Hagia Sophia

The story

In January 532 riots burned the centre of Constantinople, and the church that stood here with them. Six weeks later Emperor Justinian began a new one. Two scholars, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, designed it. On 27 December 537 it was consecrated.

Its dome is about 31 metres across and 55 metres above the floor. For nearly a thousand years no building on earth had a larger covered space. The name means Holy Wisdom: it was never dedicated to a Saint Sophia.

On 29 May 1453 Sultan Mehmed II took the city and made the church his mosque. The Ottomans added four minarets. In 1934 the Turkish Republic made it a museum. In July 2020 a court cancelled that decision, and it became a mosque again.

What is here

The prayer hall on the ground floor is for worshippers and is free. Foreign visitors buy a ticket for the visitors' route through the upper galleries, with its own entrance on the east side. The tombs of the sultans and the courtyard are outside the paid route.

If you have one minute

In the upper gallery, looking down

Visitors now see the building from the galleries upstairs. The prayer hall is below you. Look up: forty windows ring the base of the dome, and the light through them makes it seem to float. A writer of the time said it looked as if it hung from heaven on a golden chain.

The great round discs on the walls, 7.5 metres across, carry the names of God, the Prophet Muhammad, the first four caliphs and the Prophet's grandsons, in gold on green. They were painted in the 1840s.

In the south gallery is the Deësis mosaic of about 1261: Christ between his mother and John the Baptist, asking mercy for the world. The lower half is lost. What remains is among the finest faces of Byzantine art.

Things people often get wrong

"It is the Blue Mosque." The Blue Mosque, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, is the one with six minarets across the square, built in 1609–1616 to rival this building.

"The Ottomans destroyed the mosaics." Most were plastered or painted over, not destroyed. Many were uncovered in the 1840s and in the twentieth century. Some are now covered by curtains or lighting during prayers.

"It is the same building as the Saint Sophia in Harbin." Harbin's Russian church of 1907 took the name, as did cathedrals in Kyiv and Novgorod. The original is here.

"Tourists cannot go in." Since January 2024 foreign visitors enter by a separate door on the east side and see the building from the upper galleries, for a fee. Worshippers enter the prayer hall free.

Films, games and books

A scene of the James Bond film From Russia with Love (1963) is set and filmed inside Hagia Sophia, then a museum. The game Assassin's Creed: Revelations (2011) lets players climb its dome in the Constantinople of 1511. Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish Nobel prize winner, writes of it in his memoir Istanbul.

People who stood here

We searched Turkish and English sources for this list.

• Justinian I (Byzantine emperor, 527–565)He rebuilt the church after the riots of 532 and is said to have cried on entering it, "Solomon, I have surpassed you!" He also gave Europe the code of Roman law.
• Empress Zoe (Byzantine empress, died 1050)She is in a mosaic in the south gallery beside her husband, offering gifts to Christ. Her husband's head has been changed, probably more than once: she married three emperors.
• Halfdan (a Viking)In the ninth century a Norse guard carved his name in runes on the parapet of the south gallery. It can still be read: "Halfdan carved these runes."
• Sultan Mehmed II (Ottoman sultan, the Conqueror)He rode in on the day he took the city, 29 May 1453, and ordered the first Friday prayer here.
• Mimar Sinan (Ottoman architect)In the 1570s he strengthened the building with heavy buttresses and built tombs for sultans beside it. He spent his life trying to equal its dome, and said he did it in Edirne.
• Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (founder of the Turkish Republic)His government made the mosque a museum in 1934. It opened in 1935.
• Pope Paul VI, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope FrancisPaul VI knelt to pray here in 1967, and Turkey objected. Benedict XVI visited the museum in 2006 and Francis in 2014.
• Barack Obama (president of the United States)He toured the museum with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on 7 April 2009 and stopped to stroke the building's famous cat, Gli, who lived here until 2020.

Go deeper: seven stops, from the ramp to the Viking's name

The visitors' route goes up a ramp to the galleries and round them. Allow an hour, and avoid prayer times.

1. Outside: a building of many ages

From the square the building looks heavy and pink, propped by buttresses of many dates. The four minarets are each different: one of brick by Mehmed II, the others of stone, added later.

Beside it are the tombs of five sultans, with tiles of Iznik, and a fountain for washing before prayer.

2. The ramp

The galleries were reached by a stone ramp, not stairs, so that the empress and her ladies could be carried up. You walk up the same ramp, worn smooth by fifteen centuries.

3. The dome from above

The first dome was too flat and fell in an earthquake in 558. Isidore the Younger, nephew of the architect, rebuilt it six metres higher in 562. It has partly fallen twice since and been mended each time.

Look at the pendentives, the four curved triangles that carry the round dome on a square plan. Each holds a six-winged seraph. One face was uncovered in 2009 after being hidden for 160 years.

4. The mosaics of the south gallery

In the Deësis, the gold background is set at an angle so that it catches the light. The faces are made of tiny tesserae, some only a few millimetres across, shaded like paint.

A few steps on, Empress Zoe and her husband Constantine IX stand either side of Christ. His face and the name above it are later than the rest: the mosaic was altered for a new husband.

When the Swiss brothers Gaspare and Giuseppe Fossati restored the building for Sultan Abdülmecid in 1847–49, they uncovered the mosaics, drew them, and covered them again. Their drawings are how we know what is now lost.

5. The Viking's name

On the marble parapet in the middle of the south gallery, under glass, are scratched runes. Vikings served the Byzantine emperors as the Varangian Guard. One of them, bored during a long service, carved his name.

6. The apse: the Virgin and Child

High in the half-dome at the east end sits the Virgin with the Child on her lap. It was unveiled on 29 March 867, after a century when images were banned. It is the oldest surviving mosaic in the building.

On the floor below, seen from the gallery, is a square of coloured stone circles, the omphalion, where Byzantine emperors were crowned.

7. Out to the square, and the same years in China

Cross the garden to the Blue Mosque and look back. In Ramadan a message in lights, a mahya, is strung between the minarets.

The church was finished in 537, in the years of the Northern and Southern Dynasties in China (420–589), when Liang Wudi was building Buddhist temples in Jiankang. The city fell to Mehmed II in 1453, four years after the Ming (1368–1644) emperor Yingzong was captured by the Oirats at Tumu.

The dome still moves. Istanbul lies near a great fault, and engineers are strengthening the building. You may see scaffolding inside.