The Somnia Chronicles Notes

Episode 1 · Notes

What Did Hagia Sophia Look Like When It Opened in 537?

Gold vaults with no faces, a dome that seemed to hang from heaven, and marble of many colours. What Justinian's church looked like on its first day, and what came later.

Episode 1 coverWatch the episode · about forty minutes

The short answer: when Hagia Sophia was dedicated on 27 December 537, it was a church of light, not of pictures. The vaults shone with gold mosaic decorated with crosses, vines and geometric patterns, but none of the faces of saints and emperors that visitors see today. A ring of windows at the base of the dome let in so much daylight that the dome seemed to float. The dome itself was lower and flatter than the one standing now, which goes back to a rebuilding in 562 and has been partly rebuilt since. And there were no minarets. Those came almost a thousand years later.

Why was it built so quickly?

An earlier church stood on the site. It burned in January 532, during the Nika riot, a revolt against Justinian that began in the Hippodrome. Procopius, who lived through it, says the whole church "lay a charred mass of ruins."

Work on the new church began on 23 February 532, about six weeks later. It was dedicated on 27 December 537, after five years and ten months. For a building of that size, that was astonishingly fast.

Who designed it?

Two men. Anthemius of Tralles was a mathematician who studied geometry and the behaviour of light; Procopius calls him "the most learned man in the skilled craft which is known as the art of building." Isidore of Miletus was a scholar of geometry who worked on the writings of Archimedes.

Their idea was a dome more than thirty metres across, resting not on round walls but on four great arches over a square space. Curved triangles of masonry, which architects today call pendentives, fill the corners between the arches and carry the round dome down onto the square.

What was inside?

Light, first of all. Procopius wrote that the church "abounds exceedingly in sunlight," so much that "one might say that its interior is not illuminated from without by the sun, but that the radiance comes into being within it."

The dome, he said, did not seem to rest on solid masonry but to hang from heaven. Translations differ on the exact words: some say a "golden dome suspended from Heaven," others "suspended from heaven by the fabled golden chain."

Then the stone. Procopius says that a visitor "might imagine that he had come upon a meadow with its flowers in full bloom," and lists the purple, the green, the crimson and the white. White marble streaked with grey came from the quarries of Proconnesus, the island now called Marmara Island. Green marble came from Thessaly in Greece. Some columns were taken from older buildings and raised again here, though which ones, and how many, historians still argue about.

Look up, and there were galleries on three sides, carried on columns and arches. They are often said to have been used by women, but historians disagree.

Were there mosaics of saints in 537?

No. The famous mosaic faces in Hagia Sophia today, of Christ, the Virgin, saints and emperors, were made centuries later. In Justinian's church the upper walls and vaults were covered in gold, with crosses, flowing vines and geometric shapes.

What happened on the opening day?

We do not have an eyewitness account of the ceremony. The best-known descriptions were written long afterwards. The chronicler Theophanes, writing in the early ninth century, nearly three hundred years later, describes the emperor going from the palace to the church, where the patriarch Menas was waiting.

The most famous line belongs to legend. A text written down some three centuries later says that when Justinian stepped inside and looked up, he cried, "Solomon, I have outdone you," comparing his church to Solomon's temple in Jerusalem. It is a good story. It is not evidence.

Is the dome we see today the original one?

No. The first dome fell on 7 May 558, after earthquakes in 553 and 557. Anthemius was already dead. The new dome was designed by Isidore the Younger, the nephew of Isidore of Miletus, and dedicated on 24 December 562. It was steeper and higher than the first. Byzantine writers disagree about how much higher: Theophanes says more than twenty feet, the chronicler Malalas says thirty.

The poet Paul the Silentiary, describing the church at that second dedication, wrote of "countless other lights, hanging on twisted chains": cups of burning oil, "ships of silver bearing a luminous freight", clusters of lamps he compared to pine and cypress trees. "Thus the bright night smiles like the day," he wrote. That is the church of 562, but it is the closest we can get to the evening light of the first one.

Did Hagia Sophia have minarets in 537?

No. Hagia Sophia was a church for more than nine hundred years. The minarets were added after 1453, when the city became Ottoman and the church became a mosque.

Listen to it as a story

Our first episode spends one winter evening in Constantinople in 537, around the opening of Hagia Sophia. We follow an imagined mosaicist through his working day, walk the city's main street, and stand in the square as the dome glows above the rooftops. It is about forty minutes long, told slowly, and made to fall asleep to.

Watch "A Winter Evening in Constantinople, 537" on YouTube

Sources

Written from the research behind our sleep-history episodes. Spotted a mistake? Tell us in the comments on YouTube and we will fix it.