Hagia Sophia: Byzantine Alterity in the Core of Ottoman Identity

Abstract

Hagia Sophia:Byzantine Alterity in the Core of Ottoman Identity Bissera V. Pentcheva (bio) KEYWORDS Hagia Sophia, Byzantine, Ottoman Hagia Sophia is a masterpiece of world architecture and art (Fig. 1). Within it, two religions share a vision of heaven: a unity-within-diversity. Remarkably, the chief figure of this conciliatory gesture was no less than Mehmed II the Conqueror. Gülru Necipoğlu, in her important study of the Ottoman use of Hagia Sophia, has shown that "the conquerors chose to define their self-identity in terms of the conquered, while simultaneously remaining meaningful to their own past."1 Mehmed II left most of the figural mosaics uncovered.2 Moreover, he helped promote a new mythology about the building that built on the Greek legends but helped inscribe Hagia Sophia in an Islamic narrative: For instance, the story of the prophet Mohammad and how at his birth the eastern semidome of Hagia Sophia collapsed and was only fixed when a special mortar was procured, which intermixed sand from Mecca, water from the holy well of Zemzem, and the Prophet's saliva.3 Another important legend was that of the follower of the Prophet, Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, who allegedly came as the first Muslim to pray at the site and was then martyred there. Presiding over the composition of these narratives, Mehmed II ensured the preservation of Hagia Sophia as a sultanic mosque and silenced the desire of some segments of his elite and army to destroy the building.4 But how long did the Ottomans allow for the Byzantine extimacy to live at the heart (intimacy) of Ottoman [End Page 223] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Hagia Sophia 532–537 and 562, interior. The Byzantine Institute and Dumbarton Oaks Fieldwork Records and Papers, ca. late 1920s-2000s Courtesy of Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C [End Page 224] identity?5 This essay seeks answers by focusing on the meaning and experience of the central space of Hagia Sophia (which the Greek called kallichoros) and on two mosaics and their Quranic glosses: the Virgin and Child in the apse and Christ Pantokrator in the dome. Kallichoros Hagia Sophia is a symbol of the universe: an enormous void of over 250,000 cubic meters topped by a soaring glittering golden dome. It is a microcosm of the macrocosm, envisioned as a sphere of unity.6 In Greek this central performance space was called kallichoros, or the beautiful choros.7 Choros means a performance space, a stage, but also the action––dance and song–unfolding in it.8 The kallichoros of Hagia Sophia gives a plastic expression of the cosmos. In the sixth century, Procopius described the newly built Hagia Sophia as having a central performance space alight with three energies: humanity's ascent to the divine, divinity's descent to earth, and the swirling energy of circumscription or perichoreusis uniting terrestrial and celestial. Procopius imagined the interior as clay shaped by the turning of a potter's wheel–apotetorneutai–into a vessel holding a void.9 The generative, circular movement is supplanted by the lifting and ascending energy towards the skies (epairomenos aerobatei). And this ascending vector brings its opposite: divinity descending and hovering over the kallichoros, "loving to dwell in this space emphilochōrein." Thus, Hagia Sophia is experienced as a material shell, whose central void spins and propels humanity to the divine.10 Hagia Sophia's architecture embodies the concept of diversity within unity. The modern engineer and architectural historian, Roland Mainstone perceptively communicated this insight in his analysis of the form: [End Page 225] Unity is achieved on the other hand, by an underlying geometrical discipline that becomes obvious only at the level of the semidomes and dome, and on the other, by details like the horizontal cornices that sweep unbroken across the piers and above the arcaded colonnades, and by the overall unity-in-diversity of the colonnades themselves and the decorative treatment of the wall surfaces––even, perhaps, by a consistent absence of the precise uniformity typical of a modern machine age.11 For Mainstone, Hagia Sophia succeeds in achieving unity without canceling...