The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories by Edward Hollis

Constantinople, mistress of Europe and Asia and the Middle and the Euxine seas; and at the center of Constantinople stood the church of Hagia Sophia, which means, in Greek, “holy wisdom.” At the center of Hagia Sophia, which was the center of Constantinople, which was the center of the world, there was a purple stone called the Omphalos, which was the navel of them all.
    On 28 May 1453 the emperor of the Romans, who was called Constantine, was standing on the Navel of the World. He raised his eyes to the mosaic of Christ Pantocrator, the Last Judge, in holy and hopeful pleadings. This mighty judge resided at the apex of a dome some 100 feet in diameter and some 185 feet high, which was pierced with countless windows and set with thousands of oil lamps. This dome was supported on four gigantic arches, the junctions between which were inhabited by six-winged seraphs. To the east and west these arches were supported on semidomes as wide as the dome itself. These were also pierced with windows and were themselves supported on three smaller semidomes—a cascade of vaults so breathtaking that people told one another that it must be hung from heaven on a golden chain. These vaults were filled with a mosaic pantheon of angels, prophets, prelates of the Orthodox Church, and the families of the emperors; and above the altar, in the most holy vault of them all, was depicted the Virgin Mary accompanied by two angels.
    Now, as the emperor Constantine stood on the Omphalos, the open space beneath the image of the Virgin was filled with clergy, so many of them that their jeweled robes seemed to be nothing more or less than the mosaics of the walls set into motion. Before these priests stood the altar, and in front of the altar there was a silver screen set with icons. From time to time one of the priests would appear in the door of this iconostasis in a cloud of incense. Bells would shake, and the people gathered on the other side of the screen would prostrate themselves before him. The rest of the time they stroked and kissedthe solemn faces of the saints, encrusted with silver and blackened by centuries of adoration.
    And the priests and the congregation used the words they always used at the acclamation of emperors:
     
For the glory and elevation of the Romans
Hearken, O God, to your people
Many, many, many,
Many years upon many,
Many years for you, Constantine, Emperor of the Romans.
     
    And Constantine imagined, for a moment, that he was the first Constantine, whose Christian empire had stretched from Caledonia to Arabia, Mauretania to Armenia, who had founded Constantinople, and who had built the original Hagia Sophia in the year of Our Lord 360.

     
    T HAT FIRST CHURCH had been shaken to its foundations by an earthquake fifty years after it had been built, and it had then been rebuilt by the emperor Theodosius; but the Hagia Sophia in which this last Constantine stood had been born in another tremor, of a political nature. In January 532, five years after the emperor Justinian had taken the purple, a riot between the Blues and the Greens in the Hippodrome spilled out onto the streets of Constantinople. For a week the emperor was confined to his Sacred Palace as the mob rampaged through the city. On the night of 12 January, they burned Hagia Sophia to the ground.
    Justinian was in despair, and he had boats made ready to take him away; but his empress was made of sterner stuff. Theodora’s father had been a bear-baiter for the Greens, her mother had been a prostitute, and so had the empress, some said. She was used to the hurly-burly of the Hippodrome, and the crowds did not terrify her. “Purple makes a fine shroud,” she snorted, and she counseled the emperor to stay and die if necessary. Justinian, more afraid of his wife than of the mob, sent his general Belisarius to the Hippodrome. Trapped between thebanks of seats, some thirty-five thousand rioters were slaughtered there on 18 January, and order was restored.
    Then