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

Justinian called Isidore, a mathematician of Miletus, and Anthemius, an architect of Tralles, and had them devise a new Hagia Sophia to replace the one that had been burned down in the riots. Only a month later, on 23 February, the foundation stone for the new church was laid, and from then on work on the basilica proceeded with an unnatural speed. Some whispered that Justinian was a devil; others said that angels were helping the workmen, watching over the building site and ensuring that their tools were not stolen. It was said later that Justinian tricked one of these angels to stay and watch over the church once it was finished.
    Two days after Christmas 537, the emperor went in procession to Hagia Sophia. When he entered the new building, Justinian stepped out in front of all of his court; he stood under the magnificent dome, hung from heaven on its golden chain, guarded by the angel he had bewitched, and he cried out, “Solomon, I have outdone thee!” It was a hubristic moment; for as Procopius, the secret historian of Justinian’s reign, observed at the time, the dome “seems somehow to float in the air on no firm basis, but to be poised aloft to the peril of those inside it.” Nemesis was duly served: twenty years later there was an earthquake, and that magical floating dome, its heavenly chain momentarily severed, collapsed in a heap of brick and a cloud of dust.
    Justinian was not one to be discouraged. He summoned the son of the mathematician of Miletus, also called Isidore, and within three years the church was complete again. This time the dome was even taller than it had been before. At its reconsecration, Paul, the silentiary of the court, stood beneath it and declaimed, “Wondrous it is to see how the dome . . . is like the firmament which rests on air,” wisely and quickly adding, “though the dome is fixed on the strong backs of the arches.”
    Hagia Sophia was subsequently subjected to numerous tremblings of the earth, shaken in 896, and 1317, and 1346; but it always withstood the shocks and became even more magnificent than before. After each earthquake emperors, architects, and engineers added more masonry to the building, so that the dome would remain standing; and while the interior retained its celestial splendor, the outside of thechurch came to resemble a labyrinthine Babel that never quite reached the heaven to which it aspired.
    In the iconoclastic fury of the eighth and ninth centuries the church was stripped of its images, but in the tenth century they were returned from banishment even more beautiful than they had been in the first place: Christ Pantocrator, Mary, the saints, the angels, and the emperors were woven into embroideries of mosaic on dome and vault and wall. The emissaries of Prince Vladimir of Kiev visited the restored church and reported, “We knew not whether we were in heaven or earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations.”
    In 1206, when the Venetians sacked Constantinople and carried off the bronze horses and the treasures of the Hippodrome, they also attacked Hagia Sophia. They broke into the church, murdered the people they found taking sanctuary inside, and set a prostitute on the imperial throne. In a final insult, they buried Enrico Dandolo, the doge of Venice who had contrived Constantinople’s misfortune, in an aisle of the church. (His tombstone is still there.) But in 1261, the Romans returned to Constantinople, and the emperor Michael Palaeologus proceeded directly to Hagia Sophia to be ceremonially acclaimed like all the emperors before him—above the Omphalos, the Navel of the World, under the dome that was suspended from heaven by a golden chain.

     
    I N 1453, STANDING in the same place as all his predecessors, surrounded by his people and his priests, enveloped in a cloud of incense,