"A Church is Never Just a Church": Hagia Sophia and the Mutability of Monuments

Beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 will be remembered as a momentous year for monuments, including Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. On July 10, 2020, the Turkish courts handed down a decision declaring that the transformation of Hagia Sophia into a museum in 1934 was unlawful, and immediately thereafter President Erdoğan decreed that the site will once again become a mosque. Since then, this decree has been put into action with the space outfitted for Islamic prayer, and some of the most important Byzantine mosaics concealed from view behind fabric shields. These historic events have also prompted a deluge of debates, which have largely taken place on social media and in op-eds in major news outlets and academic fora.¹ The July 2020 ruling and presidential decree have largely set the conditions of the present conversation: implicit within these decisions is the idea that the status of Hagia Sophia is something definitive that can be adjudicated and finalized by lawmakers. No matter how one characterizes the moments of transition in the life of the monument, whether as acts of continuity or conquest, there is still the prevailing assumption that Hagia Sophia will always have one predominant function—church, mosque, or museum.

In the present essay we question this inflexible approach to the stewardship of heritage sites and consider how the particular case of Hagia Sophia allows us to examine our own assumptions and expectations about the status or function of a given monument. The truth is that, throughout the centuries, Hagia Sophia has consistently defied conventional notions of what a church, mosque, or museum is "supposed" to be. These kinds of functional categories are in and of themselves unstable—a phenomenon that can be described as the inherent mutability of a monument. As architectural historian Robert Ousterhout remarked in an interview following Hagia Sophia's change in status, "A church is never just a church."² In the same way that the editors of this volume urge us to resist the dominant homogenizing narratives of Istanbul, what Jeremy Walton refers to as "silhouettes," we maintain that Hagia Sophia—perhaps the most recognizable silhouette on the city's skyline—can help unsettle the rigid thinking behind a functionalist approach to architecture.³

The modern system of isolating religious spaces from other social institutions is antithetical to Byzantine conceptions of what a church was. With no separation between religion and state, let alone between religion and everyday life, churches in the Byzantine world adapted to the needs, conflicts, and celebrations of their communities. One need only turn to the sixth-century Miracles of Saint Artemios, whose eponymous shrine in Constantinople's Church of the Forerunner drew crowds of men suffering from groin hernias, for evidence of how unruly a group of churchgoers could be. Descriptions of assaults on women, fistfights, theft, and public urination within the church appear alongside accounts of miraculous healings and fervent prayer, offering a view into how churches were so thoroughly knit into the fabric of Byzantine social life that they facilitated the full spectrum of human behavior.⁴

The story of Hagia Sophia usually begins with historians contextualizing its construction as a response to the failed Nika rebellion. Yet by the time Justinian set out to transform the charred rubble of Constantinople left in the rebellion's aftermath, he was already familiar with how politics could play out through architecture. A decade earlier, Justinian was embroiled in a rivalry with one of his wealthiest subjects, Anicia Juliana. Juliana was descended from a distinguished Roman family with a patrician lineage tracing back to the republic, and her net worth declared as much. To avoid the high taxes Justinian levied on aristocrats, she used her gold to adorn the roof of a massive new church dedicated to Saint Polyeuktos. According to Byzantine law, this gesture put her fortune out of the emperor's reach. Anicia Juliana's church of

Figure 1.

Leo VI shows...