44 Fun Facts About Hagia Sophia

With some 10,000 workers, how long did Justinian's Hagia Sophia take to build?

6 years, near enough: Justinian started work only weeks after the old church burned down in 532 and inaugurated its replacement on 27 December 537.

Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles, who designed Hagia Sophia for Justinian, were primarily what?

Geometers by training: Anthemius wrote a treatise on burning mirrors, and is said to have faked an earthquake in a rival neighbour's house by piping steam under the floor.

What does the name 'Hagia Sophia' mean?

Hagia Sophia is Greek for Holy Wisdom, a title of Christ rather than a saint's name; the neighbouring older church Hagia Irene means Holy Peace.

Hagia Sophia's second church burned to the ground in January 532 during which uprising?

The Nika riots took their name from the chant of 'Nika', 'Win!', raised by chariot-racing fans in the Hippodrome next door, whose rival factions united against Justinian.

On seeing the finished Hagia Sophia, Justinian is said to have declared he had surpassed which biblical king?

Justinian is said to have exclaimed 'Solomon, I have outdone thee' at the dedication, setting his church against Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.

Hagia Sophia's best-known resident, Gli, stroked by Barack Obama in 2009, was what kind of animal?

A cat: Gli was born in the building in 2004, and when it reopened for Muslim prayer officials promised she could stay, which she did until she died at 16.

After an earthquake brought down Hagia Sophia's first dome in 558, how was its replacement built differently?

Taller and steeper: Isidorus the Younger, nephew of one of the first architects, raised and ribbed the new dome because the shallow original had pushed its supporting piers outward.

What are the four curved triangular supports carrying Hagia Sophia's main dome called?

Pendentives, the four spherical triangles between the arches, let Hagia Sophia's round dome sit on a square bay; Ottoman mosques copied the device a millennium later.

Hagia Sophia's great dome seems to float because its base is ringed by forty of what?

Arched windows: the light pouring through makes the masonry seem to dissolve, so that one sixth-century writer said the dome hung from heaven; its crown is some 56 m above the floor.

The purple porphyry in Hagia Sophia, a stone prized by emperors, was quarried in which land?

Egypt supplied the porphyry, but the old tale that the church's green columns were taken from the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus is a later legend, not fact.

Hagia Sophia's floor is mostly Proconnesian marble, quarried on an island in which sea?

The Sea of Marmara holds Proconnesus, now Marmara Island; green marble bands cross the floor's grey-veined white slabs, and they were called rivers and marked places in the church's processions.

Which word for someone who attacks cherished beliefs comes from the Byzantine movement that stripped Hagia Sophia's images after 726?

Iconoclast comes from the Greek for 'image-breaker': the movement began under Emperor Leo III and lasted, with one pause, until 843; only then did figures of Christ and the saints return to the church's walls.

Which Rus' prince is said to have chosen Orthodoxy after his envoys described their awe at Hagia Sophia?

Vladimir the Great's envoys, the Primary Chronicle says, reported of the service they saw in the cathedral: 'We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth.'

Which Rus' ruler was probably baptised in Hagia Sophia's baptistery in the 950s, taking the name Helena?

Olga of Kiev, remembered for her bloody revenge on the tribe that killed her husband, came to Constantinople as regent for her son and is now venerated as a saint.

The architect Trdat, hired to repair Hagia Sophia's dome after the 989 earthquake, came from which land?

Armenia: Trdat, builder of the cathedral at Ani, rebuilt the fallen western arch and part of the dome so solidly that his work still stands.

The delivery of a papal excommunication in Hagia Sophia in 1054 is considered the start of what?

The East–West Schism is dated from July 1054, when Cardinal Humbert, envoy of Pope Leo IX, laid a bull excommunicating Patriarch Michael Cerularius on Hagia Sophia's altar.

Runic graffiti on Hagia Sophia's gallery parapets is believed to be the work of which unit?

The Varangian Guard, the emperors' Norse bodyguard, is the likely culprit: one man scratched his name into the marble, and part of it, Halfdan, can still be read.

During which crusade was Hagia Sophia sacked and stripped of its treasures in 1204?

The Fourth Crusade's looters led mules and horses into the sanctuary to carry off its silver, the historian Niketas Choniates wrote, and stabbed those that slipped on the polished floor.

Enrico Dandolo, who led the 1204 sack of Constantinople and was buried in Hagia Sophia, was doge of which city?

Venice: its blind doge steered the crusaders onto Constantinople, died there in 1205 and was buried in the very church his army had looted, where a marble slab still carries his name.

In Hagia Sophia's Deësis mosaic, what are the two figures on either side of Christ doing?

Pleading for humanity: the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist beg Christ for mercy at the Last Judgment; hidden under plaster in the mosque years, the mosaic was revealed again in the 1930s by restorers from an American institute.

Hagia Sophia's 11th-century gallery mosaic shows Christ flanked by Constantine IX and which empress?

Zoe married three emperors in turn, and the emperor's head and name in the panel were reworked, probably to swap an earlier husband for Constantine IX.

Empress Irene, shown with blond plaits in Hagia Sophia's Comnenus mosaic, was born Princess Piroska of which kingdom?

Hungary: Piroska, a daughter of King Ladislaus I, was renamed Irene when she settled in Constantinople as John II Comnenus's bride, and the Orthodox Church now venerates her as a saint.

Visitors to Hagia Sophia's 'wishing column' make a wish by turning which finger in its worn hole?

Thumb: you press it into the hole and sweep your hand in a circle, because legend says the column has been damp since a saint appeared beside it and that its moisture can heal.

Days after taking Constantinople in 1453, the sultan attended which first service in Hagia Sophia?

Friday prayers: the 21-year-old conqueror took the city on 29 May 1453 and worshipped there that same week, turning the fallen empire's chief cathedral into a mosque within days.

Which mosque, facing Hagia Sophia across the square, is better known to visitors as the Blue Mosque?

The Sultan Ahmed Mosque went up across the square a thousand years after its neighbour, and its great dome ringed by half-domes shows how closely Ottoman builders studied the old church.

Which sultan brought two colossal candlesticks from his conquest of Hungary and set them beside Hagia Sophia's mihrab?

Suleiman the Magnificent destroyed Hungary's royal army at Mohács in 1526, and the bronze pair he carried off from Buda have flanked the prayer niche as trophies ever since.

What did the great Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan add to Hagia Sophia in the 1500s to keep it standing?

Stone buttresses: Sinan spent his career trying to outdo the old church's dome in his own mosques, yet he also shored up its walls and built two of its minarets.

Murad III had two huge Hellenistic urns brought to Hagia Sophia's nave from which ancient city?

Pergamon supplied both urns, each carved from a single block of stone; once in the mosque they were fitted with taps so that worshippers could draw water from them.

What did the Fossati brothers do with the mosaics they uncovered in Hagia Sophia?

Covered them again, after drawing them: many of those mosaics have since been lost, so for some images the brothers' sketches are the only record left.

Besides Allah, Muhammad and his two grandsons, whose names are on the Hagia Sophia's eight giant medallions?

The first four caliphs, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali, complete the set, hung in the 1840s; the vast roundels hang beside Byzantine mosaics of saints and emperors, a pairing the interior is famous for.

Who converted Hagia Sophia into a museum in 1935?

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's government made the mosque a museum by decree, part of his drive for a secular Turkey, and let restorers uncover Byzantine mosaics long hidden under plaster.

What did a Greek military priest perform in Hagia Sophia in 1919, for the only time since 1453?

A Divine Liturgy was possible only because Allied troops were occupying the Ottoman capital after the First World War; army chaplain Eleftherios Noufrakis slipped in and celebrated it in January 1919.

The Omphalion, a disc of coloured marble in Hagia Sophia's floor, is traditionally said to mark where what happened?

Emperors were crowned in Hagia Sophia for centuries, and even the crusaders who sacked it in 1204 staged the coronation of their own emperor, Baldwin of Flanders, under its dome.

What happened to Hagia Sophia's apse mosaic when prayers resumed in 2020?

Veiled with drapes: white curtains hid the ninth-century Virgin and Child at the first service on 24 July 2020, held two weeks after a court annulled the decree that had made the building a museum.

In 2020 Turkey's top administrative court ruled that Hagia Sophia belonged to a foundation named after which sultan?

The court held that Hagia Sophia belonged to the Fatih Sultan Mehmed Han Foundation, the waqf of Mehmed II, who had endowed it as a mosque in perpetuity, so the 1934 decree was void.

Which Turkish novelist denounced the 2020 conversion of Hagia Sophia back into a mosque?

Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's 2006 Nobel laureate in literature, told the BBC the conversion took away Turks' pride in being a secular Muslim nation; UNESCO and the World Council of Churches also objected.

The first church on Hagia Sophia's site was known simply as what?

The Great Church opened in 360 under Constantius II, though later tradition handed the credit to his father, Constantine the Great.

The riots that burned the first Hagia Sophia in 404 followed the exile of which Patriarch of Constantinople?

John Chrysostom was banished in 404 after clashing with Empress Eudoxia, wife of Emperor Arcadius, and the riots his supporters raised left the cathedral in ashes.

Which court historian praised Hagia Sophia's new dome in his book 'On Buildings'?

Procopius praised the dome in his official 'On Buildings', yet in his unpublished Secret History he called the same emperor, Justinian, a demon in human form.

From January 2024, Hagia Sophia began charging an entrance fee to which visitors?

Foreign nationals visiting as tourists were charged 25 euros and sent to the upper gallery to look down on the prayer floor, while those coming to worship still entered free.

Byzantine legend held that Hagia Sophia's great Imperial Door was made with wood from what?

Noah's Ark, the story went; only the emperor and his retinue could pass through the door, yet the mosaic above it shows an emperor bowing low before Christ.

Why does the niche the Ottomans added to Hagia Sophia's apse sit slightly off the building's axis?

To face Mecca: the church had been laid out towards the Christian east, so when it became a mosque the niche had to be angled a little to one side of where the altar stood.

In the 1600s Hagia Sophia's old baptistery was converted into what for Sultans Mustafa I and Ibrahim?

A tomb: Mustafa I, deposed twice within six years, was laid in the former baptistery in 1639, and Ibrahim, another sultan thrown off the throne, joined him there in 1648.

Hagia Sophia's dome amazed the medieval world, but which older building's dome is wider still?

The Pantheon's concrete dome is the wider, but it rests on a solid circular wall; Hagia Sophia's builders did something harder and raised theirs high over a square hall.