title
Gazi
, or warrior, as Mehmet had once been given it; and eventually that of
Atatürk
, which means “Father of the Turks.” But he did not take the title of
sultan or caliph
. These he regarded with scorn as decadent anachronisms in a modern, progressive age.

In 1925, in a move controversial even to this day, Atatürk abolished Islamic rules for headgear: no longer would women have to wear the veil, nor would the status of a man be defined by the shape and color of his fez. Atatürk preferred a panama hat and a linen suit, himself. At the same time he closed all the imperial mausolea, to which the faithful had long gone to pray, and all the dervish lodges, in which mystics had danced themselves into distinctly unmodern trances. In 1928, he abolished the use of the Arabic alphabet, ordering his officials to concoct a version of the Latin one, and not long after, the last practices of sharia law were brought to an end. In short, Mustapha Kemal did everything in his power to break the hold of Islam over his people; and he moved the center of the Turkish world away from Istanbul to a new capital in Ankara, in the heart of Anatolia.

Having done so, he went to the National Assembly and addressed himself to the largest, most visible, and perhaps most inconvenient relic of the past: the Ayasofya Mosque. In 1920 the European victors of the First World War, in a vengeful mood, had demanded that the spell of Sultan Mehmet be reversed, and that Ayasofya should become Hagia Sophia once again. In other words, the terms of the humiliating Treaty of Sèvres demanded that the greatest mosque of the greatest city of the Ottoman Empire become a church.

Everybody knew that Ayasofya had not always been a mosque. Everybody knew that under the whitewash and the carpets, behind the mihrab and the
minbar
and the minarets, there was another building
that, some five hundred years ago, had been placed under the spell of Islam. But surely the tribe of Osman had undergone enough in their painful rebirth as the nation of Turkey? Surely it was enough that the sultan had been sent into exile, and that the caliphate had been abolished? What further humiliations prompted by the European enemy would the Father of the Nation heap upon his people?

Atatürk may have been a radical secularist, but he was nothing if not a canny politician. His clear blue eyes twinkled as he announced: “We have invited the Byzantine Society of the United States to begin excavations at Ayasofya. Ayasofya will become a museum.” The vaunting powers of Europe, who preached to others about modernity and liberal democracy, could hardly object to something so modern, so liberal, as a museum. And the people of Turkey, who could surely be forgiven a little nostalgia for their old customs, could be spared the humiliation of the conversion of Ayasofya into Hagia Sophia.

And nothing would give Atatürk greater pleasure than to exorcise such a pile of the superstitious spell that had afflicted it for centuries. A museum it would be, a historical document, a memento of yesteryear, connected to no one religion, the international patrimony of a disinterested modern mankind. Just as the golden chain that connected the dome of Hagia Sophia to heaven had been broken in a vision of moving flame on the night of 25 May 1453, so the invisible line that had connected the Ayasofya Mosque to the Kaaba in Mecca was now also severed. In 1929, some fourteen hundred years after it had been built, Ayasofya became a building, no more, nor less. It pointed nowhere in particular and was the center of nowhere.

The archaeologists of the Byzantine Society dug beneath the pavement in front of the building and found the remains of the basilica of Theodosius, burned down by the Blues and the Greens in the riots of 532. They scraped away the whitewash that covered the walls and found the glittering mosaics of Constantine and Justinian, of the Virgin Mary and Christ himself. They took away the carpets, and underneath them they found a purple stone: the Omphalos, which had once been the Navel of the World. But because Hagia Sophia had also been Ayasofya, the archaeologists did not take away the minarets, or the fountains, or the pews, or the
minbar
, or the mihrab itself. They all
remain, the fragments of the spell that was cast when Mehmet the Conqueror climbed on the altar table, turned his face to Mecca, and said his prayers.

Petitions and campaigns to return the building to both Christian and Islamic use still abound, each citing the custom of centuries to justify their cause; others propose the use of Ayasofya as a memorial to the victims of the great clash of cultures that the building embodies, from the Crusades to the War on Terrorism. All sides agree that the Turkish government and UNESCO do not adequately fund the work required to keep the building standing, and all see political motivation—secularist, Islamist, Christian—in this parsimony.

In 2006, Pope Benedict went to Ayasofya. He stood in front of the mihrab and said his Ave Marias, while Islamist protesters prostrated themselves before the mosaics of Roman emperors and called out to Allah. No spells were cast that day, or if they were, neither Maria nor Allah seem to have heard them. The babble of the crowd echoed against a dark and empty dome, and their aimless feet trampled the stone that had once been the navel of the world.

The Wondrous Flitting of the Holy House