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Notes on Contributors
Benjamin Anderson is Associate Professor of History of Art and Classics at Cornell University. His research focuses on late Roman and Byzantine art and architecture, the urban history of Constantinople and the history of archaeology. He is author of Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art (2017) and co-editor of Antiquarianisms (2017), The Byzantine Neighbourhood (2022), Otros Pasados (2022) and Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline ? (2023).
Tiilay Artan is a Professor in the History Program, Sabanci University, Istanbul. She works on prosopographical networks of the Ottoman elite and their households; antiquarianism, collecting and material culture; consumption history and standards of living; and seventeenth-toeighteenth-century Ottoman arts, architecture and literature in comparative perspective. She is the director of a three-year TUBITAK (Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) project on the manuscript collection of an early eighteenth-century grand vizier, Sehid Ali Paga. Recent publications include ‘Patrons, Painters, Women in Distress: The Changing Fortunes of Nev‘izade Atayi and Uskiibi Mehmed Efendi in Early Eighteenth-Century Istanbul’, Mugarnas 39 (2022): 109-52.
Sotirios Dimitriadis is a historian currently teaching at Temple University. His research focuses on the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East, and he has worked on themes of urban and social transformations, the emergence of modern education and the perception of the Ottoman past in contemporary Greece.
Asli Menevse is currently an Assistant Professor in the Civilizations, Cultures and Ideas programme of Bilkent University (Ankara, Turkey).
Her primary area of research is the intersection of politics and art in public space, focusing especially on two contradictory aesthetic interventions into everyday life: official monuments and political ephemera. Asli received her Ph.D. degree from the Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University in 2021.
Robert S. Nelson, an Emeritus Professor at Yale University, has long been interested in what the Byzantines called the “Great Church’, the subject of this volume. He is the author of Hagia Sophia, 1850-1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument (2004), which asks the question, how did a building so disparaged by Europeans in the eighteenth century come to be regarded as great again? During his research he happened upon an early twentieth-century synagogue in San Francisco that resembled the mosque in Istanbul. Since then, others have been noted, including the building in Cleveland studied here.
Emily Neumeier is Assistant Professor of Art History in the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. Her work examines the visual and spatial cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, with a focus on the Ottoman Empire. She has published in the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, History and Anthropology and the International Journal of Islamic Architecture. This research has been supported by the Getty Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Research Institute in Turkey and the Fulbright Program.
Robert Ousterhout (1950-2023) was Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He published widely on Byzantine architecture, monumental art and urbanism. His many books include Master Builders of Byzantium (1999), Visualizing Community: Art, Material Culture, and Settlement in Byzantine Cappadocia (2017) and Eastern Medieval Architecture: The Building Traditions of Byzantium and Neighboring Lands (2019), for which he was awarded the 2021 Haskins Medal by the Medieval Academy of America.
Unver Riistem is the Second Decade Society Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Johns Hopkins University. His research centres on the Ottoman Empire in its later centuries and on questions of cross-cultural exchange and interaction. He is the author of Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton University Press, 2019) and has published articles and chapters on subjects including the reception of illustrated Islamic manuscripts, the tombstones of Ottoman Cyprus, the art of medieval Qur’ans with interlinear translations, and Ottoman costume books in the age of modernity.
Ayse Hilal Ugurlu is Associate Professor of Architectural History at MEF University, Istanbul. Her research interests include Ottoman social, political and architectural history, especially of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She co-edited a book with Professor Hatice Aynur in 2016 entitled Osmanlt Mimarlik Kiiltiirii (Ottoman Architectural Culture), and two books with Dr Suzan Yalman: Sacred Spaces and Urban Networks (2019) and The Friday Mosque in the City: Liminality, Ritual, Politics (2020). Her academic work has been supported by a Major Award from Barakat Trust, ANAMED of Kog University, Salt Research and Istanbul Research Institute.
Acknowledgements
The papers collected within this volume began as presentations at a symposium held at the Ohio State University in September 2018. Our sincere thanks to OSU’s Department of Classics for sponsoring the event, and especially to Department chair Anthony Kaldellis for his support. We also owe our gratitude to the Department manager, Khalid Jama, who expertly handled all the logistical aspects of the gathering. Additional financial support was provided with a generous grant from the OSU College of Arts and Sciences and the Discovery Theme Initiative.
We have both profited from learning about Hagia Sophia with students at our respective institutions. In the spring of 2014, Ben led a seminar on ‘Problems in Byzantine Art: Hagia Sophia’ at Cornell University. He thanks all participants — Billy Breitweiser, Liana Brent, Asa Cameron, Betty Hensellek, Nichita Kulkarni, Nick Lashway, Asli Menevse, Margaret Moline, Avinash Murugan, Chinelo Onyilofor and Weihong Rong — for open-minded and exploratory engagement with Hagia Sophia’s many histories. In the fall of 2020, Emily organised a graduate seminar titled “The Biography of a Monument: Hagia Sophia’ at Temple University. She would like to extend her thanks to the participants in that seminar — Nonna Batrakova, Molly Bernhard, Michael Ernst, Michael Lally, Ari Lipkis, Nicole Emser Marcel, Sara Potts, Kendra Schmit, Alexa Smith and Ozlem Yildiz — for joining her to think through the many layers (both physical and metaphorical) that Hagia Sophia has accrued over time.
We are grateful to Sam Barber and Max Meyer for assistance with copy-editing, and to Michael Ernst and Ozlem Yildiz for assistance with securing images and permissions. Thank you especially to Ayla Cevik, who prepared the index.
This book could not have been realised without the attentive staff of Edinburgh University Press. We would like to acknowledge our editors Nicola Ramsey, Louise Hutton and Isobel Birks for their steadfast patience and continuous encouragement, as well as series editor Kent F. Schull for his willingness to include this volume in the Edinburgh Studies on the Ottoman Empire and managing desk editor Eddie Clark for shepherding the book into print. We wish additionally to thank the anonymous peer reviewers who evaluated our proposal and finalised manuscript. Most importantly, we are grateful for having the opportunity to work with all the incredible contributors to this volume, whose collective voices offer many new perspectives on a building that continues to capture the imagination and command the attention of the world.
As we readied the final manuscript for submission to the press, we received the sad news that Bob Ousterhout, the author of the concluding chapter, had passed. We were fortunate to know Bob as a teacher, a mentor, and a true friend of Hagia Sophia. This book is dedicated to his memory.
Introduction: Writing the Modern Biography of an Ancient Monument
Emily Neumeier and Benjamin Anderson
Hagia Sophia, the colossal structure whose domes have defined Istanbul’s skyline for a millennium and a half, has led — and continues to lead — multiple lives. The present volume tracks its constantly fluctuating status and meaning to a wide variety of stakeholders during the long nineteenth century, a crucial yet understudied period in the building’s history, c. 1739-1934. We hope that it might serve simultaneously as a detailed examination of a fascinating moment in the biography of a building, and as a resource for considering its enduring significance in the present.
In the summer of 2020, while the chapters in this book were still under preparation, a Turkish high court ruled that the transformation of Hagia Sophia into a museum in the early twentieth century was unlawful. The effects of this ruling were immediate, paving the way for the site’s re-conversion into a mosque in a matter of weeks. As responses to these events erupted across news networks, social media and countless op-eds, the urgency for an account of Hagia Sophia during the late Ottoman period became even more apparent. For, we contend, it was during the long nineteenth century that Hagia Sophia’s contested status, its use as a sign for something else, first began to determine the fate of its physical fabric.
This volume begins with Hagia Sophia’s transformation from a freestanding mosque to a multi-functional complex under Sultan Mahmud I (r. 1739-43). Contributors continue the story by examining the large-scale restorations of Hagia Sophia ordered by Sultan Abdiilmecid (r. 1839-61) and carried out by the Swiss-Italian architect Gaspare Fossati. The book concludes with the abolition of the sultanate (1922) and the debates about the building during the first decade of the Turkish Republic, which culminated in the decision (1934) to turn Hagia Sophia into a museum. The nine chapters, by scholars of both Byzantine and Ottoman history, adopt a variety of methodological approaches, including archival research, literary analysis and art history. Despite the diversity of these different accounts, the volume taken as a whole offers a coherent narrative of the process by which Hagia Sophia became an image. This process was not a linear progression, but involved a variety of interactions between different and sometimes competing conceptions of heritage, architectural patronage and restoration practices. The plurality of claims mapped onto Hagia Sophia that emerge during the nineteenth century establishes this period as a largely unacknowledged precursor for the debates and dynamics that we have seen unfold in public discourse since 2020.
Monument Biography
This volume adapts the concept of object biography, an approach that developed from the fields of anthropology and archaeology, and extends it to an entire built environment — to the realm of the monumental. Some maintain that the practice of writing life histories of the inanimate dates back at least to the European Enlightenment, along with the emergence of biography itself as a modern literary genre.! Yet it is Igor Kopytoff’s 1986 essay that launched the contemporary scholarly conversation about how objects can be ‘culturally redefined and put to use’ over time.”
As the mobility of objects often plays a key role in these narratives, it may seem incongruous to apply object biography to architecture.* After all, most objects are portable, and, by moving around, can be exchanged and have encounters with a number of people in different geographies. By contrast, buildings usually remain in one place over the course of their lives. Even if a structure is fixed in one place, however, it inevitably experiences physical changes to its fabric over time, of which some are dramatic and intentional, and others present as natural (‘decay’) or routine (‘maintenance’ ).* Both types of change find analogies in biography, just as the human body transforms and may require outside medical intervention with age. Moreover, if an object is able to meet many individuals on its peregrinations, a building conversely can receive those who make their way to the site, with a potentially wide range of patrons, architects, builders, caretakers, residents, congregants, visitors and tourists all developing their own unique relationship with the structure. As we are reminded by Asli Menevse and Robert Ousterhout’s chapters in this volume, it is also perfectly possible in the modern era for armchair travellers to ‘visit’ a monument remotely through the consumption of mass media.
In short, every building has a biography. As it happens, the first example Kopytoff uses to introduce the concept of object biography is architectural: the houses constructed by the Suku in Central Africa, whose physical state at each given age corresponds to a particular use’.° The authors of this volume explore the extent to which the same can be said of Hagia Sophia.
There are many ways to write a biography. In her study of the Cemberlitas Hamam in Istanbul, the architectural historian Nina Macaraig takes methodological inspiration from the specific genre of biographical memoir (tezkere) in Ottoman literature.° She observes that, while Western biographies tend to follow a sequential order in terms of time, tezkere are typically organised according to more thematic categories like birth, physical appearance, professional activities, etc. In a similar fashion, the present chapters, while arranged in a loosely chronological structure, examine how Hagia Sophia became a cultural symbol endowed with different meanings for various individuals and groups of people during the same era.
Over the course of the long nineteenth century, Hagia Sophia served multiple functions even while its ‘status’ as a mosque remained firmly fixed. For example, the site was an imperial monument that had received the special attention of the Ottoman sultans for hundreds of years, from its privileged position adjacent to the Topkapi Palace to the construction of several royal tombs within the confines of the mosque precinct in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this capacity, Hagia Sophia attracted a large number of pilgrims from all corners of the Ottoman Empire and beyond, as explored by Tiilay Artan in this volume. At the same time, the complex also played a specific role within Istanbul’s urban geography as the Friday mosque that served the people who lived and worked in the immediately surrounding area.
Today, there is a park between Hagia Sophia and the Mosque of Sultan Ahmet, which affords tourists and the city’s residents unencumbered views of both monuments (Figure I.1). This expansive space, however, was only realised about a hundred years ago in the early twentieth century (1913), when an entire residential quarter of wooden houses was cleared out and levelled to the ground.’ Archival documents and contemporary images are now all that remain of this mahalle (neighbourhood) of ‘Ayasofya-y1 Kebir’, which contained around a hundred and fifty houses.* A plate from the 1852 album commemorating the Fossati restorations shows a bustling warren of narrow streets, with buildings of various sizes and states of repair reflecting the mixed nature of the residents in terms of their income and social status (Figure 1.2). Archival records also offer a glimpse of an overwhelmingly Muslim neighbourhood that housed a cross-section of society, from the impoverished (like Ayse Hanim, a mother raising four daughters on her own) to the political elite (like Ziibeyde Hanim, wife of the Edirne governor Abdurrahman Pasha).?
In Ottoman Istanbul, the mahalle served not only as an administrative unit but also as a durable source of local identity, and the neighbourhood’s mosque usually functioned as the public meeting space for the surrounding community.!° Thus, even as Hagia Sophia became an internationally famous building, it also continued to define the everyday experiences of those who lived just beyond its walls. Indicatively, the residents of the Ayasofya mahalle rallied to fight against the municipality’s 1913 plan for a park between the two mosques, arguing in petitions that the process of eminent domain (istimlak) would deprive Hagia Sophia of its local congregation and only a ‘large desert’ would remain.!!
Perhaps the Fossati album features the screen of wooden houses in front of Hagia Sophia to stress the need for their ultimate destruction — as they impede a clear view of the monument. Nevertheless, the image simultaneously illustrates the integration of the mosque into the urban fabric, hovering protectively over the residents of its mahalle.'? All of the contributors to the present volume are likewise attuned to the importance of tracing both top-down and state-sanctioned narratives about Hagia Sophia, which determine the bulk of our source material, and the local or non-traditional perspectives that are less visible today.
If we define a monument as an example of architectural excess — an opportunity, in other words, for a patron to showcase their wealth and power by spending lavishly on the construction of a building of exceptional scale and expert design — then Hagia Sophia has been a monument since its foundation under Justinian.!> Yet the case study of the 1913 park acts as a stark reminder that, especially during the long nineteenth century, there were shifting and increasingly incompatible approaches to what constitutes a monument.!* Within the Ottoman context, the demolition of the Ayasofya neighbourhood signals the potential tensions between understanding Hagia Sophia as an imaret (mosque complex) and understanding it as an eser (historical building) or abide (memorial). All these terms could legitimately be translated as ‘monument’, but there are significant semantic differences behind each.
Imaret was often used in Ottoman Turkish to describe a collection of charitable works that provide essential services to the public, like education or food for the poor, usually anchored by a Friday mosque.!> As Unver Riistem and Tiilay Artan show in this volume, Hagia Sophia did not become an imaret in the full sense of an imperial mosque complex until the mid-eighteenth century.
Meanwhile, the word eser distinguishes what would otherwise be an ordinary object or building as a work of fine art or architecture; while abide conveys the idea of a structure that is perpetual or eternal.'© These terms come closer to the conceptions of the historical monument that took form in Europe over the course of the long nineteenth century, even if neither follows quite the same trajectory as the French and English ‘monument’ or the German ‘Denkmal’.'’ For example, the definition of the historical monument (Denkmal) offered in 1903 by the Habsburg art historian Alois Rieg]l emphasises its value as a permanent document of a certain period of artistic production, thus as an element in a linear history of style.'® Accordingly, the biography of Hagia Sophia in the long nineteenth century cannot rest on a stable understanding of what constitutes a monument. Rather, the building itself became a testing ground for multiple general concepts of the monument. The architect Aldo Rossi writes eloquently of the fashion in which buildings can shed one function in favour of another many times over the course of their lives, even if they maintain almost exactly the same form.!? To this we would add that Hagia Sophia in the long nineteenth century served many functions at the same time, and sometimes even for the same person. The contributors to this book thus follow not only Hagia Sophia’s physical transformations but also, and perhaps even more crucially, its discursive transformations. This book joins a wider movement in scholarship that considers monuments as generators of plural histories, and we hope that it may inspire a biographical approach for other major architectural landmarks around the globe.”
Hagia Sophia: A Very Short History
The Great Church of Constantinople was consecrated under Constantius II, son of the city’s founder, on 15 February 360, beneath the acropolis of old Byzantium. Its dedication to Hagia Sophia (Greek for ‘Holy Wisdom’) parallels that of the proximate Hagia Eirene (“Holy Peace’), built already under Constantine.*! We know nothing, archaeologically or textually, of these buildings, but they were probably basilicas, like Constantine’s foundations in Rome: St Peter’s in the Vatican, St John’s in the Lateran. Unlike the Roman churches, the Constantinopolitan were dedicated, not to saints, but to ‘glorious powers’ (in the words of a sixth-century poet).”?
The first Hagia Sophia burned in a riot, 404;7° its successor, whose atrium and narthex were excavated in the twentieth century, burned in another, 532.4 The construction of the third Hagia Sophia under Justinian was the stuff of legend from the start. Justinian’s court historian, Procopius, supposed
that if anyone had enquired of the Christians before the burning if it would be their wish that the church should be destroyed and one like this should take its place, showing them some sort of model of the building we now see, it seems to me that they would have prayed that they might see their church destroyed forthwith, in order that the building might be converted into its present form.”°
For Romanos the Melode, great poet of the age, the riot was divinely ordained, after which:
The very structure of the church Was erected with such excellence That it imitated Heaven, the divine throne, Which indeed offers Eternal life.
Both historian and poet link the wonder of the building directly to its form (even as Procopius imagines its form as existing prior to the building). The third Hagia Sophia is still, in essence, a basilica, but one (as Procopius writes) both ‘exceedingly long and at the same time unusually broad’.?’ That is to say, it is both bigger and closer in plan to square than most basilicas. Justinian’s Hagia Sophia was additionally distinguished by (quoting the same historian) ‘the huge spherical dome which makes the structure exceptionally beautiful. Yet it seems not to rest upon solid masonry, but to cover the space with its golden dome suspended from heaven.’”®
‘Hazardous in its statics’,”’ that dome collapsed in an earthquake two decades later, 557. A contemporary historian, Agathias, reported that its replacement was more secure but less impressive: ‘it has become narrower, its lines have hardened, and it has lost something of its old power to inspire awe and wonder in the beholder’ .*° Otherwise, Justinian’s basilica is in essence the same structure that we visit today. The primary changes have been to its decoration.
The vast naos, spanned by the dome, was rich in mosaics. Those original to Justinian’s church displayed a rich variety of motifs, including vegetal scrolls, trees, rosettes, palmettes, ropes, jewel strands, stars and crosses; but figures (be they animal, human or divine) were wholly absent.*! The earliest figural mosaics of the naos date to some three centuries later, after the end of the Iconoclast controversy. Thus the mosaic of the Virgin and Child in the apse was installed in the ninth century, and surrounded by an inscription, fragments of which remain: “The images that the heretics took down from here our pious sovereigns replaced.’*? This is false — there were no images in the apse before Iconoclasm. However, there is evidence for iconoclast-era removal of bust-length portraits of saints from a space adjacent to the naos (the ‘Room Over the Ramp’), which may have served the patriarchs as an office.
Images subsequently executed include portraits of reigning emperors and venerated saints.*4 More difficult to classify is the mosaic of the South-west Vestibule, opposite the ‘beautiful door’, in which the Virgin and Child receive the city from Constantine, the church from Justinian. The mosaic retrospectively makes both emperors into saints,*> even as it presents the earliest preserved picture of Hagia Sophia itself, magnifying its already massive dome out of all proportion to its supports (Figure I.3). The mosaic is an amalgam of fiction and truth, religion and politics, tensions that would remain in all subsequent representations of the building.
The image of Hagia Sophia in Byzantine literature remained closely entwined with its matter. “The Story [Diegesis] of Hagia Sophia’ is a text of the ninth century, thus contemporary with the mosaic of the apse. Like that inscription, the Diegesis mythologises the building’s origins, but it also exhibits a minute interest in its structure and fabric. Thus, when an angel appears to the architect’s son, swearing ‘that he would protect the church on behalf of God’, this happens ‘on the right side of the pier for the upper arch that reaches up to the dome’.*®
The dome remained subject to gravity, and fell once more in an earthquake, 989. A contemporary historian records that
there were many attempts by ingenious Greek architects to restore it again. But the leading architect of the Armenians, Trdat the stoneworker, happened to be there; he offered a plan of the building and through clever invention, he prepared models of the apparatus and started the rebuilding; it was constructed more beautifully, more brilliant than before.*”
The third — thus far final — collapse occurred in 1346; the reconstruction is attributed to two Italians, Fazzolati and Giovanni de Peralta, and a Greek, Astras.°8
These successive repairs represent one aspect of the building’s internationalisation: namely, the consistent role of foreigners (non-Byzantines) in the maintenance of its fabric. Another aspect is its growing fame abroad, often among those who had never seen it, as a symbol of earthly power and divine favour. A chronicle composed in Kyiv in the eleventh century granted Hagia Sophia a role in the conversion of Rus to Orthodoxy: for when its ambassadors entered the Great Church, ‘we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth’ .*? Arab visitors, if Muslim, seem not to have been granted entrance, but still traded accounts of ““the Great Church, where it is said that an angel resides” and where lies “‘a colossal high altar with huge doors and columns””’.*°
Yet another side of the internationalisation of Hagia Sophia was military. This begins already with the Varangian mercenary who carved his name (Halvdan) on a gallery balustrade in the eleventh century.*! A more direct military appropriation was enacted by the Frankish Crusaders, who in 1204 robed, anointed and enthroned their new emperor, Baldwin, in the Great Church.” They also rearranged the furniture; so that when the Greek emperor Michael re-took Constantinople, 1261, he ‘restored to its previous condition the entire church which had been altered by the Italians in many respects. And placing in charge the monk Rouchas . . . he rearranged the bema and ambo and solea.’*
Two centuries later, immediately after taking Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed II visited the Great Church, which the new rulers swiftly adopted as the city’s principal congregational mosque.*t An anonymous Greek poet writing in the aftermath of the conquest thought back to the story from the Diegesis, wondering:
Was the angel watching, as he had been ordered to do, the one who, once upon a time, made a promise to the young man saying: ‘I will not leave until you come back?’*
The new rulers, too, were interested in the Diegesis, as attested by a Greek manuscript of the text, copied in 1474, and still preserved in the library of the Topkapi Palace;*° and its stories found their way into the new accounts of the building’s wonders composed in Persian and Turkish.
Adaptation of the interior to Muslim worship required little more than mihrab and minbar. Many of the figural mosaics remained visible for centuries after the conquest. The Virgin and Child in the apse, for example, appear in views as late as the early eighteenth century. The seraphim in the pendentives were never entirely concealed. These Byzantine mosaics were gradually joined by a variety of inscriptions in Arabic, of which the most prominent are the calligraphic panels studied in this volume by Emily Neumeier. Other inscriptions established a dialogue with the earlier decorations. The Qur’anic text of Mehmed’s mihrab (3:37), for example, refers to Mary, whose image appears in the apse directly above.** Others are more agonistic, such as that executed in 1698 and displayed outside the South-west Vestibule — thus near to the mosaic of Constantine and Justinian — on which appears the hadith foretelling the capture of Constantinople by a Muslim army.”
While the sultans exercised a light touch on the interior, they substantially altered the external image of Hagia Sophia. The minarets arose successively: at the south-east under Mehmed, at the north-east under his successor Bayezid, and the two at the west under Selim II and Murad III in the following century. The mausolea that cluster along the building’s southern flank are likewise products of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, built to house the mortal remains of the same Selim and Murad, and of Mehmed III. The final substantial addition to the exterior was the construction of library, school, fountain and soup kitchen under Mahmud I, either side of 1740, analysed in this volume by Unver Riistem and Tiilay Artan.
Subsequent campaigns have focused primarily on conservation and documentation of the historical fabric: the work undertaken by the Fossatis at the behest of Abdiilmecid I in the 1840s;°° the work of the Byzantine Institute in the mid-twentieth century;>! and the more recent work of the Turkish Ministry of Tourism and Culture.*” At the same time, the image of Hagia Sophia continued to change, sometimes in response to its physical structure, sometimes in a nearly independent fashion.
Ottoman officials played a decisive role in this changing image: both through the literal production of images, and through staged events open to visitors both foreign and domestic, such as the Laylat al-Qadr celebrations studied by Ayse Hilal Ugurlu in this volume. But they could not hinder the production of a great variety of alternative images. These too engaged a mix of local and foreign audiences: on the one hand, the ‘folkloric’ accounts exchanged by residents of Constantinople and studied by Benjamin Anderson in this volume; on the other, the (often manifestly false) accounts published in American newspapers and here treated by Robert Ousterhout.
The emergence of a scholarly image of Hagia Sophia was subject to the same tensions. The Ottoman state advanced its own view, as in the folio of images prepared by the Fossatis and published by the Porte in 1852, and analysed by Asli Menevse in this volume. Eugéne Antoniades’s threevolume Description of Hagia Sophia (1907-9), to date the most comprehensive monographic treatment of the building, was likewise published with imperial support. Both publications emphasise the palimpsestic, multiple temporalities of the building. They thus participate in an emerging Ottoman discourse on the meaning of historical monuments, whose impact was felt also in the provinces: for example, in the conservation of another Hagia Sophia, this one in Thessaloniki, studied in this volume by Sotirios Dimitriadis.
A very different kind of image appears in Wilhelm Salzenberg’s 1854 Early Christian Monuments of Constantinople (Figure 1.4). Here the Ottoman additions are stripped away, while the (in truth also palimpsestic and temporally multiple) Byzantine elements are treated as if part of a coherent, ‘original’ structure. These were the images that enjoyed the greatest circulation in Western Europe and North America, entering university libraries and serving as the basis for ‘Byzantine revival’ structures such as Tifereth Israel in Cleveland, here studied by Robert Nelson.
The image of Hagia Sophia was (and remains) inextricably tied to the images in Hagia Sophia. In the 1930s, the government of the newly declared Turkish Republic commissioned the Byzantine Institute to uncover and conserve the medieval mosaics, many of which had been first uncovered then re-covered by the Fossatis the century before. The success of their work convinced the Turkish Council of Ministers to transfer custody of the building, still at that time a mosque, to the Ministry of Education, and to open it as a museum.
This manoeuvre was naturally interpreted within the context of early Republican secularisation: touted by some as a sign of Turkey’s modernity, condemned by others as an illegal abrogation of the vakif: Perhaps it also eased UNESCO’s 1985 inclusion of Hagia Sophia on the World Heritage List — although the official inscription (of the “Historic Areas of Istanbul’) includes monuments still in religious use, not least Siileymaniye.™
The 1934 declaration fixed, for a time, custody over the physical fabric of the building. Extensive subsequent campaigns of restoration and consolidation sought above all to protect the dome against the threat of future earthquakes. Let us call this the Hagia Sophia of the engineers. Its story reaches back to the construction of the building in the sixth century, and runs throughout the centuries, through Trdat and the Fossatis to today, in a contest between human ingenuity and the implacable natural forces of gravity and seismics.
Thus the Hagia Sophia of the engineers has always been a single building. The Hagia Sophia of the historians, by contrast, is usually split into three — church, mosque and museum. Its defining struggle was more about the building’s image than its fabric. Some interventions were intentionally polarising. The American ‘Free Agia Sophia Council’ published photographs of the building with its minarets erased; while conservative Turkish newspapers published drawings of the building in chains.>* Scholarly and touristic publications rarely acknowledge such polemics, but reinforce the fundamental division every time they repeat the potted history: ‘Justinian’s church was completed in 537 and reigned as the greatest church in Christendom until the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Aya Sofya remained a mosque until 1935 [sic], when Atattirk proclaimed it a museum.’*>
An alternative history would track the gradual divergence of the building’s image from its physical structure; the process by which ‘the building has accrued meanings that have nothing to do with its physical form and quite possibly very little to do with its history’.°° Such a history would begin already with the mythologising texts of the ninth century, if not indeed those of the sixth, as we have sought to indicate above. However, the period that we define here as the ‘long nineteenth century’ witnessed something different in kind, an all-encompassing acceleration and intensification of this process. It is, namely, the period in which Hagia Sophia definitively became an image. On the one hand, the nature of physical interventions shifted, from monumental additions (annexes and outbuildings) to restoration of the existing structure. On the other, representations of the building proliferated both within and beyond the Ottoman Empire. Thus, while the present volume encompasses a period during which Hagia Sophia was ‘simply’ a mosque, it nevertheless describes a series of changes arguably more consequential (if far more gradual) than those of 1453 and 1934 — or indeed of 2020.
A Very Long Nineteenth Century
The restoration and internationalisation of Hagia Sophia were closely interrelated processes. As Robert Nelson explores in his monograph on the building’s reception, the seeds of Hagia Sophia’s canonical status in Western art history took root in the 1840s, propelled by efforts to document the renovations that were ordered by Sultan Abdiilmecid and led by Gaspare Fossati.°’ This was the moment when both Europeans and Americans ‘discovered’ the significance of Byzantium’s contributions to the history of design and gradually came to be involved with both the physical restoration and widespread media representation of Justinian’s most ambitious architectural gambit.
While armchair travellers and foreign visitors to the Ottoman capital alike advocated for their own conceptions of Hagia Sophia, local actors remained intimately involved in the evolution of the building and its representation. As Gtilru Necipoglu has shown, Hagia Sophia in the nineteenth century became a repository of signifiers proclaiming the Ottoman sultans as the rightful caliphs of Sunni Islam, from the installation of large calligraphic roundels in the central prayer area to the decision to cover all figural mosaics from the Byzantine period.°* Necipoglu’s account emphasises the continuity of the monument as a vehicle for political power, even as one reign gave way to another. The chapters included in the present volume likewise seek the audiences of Hagia Sophia beyond strictly Western observers, including not only Ottoman government officials but also the non-Muslim communities living throughout the empire. The result is an expansion in the geographic, demographic and social range of the interpreters whose voices are heard in scholarship.°?
While the nineteenth century has long been an important subject for historians of the Ottoman Empire, largely because it serves in wider narratives as the lead-up to the First World War and the formation of the modern Middle East, it has been less prominent in studies of Ottoman art and architecture. Studies of the built environment, in particular, have traditionally focused on the ‘classical’ age of Ottoman rule in the sixteenth century, especially the work of the chief architect Mimar Sinan, whose tenure spanned the reigns of three sultans. Sinan’s mammoth edifices are, by design, difficult to ignore: the dome and minarets of the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne (c. 1575), for example, give the impression of a massive ship sailing through the plains of Thrace. However, in the last decade, the remarkably wide range of architectural innovation and spatial transformations in the late Ottoman Empire — including urban palaces and mosque complexes built in eclectic styles, the personal mansions of district governors giving way to civic buildings as nodes of authority in the provinces, and large-scale infrastructure projects such as fortifications and railroads — have enjoyed increased scholarly attention.
This new attention to late Ottoman art and architecture benefits from a wealth of increasingly accessible documentary sources. For Hagia Sophia specifically, we now have an encyclopaedic volume prepared by Ahmed Akgiindiiz, Said Oztiirk and Yasar Bas that exhaustively traces the material interventions in the building during the Byzantine and Ottoman periods and almost until the present day, largely by means of the presentation of archival documents.°! The Fossati restorations were particularly well documented, due to the state’s direct investment in and stewardship of the project.°? While several of the chapters in this volume make use of sources from the state Ottoman archives, authors also present a wider variety of under-studied materials, including contemporary academic publications in both Greek and Ottoman Turkish, mass media (newspaper articles and photographs), and the material evidence — especially inscriptions and other architectural decorations. This material has much to contribute to the growing field of nineteenth-century studies.
For the purposes of our investigation, the long nineteenth century indicated in the title of the present volume is a very long century indeed. The volume begins in 1739, with the building campaigns of Sultan Mahmud I, and concludes in 1934 with the decree establishing Hagia Sophia as a museum — an era that in fact spans almost two hundred years. We thus take on the broader historical concept of the long nineteenth century and use key moments of engagement with Hagia Sophia to push this framework to its furthest limits. The story of how one brick-and-mortar building became a present-day architectural icon thus may in turn serve as a useful barometer for how we discuss and track broader paradigms of modernity within the eastern Mediterranean.
The notion of the century that simply could not remain confined to the span of one hundred years was popularised by the historian Eric Hobsbawm.® His trilogy of books covering the history of modern Europe begins with the French Revolution in 1789 and concludes with the eruption of the First World War in 1914. Hobsbawm admitted he did not intend to write a history of ‘the long nineteenth century’ until he reached the third volume.® Nevertheless, a phrase originally coined for a specific study on the triumph and impacts of capitalism in north-western Europe has, since the 1990s, become a byword for the beginning of modernity itself, and applied to a much broader, even global expanse.
Just as scholars have questioned the precedence afforded to the Western programme of modernity, proposing instead a constellation of ‘multiple modernities’, it is time to discuss the possibility of multiple long nineteenth centuries.°’ In the case of the Ottoman Empire, which officially followed the Hijri and not the Gregorian calendar, it may be appropriate to talk about a long thirteenth century (1200-1300 H/1785—1882 CE) instead. This volume thus presents an opportunity to revisit normative periodisations.
For its part, Hagia Sophia already has its own commonly accepted chronologies. To many, the modern history of the building begins with the Fossati restorations in the 1840s. As discussed above, ‘foreign’ architects have contributed to the upkeep of Hagia Sophia since the tenth century, if not before. Yet, in the context of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman state’s decision to hire an Italian architect is understood as an act of westernisation,® particularly as the restorations coincided with the Tanzimat reforms, traditionally held by Ottoman historians to be the watershed moment that ushered in a new, modern socio-political project for the region. Despite attempts to nuance this strict periodisation, the notion that the Ottomans had a rather delayed start to their nineteenth century — and, thus, modernity — has been difficult to shake.”
On this point, the field of art history has much to offer. Recent scholarship questions a definitive split between the pre-modern and modern eras in the Ottoman Empire. For example, Shirine Hamadeh suggests that the reforms under sultans Mahmud II and Abdiilmecid I in the mid-1800s were anticipated by cultural developments in the eighteenth century. This was a time, Hamadeh argues, in which Ottoman commentators placed a good deal of emphasis on notions of novelty and innovation, which could be seen on the ground in the form of new public spaces staged around large monumental fountains and garden complexes along the Bosphorus.”! In a recent volume on the art and architecture of the nineteenth-century Islamic Mediterranean, editors Margaret Graves and Alexandra Seggerman reject the binary model of rupture versus continuity in this era: “In reality there are no moments of true and total rupture in material practices, just as there are no traditions that continue without modification from past to present.’
In addition to challenging the long-standing narratives of periodisation during the late Ottoman Empire, studies on the art and architectural production also have had to confront the related characterisation of westernisation (Tr. Batililasma) as an act of blind copying of European fashions. Both Hamadeh and, more recently, Unver Riistem have worked to decouple the engagement with foreign trends or audiences from the decline model inherently embedded in the concept of westernisation.’*
Similarly, the study of Hagia Sophia exemplifies the need for a more expansive framing of modernity in the late Ottoman Empire, both chronologically and geographically. The first three chapters in this volume demonstrate that the restoration of the building under the Fossatis was not a clean break from the past, but a continuation of processes that began in the mid-eighteenth century. Unver Riistem shows that Mahmud I’s ‘Baroque’ remake of Hagia Sophia anticipated the ‘Neoclassical’ restoration of the Fossatis. Moreover, Mahmud’s interventions drew their aesthetic inspiration as much from the sixth-century sculpture of Hagia Sophia itself as they did from contemporary sculpture in Rome. Tiilay Artan demonstrates that the epigraphy of Mahmud’s ablution fountain already addressed an international audience, but not a European one. Rather these inscriptions spoke to Muslim ‘merchants, diplomats and pilgrims’ from ‘Cairo, Damascus, Isfahan, Bukhara, and even Mughal India’. Finally, Emily Neumeier traces the eighteenth-century precedents of the calligraphic roundels that have become metonyms for the Fossati restorations. She finds them not only in Istanbul but also in such provincial Anatolian cities as Yozgat and Manisa. In brief, if the restoration and internationalisation of Hagia Sophia jointly constitute its entry into modernity, both processes had been under way for 100 years when Abdiilmecid commissioned the work of the Fossatis.
So too was the decision taken in 1934 to ‘secularise’ Hagia Sophia and open it as a museum the result of a much longer development. In this volume, Asli Menevse and Ayse Hilal Ugurlu explore the complex balancing act that the Ottoman state and, subsequently, the Turkish Republic undertook in the aftermath of the Fossati restorations, as they sought to instrumentalise the building on both the domestic and the international stages. Robert Ousterhout examines the other side of the coin: the rampant circulation in the US press of bizarre rumours about the fate of the building as the Ottoman state collapsed and the Turkish Republic was founded. Both arenas witnessed trial secularisations in advance of 1934, ranging from the ridiculous (the 1926 rumour in the international press that Hagia Sophia would become a dance hall) to the profound (the introduction of Turkish-language prayer in 1932).
Coda: Hagia Sophia’s Many Conversions
We offer this study of changing attitudes towards Hagia Sophia in the long nineteenth century during a similarly dynamic period in the early twenty-first century. Here too, the changes have taken place gradually, even if the summer of 2020 marked a watershed: both in terms of the conversion of Hagia Sophia, and in terms of a broader reassessment of the legacies of politically fraught monuments around the world.” It has become increasingly clear that ‘monuments no longer signify the universal, idealized, and permanent’.’> Ongoing debates about the status and proper stewardship of Hagia Sophia challenge the notion of monument-making as a neutral act and force us to ask whose past is monumentalised.
On 10 July 2020, the highest administrative court in Turkey annulled the 1934 transformation of Hagia Sophia into a museum, arguing that the Council of Ministers did not have the authority to abrogate a pious foundation (vakif).’° Within the hour, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued his own decree that, after almost a century of serving as a museum, Hagia Sophia would once again become a mosque.”’ The cultural and legal groundwork for these events had been laid in the previous decades, notably in the re-conversions of two buildings likewise named Hagia Sophia in Iznik and Trabzon in 2011 and 2013, respectively.’® In anticipation of the official ruling in the summer of 2020, we joined several colleagues to publish an ‘Open Letter About the Status of Hagia Sophia’, which garnered almost four hundred signatures from scholars of Byzantine and Ottoman studies.””? We argued that the discussion about the status of the building — should it be a museum or a mosque? — was a distraction from the more pressing issue of its conservation and management, asking “How can we best care for Hagia Sophia?’ Only two weeks after Erdogan’s decree, the building was outfitted for Friday prayers, an event that marked its official conversion into a mosque.*° For this ceremony, the majority of the visible Byzantine mosaics were shielded from view with sail-like fabric and the marble floors were covered with green carpeting.®!
The material transformations of Hagia Sophia are ongoing, and this is not the place to document them. However, we do want to draw attention to one display in which the nineteenth-century history of the building is mobilised to legitimate Erdogan’s decree. During a visit in June 2022, we observed a new installation in the narthex, greeting visitors just as they enter the building from the west (Figure I.5). A new set of texts and emblems hang alongside a sultanic monogram (fugra) of Sultan Abdiilmecid in gold mosaic, which was created to commemorate the Fossati restorations in the mid-nineteenth century and has been on view in that location for quite some time. The recent additions comprise: a gilded tugra of Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1451-81); the legal text (vakfiye) endowing Hagia Sophia as a mosque after Mehmed II’s conquest of Istanbul in 1453; and the decrees ordering the re-conversion in 2020.
These quasi-documentary displays include text panels in Turkish, English and Arabic, indicating the multiple (domestic and international) audiences that this exhibition is intended to address. The panel that describes the tugra of Abdiilmecid emphasises the sultan’s role in commissioning Fossati to ‘complete one of the restorations (tamirler) taking place in Hagia Sophia’, placing this particular restoration effort within a wider constellation of interventions during the life of the building. To that point, situated below Abdiilmecid’s mosaic tugra is a frame containing two documents signed by Erdogan on 10 July 2020, which represent the Presidential decree that officially opened the building to Muslim worshipers. The format of the document on the left, on certified letterhead emblazoned with the Turkish flag and embellished with Erdogan’s arching signature, visually echoes the famous decree signed by President Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk and the Turkish Council of Ministers on 24 November 1934 proclaiming the secularisation of Hagia Sophia: a text that had been frequently reproduced in Turkish news media in the lead-up to the 2020 court decision, but is notably absent here.*”
The new display thus constructs a genealogy for Erdogan’s decree. By recovering the ‘lost mosque’ ,*? Erdogan’s order restores the original intent of Mehmed II’s pious endowment. Abdiilmecid, not Atatiirk, stands as the steward who ushered Hagia Sophia into the modern era. This exhibit reveals that the nineteenth-century history of Hagia Sophia remains ideologically relevant in the current moment. Multiple interpretations of its significance are anticipated and countered on the walls of the monument itself.
The 2020 court rulings have largely established the parameters of recent public discourse, in particular the underlying assumption that Hagia Sophia can only serve one function — church, mosque or museum — at any given time. Yet this assumption belies the reality on the ground. Over the previous three decades, the function of the museum had expanded to include increasingly visible (and audible) expressions of Muslim piety. Since 1991, there was a small area dedicated to Muslim prayer in the Hiinkar Kasri accessible on the south-east side of the complex.** Meanwhile, the call to prayer has sounded from the minarets since 2012, and the site was served by a full-time imam since 2016.®° Thus, in a certain sense, Hagia Sophia for some time had been functioning as both a museum and a mosque.
Understanding the fluidity and possible overlap between different functional categories for a monument at a given time leads us to the further observation that any one individual function is also in and of itself unstable, a phenomenon that one of us has described elsewhere as the ‘mutability’ of a monument.®° During the Ottoman period, the stewardship of the site repeatedly defied common expectations of a mosque — for example, through the continuing visibility of Byzantine-era mosaics. As noted above, the mosaic of the Virgin and Child in the apse was still visible in the eighteenth century. What is more, the faces of the seraphim under the central dome of Hagia Sophia were visible for a full four centuries after 1453, and only covered during the Fossati restorations in the mid-nineteenth century. It was also during the Fossati restorations that, for the first time, architects uncovered and documented the Byzantine mosaics, then concealed them again, all by order of Sultan Abdiilmecid. It is reported that, after he had seen the mosaics, Abdiilmecid said “They are beautiful, yet hide them because our religion forbids them; hide them well, but do not destroy them, for who knows what can happen [in the future]?’®’ This statement reveals the nineteenth century as a moment when the Ottoman elites began to consider Hagia Sophia as a potentially shared sacred space — simultaneously a site of active religious worship, and a monument that documents a layered and multiple history.
The first Friday prayers in nearly a century were held in Hagia Sophia in July 2020. Ali Erbas, as president of the national Directorate of Religious Affairs, delivered the sermon from the minbar, in which he positioned Hagia Sophia’s newest conversion as the fulfilment of ideals first established by Sultan Mehmed II: “The re-opening of Hagia Sophia for worship is the attainment of the fundamental character (asli vasif) of a holy place that welcomed the faithful for five centuries.’** In this statement, Erbas calls for a return of the monument to its past as a symbol of Ottoman conquest. And yet, the ‘fundamental character’ of what defined a mosque space did not remain stable throughout the Ottoman period, but shifted gradually over time. By charting how Hagia Sophia presented multiple alternative images to different stakeholders simultaneously in the long nineteenth century, we hope to destabilise such a rigid, functional categorisation and reconfigure the terms of the ongoing conversations about the building.
In response to the decision to change Hagia Sophia’s status in 2020, Robert Ousterhout noted that ‘A church is never just a church’.®? Looking at the full range of approaches to Hagia Sophia during the long nineteenth century that are presented in this volume, we can likewise observe that a mosque is never just a mosque.
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