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Summary
- Istanbul was Constantinople for 1,123 years, from 330 to 1453, and most of the places in these pictures have belonged to both Christians and Muslims.
- Hagia Sophia was a church for 916 years, a mosque from 1453, a museum after the decree of 1934, and it has been a mosque again since July 2020.
- The gold discs in Hagia Sophia are 7.5 metres across, and when they were taken down in 1935 they would not go through even the Imperial Door, so they stayed inside until they went back up on 28 January 1949.
- Next door in Hagia Irene the apse has only a cross, probably from the rebuilding under Constantine V, an emperor who rejected figures in religious art.
- The Chora reopened as a mosque on 6 May 2024, and its fresco of Christ pulling Adam and Eve from their tombs stays in plain view in the side chapel.
- The relics of St Gregory the Theologian and St John Chrysostom were taken to Rome after the Fourth Crusade, and they came back in November 2004 to the Patriarch’s church of St George.
- The Turks’ usual name for the city comes, according to the old Catholic Encyclopedia, from a Greek phrase that means into the City.
Bibliography (Click to show)
- Scripture is quoted from the King James Version: Psalm 107:16.
- Byzantine Legacy: Hagia Sophia, Hagia Eirene, Chora Monastery, Pammakaristos Monastery and Basilica Cistern (the last with Procopius and Pierre Gilles, tr. John Ball).
- University of Sussex, Corpus of Byzantine Wall Mosaics: Hagia Sophia and the apse mosaic, with the homily of Photios of March 867.
- Procopius, The Buildings, book 1, tr. H. B. Dewing (Loeb Classical Library, on LacusCurtius).
- Ahmed Zahid Çelebi, The Status of Hagia Sophia Big Roundels From Past to Present Through Photographs and Engravings, İslam Tetkikleri Dergisi 11, 1 (2021): 209-242.
- Alexander van Millingen, Byzantine Constantinople: The Walls of the City and Adjoining Historical Sites (1899).
- Constantinople and First Council of Constantinople, Catholic Encyclopedia.
- Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 68.
- Orthodox Church in America, history of the Fourth Crusade.
- Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, A Brief History of the Temple of St. George.
- Al Jazeera, report of the Council of State’s ruling and the decree, 10 July 2020.
- Daily Sabah, report on the Hagia Sophia ruling (July 2020) and report on Türkiye’s population figures for 2025.
- UNESCO, statement on Hagia Sophia, 10 July 2020.
- Ecumenical Patriarchate Permanent Delegation to the World Council of Churches, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew about Hagia Sophia, 30 June 2020.
- The Art Newspaper, Some of Hagia Sophia’s mosaics will be covered during Muslim prayers, 20 July 2020.
- Pope Francis, Angelus, 12 July 2020.
- Hyperallergic, report on the reopening of the Chora, 2024; The Art Newspaper, report on the same, 2024.
- Vatican News, Pope Leo XIV’s third day in Türkiye, 29 November 2025.
- Architectural Digest, The Blue Mosque: Everything You Need to Know.
- Picture details from each file’s Wikimedia Commons page; the British Museum’s description of the 1852 print and the Library of Congress record of the 1890s view, as given there.
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