Memories of Istanbul's Hagia Sophia

In my third year of college, I began to feel an inescapable urge to see the world beyond my United States. It was almost suffocating, and presented an enormous personal dilemma. I was a middle class kid from New Jersey studying the most practical and employable of fields I could imagine – chemical engineering. My time, money, and attention were claimed by the devotion to this field that would give me the means to escape the valence of my parents’ support and allow me to pave my own way in the world with a noble calling.

When wanderlust struck, I was committed to a course load that consisted of physical chemistry and thermodynamics, among other intimidatingly named classes. I enjoyed the technical nature of these classes, and they satisfied a deep curiosity about the mysteries of material existence. Increasingly, my classes seemed limited in illuminating the greater mystery I felt about the nature of existence itself.

On the other side of campus, in what felt like a different world, I was taking an art history class. It was there that wanderlust transformed into a compulsion. All of the objects and structures we studied were from cultures that were distant in time and place: the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Etruscans and Mycenaeans, then the Greeks and Romans, and so on through time.

The object that had the greatest impact on me was the Hagia Sophia, the grand Byzantine basilica in modern day Istanbul. It was a symbol – made potent by its size, ingenuity, and visibility from afar – of the shift of power away from Rome and eastward toward peoples who were increasingly Christian and Greek-speaking, and who were finding self-identity and self-sufficiency as pagan Rome weakened and succumbed to corruption and despotic leadership, as well as Germanic and Slavic challenges.

The images of the Hagia Sophia that we studied were black and white, which allowed us to see more starkly the massive scale and vastness of its interior. The Byzantine architects designed the structure to give the impression that visitors were witnessing a miracle. The weight of the central dome rests primarily on four massive columns. This design alleviates the need for rows of supporting beams and creates a sense of airy vastness. The massive dome appears to be floating more than 50 meters from the ground, supported by the light of the divine streaming through the windows piercing it.

More captivating to me, however, was its dual history as church and mosque. I was struck by the large circular plates erected high above the cavernous central nave on which graceful Arabic calligraphy seemed to convey a celestial message. These giant discs and their indecipherable text were symbols in the truest sense, pointing towards an unseen power. I had the impression that the Muslims who hung them had the presence of mind to recognize this structure’s symbolic potential, its unique ability to serve as a portal to the divine, and while preserving its greatness claimed it in the most unambiguous terms.

Within a year and half of that art history class, I would make my first trip to Istanbul. I had completed my degree, but let the word ‘engineer,’ which I had once held in reverence, slide from my identity.

I was haphazardly and without any formal direction, forging another identity altogether, one based not on knowledge of physics and chemistry, but on history and culture. It was a painful and tortuous break that has reverberated within me to this day. It felt selfish and self-destructive, an affront to my potential, and what my parents had hoped for and invested in me.

Part of me was eager to renounce the stifling world of engineering and dull office life to which I’d imagined it would confine me. I felt that I was on the precipice of discovering a more authentic version of myself. But the decision to change the course of my life, in such dramatic and quixotic fashion, opened a fissure in my psyche that has never healed, and put a question mark over part of my personal history that I’ve struggled to understand and explain, and at times, felt the need to atone for.

Today, over 25 years later, I recall that struggle keenly, but little of my first trips to the Haghia Sophia. The intervening years of my life--filled by advanced study of economics, history, political science, finance, and journalism, as well as several years working as a journalist in San Francisco and New York City, and then a decade of living as an expatriate in Hong Kong--have dulled and diluted the memory of wonder I must have felt the first and second times I saw the Hagia Sophia.

Last year I traveled to Istanbul and it was the first thing I wanted to see. As I approached it, I concentrated my mind in an effort to surface any recollections of what I saw and felt during my first visit to the church.

On that day, so many years ago, I’d arrived in Istanbul at dawn, groggy after a mostly sleepless night on a train from Bucharest. I remember wearing an oversized puffy ski jacket that a much taller acquaintance had discarded, and maroon boots that I'd purchased before leaving the US.

Turkey was staunchly secular at the time, and the basilica operated as a museum, as it had since the fall of the Ottoman caliphate after World War I. Young men fresh out of the country’s vaunted army, many with scars from the internal conflict with the Kurds, worked in the souvenir shops or served coffee at cafes in the basilica’s shadow.

I remember going directly to the basilica from the train station. I recall a crystalline quality of sunlight, and a clear blue sky that stood in contrast to the structure’s reddish exterior. Sunlight suffused the second story corridors where there were mosaics depicting Biblical scenes.

I remember walking around the outside of the church in an effort to see it and experience it from every angle, and feeling surprised and disappointed that the weighty history of this structure and the society that built it terminated so abruptly with the adjacent tourist shops, hotels, and barren bits of land stretching down to the Bosphorus.

But these snippets were the extent of my memories.

Visiting Istanbul in 2022 was my first attempt at travel during the Covid era. My girlfriend of several years and I had been confined to the limits of Hong Kong since the pandemic emerged.

People still line up to see the basilica. We arrived early one morning and a crowd was already gathering. A Chinese girl stood in front of us speaking Mandarin to her parents and taking selfies. They were part of the recent wave of Chinese tourists who had benefited from the country’s integration with the global economy in the 1990’s, and had become some of the most peripatetic globetrotters.

A man from Oman standing behind us said he was in town for business. The Gulf states, from where he hailed, had also risen in global prominence, first as US allies in a fight against global jihad, and more recently, as non-aligned nations in America’s geopolitical tussle with China. In the process, they have spawned a petro-fuelled business class.

What struck me about the Hagia Sophia on this visit was its reconversion to mosque, a populist move by the country’s Islamist leader. Circular lights hang low, breaking up the view of the dome and precluding the otherwise palpable sense of enveloping vastness. Drapes have been hung to block the Christian images above the apse. A lectern typical of mosques, called a minbar, has been installed. The floor is carpeted to allow people to kneel and pray. My girlfriend had to wear a headscarf. We both had to remove our shoes. Only the nave was accessible. The second floor, with its wondrous Christian mosaics, were off limits.

Hagia Sophia nonetheless still inspires awe. We sat on the carpet and snapped photos. With my eyes, I traced the lines of the four primary pillars supporting the dome. It was as if I were seeing most details for the first time: the winged creatures flanking the dome, the mesmeric Arabic calligraphy at the ring around the very top of it, the powerful walls, and the hues of dark grey, black, and yellow that dominate the color scheme. None of this did I recall.

My mind then turned to the young person I was on my first visit to the Hagia Sophia. I could only briefly conjure an image of myself at the time: a self-serious and impecunious early twenties seeker of enlightenment, traveling alone with no commitments or attachments to anyone or anything, and incapable of expressing the emotions evoked by the imposing basilica and his achievement in finally having seen it.

I wanted to ponder that image of my former self, and imagine encountering him and catching him up on the person he’s become. But that effort felt too deep and volatile of an emotional vein to tap.

I let the image of my younger self disappear from my mind. He would remain a mystery; only an incomplete understanding of him would remain, and it would continue growing fuzzier over time. Hagia Sophia too, in a sense, would now exist only as a fracturing memory, as I was unable to experience it as I once had.

And so we left, taking a taxi across the Bosphorus for lunch on a quiet side street near the shopping district on Istiklal boulevard, where a few months later a terrible bombing would occur.