page_title: Hagia Sophia
section_title: Church of Justinian I (current structure)
hierarchical_section_title: Hagia Sophia / History / Church of Justinian I (current structure)
caption_attribution_description: Hagia Sophia&#160;; inside view&#160;: columns (southern section); Istanbul, Turkey
context_page_description: Hagia Sophia, officially the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque and formerly the Church of Hagia Sophia, is a Late Antique place of worship in Istanbul. Built in 537 as the patriarchal cathedral of the imperial capital of Constantinople, it was the largest Christian church of the eastern Roman Empire and the Eastern Orthodox Church, except during the Latin Empire from 1204 to 1261, when it became the city's Roman Catholic cathedral. In 1453, after the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire, it was converted into a mosque. In 1935 the secular Turkish Republic established it as a museum. In 2020, it re-opened as a mosque.
  Built by the eastern Roman emperor Justinian I as the Christian cathedral of Constantinople for the state church of the Roman Empire between 532 and 537, the church was then the world's largest interior space and among the first to employ a fully pendentive dome. It is considered the epitome of Byzantine architecture and is said to have "changed the history of architecture". The building was designed by the Greek geometers Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles.
context_section_description: On 23 February 532, only a few weeks after the destruction of the second basilica, Emperor Justinian I decided to build a third and entirely different basilica, larger and more majestic than its predecessors. It was designed by Anthemius of Tralles, and Isidore of Miletus. 
  Construction of the church began in 532 during the short term of Phocas as praetorian prefect. Phocas replaced John the Cappadocian after the Nika Riots saw the destruction of the Theodosian church, although he had previously been arrrested in 529 on suspicion of paganism. According to John the Lydian, Phocas was responsible for funding the initial construction of the building with 4,000 Roman pounds of gold, although he was dismissed from office in October 532. John the Lydian, writing in the 550s, was careful to say Phocas had acquired the funds by moral means; Evagrius Scholasticus later wrote that he had obtained the money unjustly. 
  According to Anthony Kaldellis, both of Hagia Sophia's architects named by Procopius  were associated with to the school of the pagan philosopher Ammonius of Alexandria. It is possible that both they and John the Lydian envisaged Hagia Sophia as a great temple of the supreme Neoplantonist deity whose visible manifestation was light and the sun. John the Lydian describes the church as the "temenos of the Great God" (Greek: τὸ τοῦ μεγάλου θεοῦ Τέμενος, romanized: tò toû meglou theoû Témenos). 
  Originally the exterior was covered with marble veneer, as indicated by remaining pieces of marble and surviving attachments for lost panels on the building's western face. The white marble cladding of much of the church, together with gilding of some parts, would have given Hagia Sophia a shimmering appearance quite different to the brick- and plaster-work of the modern period, and would greatly have increased its visibility from the sea. The cathedral's interior surfaces were sheathed with polychrome marbles, green and white with purple porphyry, and gold mosaics. The exterior was clad in stucco tinted yellow and red during restorations in the 19th century at the direction of the Fossati architects. 
  Justinian chose geometer and engineer Isidore of Miletus and mathematician Anthemius of Tralles as architects. The construction is described by Procopius's On Buildings (Greek: Περὶ κτισμάτων, romanized: Peri ktismatōn, Latin: De aedificiis). Columns and other marbles were brought from all over the empire, throughout the Mediterranean. The idea of these columns being spoils from cities such as Rome and Ephesus is a later invention. Even though they were made specifically for Hagia Sophia, the columns show variations in size. More than ten thousand people were employed. This new church was contemporaneously recognized as a major work of architecture. Outside the church was an elaborate array of monuments around the bronze-plated Column of Justinian, topped by an equestrian statue of the emperor which dominated the Augustaeum, the open square outside the church which connected it with the Great Palace complex through the Chalke Gate. At the edge of the Augustaeum was the Milion and the Regia, the first stretch of Constantinople's main thoroughfare, the Mese. Also facing the Augustaeum were the enormous Constantinian thermae, the Baths of Zeuxippus, and the Justinianic civic basilica under which was the vast cistern known as the Basilica Cistern. On the opposite side of Hagia Sophia was the former cathedral, Hagia Irene. 
  Referring to the destruction of the Theodosian Hagia Sophia and comparing the new church with the old, Procopius lauded the Justinianic building, writing in De aedificiis:
  ... the Emperor Justinian built not long afterwards a church so finely shaped, 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, shewing 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 int
caption: Verd antique columns from the south aisle
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