From Museum to Mosque, Hagia Sophia’s Epic Continues
As Erdogan's edict makes a mosque of Istanbul’s historic museum and yet another regime manipulates the cultural monument in tandem with its political agenda, Hagia Sophia enters its umpteenth phase of transformation.
Photo by Kairat Murataliev, via Unsplash.
Since President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey issued his controversial decree last week to reconsecrate Hagia Sophia, the cultural and architectural glory of Istanbul, as a mosque, the decision has ignited widespread controversy and concern. The Turkish court’s substitution of the former edict classifying the Byzantine marvel a secular museum in favour of a religious decree permitting Muslim worship and the alleged covering of the former basilica’s Christian iconography has received an overwhelmingly negative response, from professions that the transition will erase the past to projections that it will fortify persisting movements of Islamist nationalism.
The rededication of older structures to serve alternative purposes is an inevitable way of engaging with space, both pragmatically and ideologically. From single buildings to whole city blocks, power figures have manipulated physical architecture and its meaning as an extension or expression of their realm of control since ancient times. It’s a pattern we are familiar with, for we have seen it time and time again in history; but despite its repetitive nature, this practise of altering the form, function and implications of a space is no less threatening, and rightfully so. While attachment to material culture in its current form and with its current status is futile in a world so often subject to change, the controversy of Hagia Sophia’s impending transformation is not so much rooted in the Western world’s sentimental devotion to the building’s function as a museum, but rather concern for the ideology this shift will help communicate.
Photo by Rumman Amin via Unsplash.
Since, evidently, heritage monuments are key arms in culture wars, the reestablishment of Hagia Sophia as a mosque has been rebranded ‘Turkey’s Islamist Dream Realised’; a strategic move which intends to reclaim a currently secular place and repatriate it to the Muslim community. As an aside, it’s worth questioning whether even in its museum form Hagia Sophia was ever really secular to begin with. It’s difficult to rationalise a building cloaked in both Christian mosaics and Islamic motifs alike as a profane space even if it is officially deemed as such. It’s questionable how neutral a converted place of worship can really be, especially to museum visitor-pilgrims paying homage to their religious traditions, the same to which the site was once devoted.
If Hagia Sophia has unofficially continued to carry significance for religious groups, the same is true of political ones. Romanticists who regard the nation’s secularisation as the end of a golden age and the encroachment of the West upon the true Turkish spirit have commended this fateful transformation of Hagia Sophia as a return to its former glory. The monument’s role as a spiritual and ideological symbol, regardless of its secular status throughout the past century, now justified by legislation, brings to light the potential danger associated with Hagia Sophia’s religious reclamation. Countless reports deconstruct the ideological purposes of this decision, pitting the current President’s revival of Islamic nationalism against the secular foundation of the Turkish Republic by the benevolently remembered Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s. Political journalists write pointedly about the climate of brewing nationalism and the rise of the far-right which the decree epitomises, and raise concerns that Turkey’s secular status and relations to the European Union as well as to American and Russian powers are critically at stake.
There is plenty of media outlining the current political circumstances surrounding this edict, which is clearly about so much more than the edifice it rededicates. But in an effort to critically engage with the backlash it has earned, I wonder what the response would have been had a traditionally Christian nation resanctified one of its historic buildings – with a comparatively long history and complex identity as Hagia Sophia, that is – as a strategic political move. Would Muslim or Jewish religious leaders be entitled to the same head-shaking disheartenment as the Pope? Would the media carry a similar tone of dismay and raise flags for a country in disarray? Or would political and cultural bodies salute, or at least tolerate, the decision to return the monument to its former glory?
But like so many heritage monuments that have been washed in countless waves of transformation, any reference to the former glory of Hagia Sophia warrants necessary specification of which one. Is it the monumental museum inaugurated alongside the secular sovereign Turkish state? The splendid Ottoman mosque of the previous five hundred years? The Byzantine cathedral of the millennium before that, constructed in the sixth-century but remaining under almost constant beautification? The reportedly brilliant original basilica dedicated by Constantine from two hundred years prior, which was subsequently lost to fires and riots?
With such a lengthy past and shifting identity, Hagia Sophia’s recent change in status rightfully sparks worry amongst the international community, not just because it reveres both the glory and gore that characterised the Ottoman phase of the monument’s lifespan, but because the strategic choice will affect how the space will continue to be used as well as remembered. But there is a missing piece in the perspective of many who broach the topic; perhaps a slightly more philosophical one, but an important point nonetheless.
Photo by Stefan Kostoski, via Unsplash.
Every building, space, monument, object, and symbol we encounter has past lives; legacies long or short that we may or may not be already familiar with, known histories publicised for us to learn and exponentially more hidden from modern eyes. We are used to situating these narratives in the past, these neat little stories which account for that curious stretch of ambiguous time from when something was borne onto this earth until the present day. In the classification of the ‘historical’, a fundamental misconception is reinforced: the idea that anything of old age is thing of the past, a memory fading into oblivion, an entity that ceases to exist in the modern world, when indeed this is far from the case.
The material remnants of a time before our own don’t exclusively belong in history, especially when they are buildings in continuous use, still pulsing with life and breath and activity. Whatever survives of an earlier era is inevitably subject to the movements of the modern day, and whatever is undergone and witnessed by it will only be added to an ongoing story, an afterlife that continues to be written day after day. We seldom consider our lives and times this way, but history is being made every second; moments only just passed will soon become the latest chapter of an elongated chronicle.
Many would argue that this is one of the most magical properties of the material remains of the past: their ability to tell a story of days long gone while ceaselessly tacking onto its end. In the case of Hagia Sophia, the new re-establishment of the mosque must certainly be regarded as a loaded ideological statement rather than a cultural alteration, underscoring the need to monitor Turkey’s overheating political climate. But with regard to the building itself, so long as all elements of the heritage site, whether Muslim or Christian, are respectfully and safely kept, and so long as we are aware of what is being communicated through the reclaiming of the space, there may be more danger in resisting architectural conversions rather than addressing the political ones. We may have no choice but to adopt an attitude of acceptance, resting assured in the understanding that nothing material is ever truly permanent, that meaning and status will remain subjective despite official decrees, that there is always the possibility for monumental change to be made at the drop of a hat.
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