Aghia Sophia and a Reckoning with History
It is an understatement to say that Turkey has a complicated relationship with its past—recent and remote. It also goes without saying that this is hardly a uniquely Turkish predicament. Here in the U.S., as the nation goes through one of the most polarizing moments of its history, one of the flash points of the protests has been the debate over public monuments. Turkey has been going through a similar reckoning with the legacy of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II (d. 1481) of the conquest-of-Constantinople fame. The controversy concerns the Turkish government’s decree re-designating Aghia Sophia a mosque, officially announced by President Erdoǧan on July 10, 2020.
Aghia Sophia’s reconversion into a mosque has been a cause célèbre of a conservative Islamist circle ever since it was designated a museum by a decree of the Cabinet and signed into law by Turkey’s founding President, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on November 24, 1934. For some Muslims, the 1934 decision was emblematic of their suppression under the staunchly secular regime of the early Republic, a blasphemous insult to the prophet Muhammed, who had foreseen the conquest of Constantinople by Islam and the conversion of Aghia Sophia into a mosque. Be that as it may, the latest move by the Turkish government has been internationally criticized as a last-ditch effort by President Erdoǧan to mobilize his base to divert attention from a faltering economy further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The decision has also divided Turkey along party lines, just like the removal of Confederate monuments has taken on the contours of a culture war in the U.S. Unlike in the U.S., however, the overall reaction has been more muted, with the exception of pro-government news outlets and the twitterati who have celebrated the decision with wishes for the “liberation of Masjid al-Aqsa” (Aqsa Mosque) on Temple Mount. The secularist opposition, a smaller and less vocal group, has condemned the decision not so much out of concern for protecting the status of a World Heritage site as its implications for the restitution of properties that belong to non-Muslim religious institutions, or vakfs. The non-Muslim foundations they mention are corporate bodies and hence their status is not really comparable to the Ottoman-era vakfs, which were established on an entirely different legal basis. Yet, it is a sensitive issue for nationalists since the Turkish government had confiscated a large portion of these properties in the early years of the Republic, and their restitution is an on-going struggle.
An even smaller group of intellectuals and legal scholars have been debating the very legitimacy of the decree. The problems they point out are both procedural and substantive. The current situation is the final outcome of a lawsuit filed by a civic association with the Council of State, challenging the 1934 law. The reasoning issued by the Council of State was inexplicably based on arcane laws governing the properties belonging to vakfs. In its basic definition, vakf is an Islamic charitable institution whereby a person or family designate property or income sources such as stores, buildings, mills, orchards for pious purposes such as fountains, soup kitchens, schools, hospitals, and mosques, in perpetuity. In the Ottoman context, vakfs, and especially large mosque complexes endowed by sultans and other members of the Ottoman dynasty were highly important in shaping the built environment of urban centers. The large complex built by Mehmed II, for instance, was one of the cornerstones of his plan to rebuild the city as a metropolis of Islam and was deliberately designed to be the center of a neighborhood where new arrivals to Istanbul could settle (figure 1). It was no coincidence that the complex was built over the Church of Holy Apostles, where Byzantine emperors were buried.
Figure 1. Faith Mosque Complex, built over the Church of Holy Apostles. Photograph by Sébah and Joaillier. Source: Library of Congress.
After the foundation of the Turkish Republic the governance of vakfs were transferred to a secular body and properties of a large number of them confiscated. In fact, the text of the 1934 law mentions that Aghia Sophia lacked a vakf. Scholars have pointed out that the reasoning not only bypasses constitutional laws, its interpretation of the endowment’s deed is also highly problematic. Unfortunately, these objections based on legal jurisprudence, Islamic or secular, will likely remain an intellectual exercise. “Performed legality” is the only way one can describe this thin disguise for a blatantly political decision. It is rather ironic, I can’t help but note, that Sultan Mehmed II, whose vakf registry was the basis of the reasoning, had drawn the ire of many Ottoman notables by confiscating their vakf property to the treasury.
“...for Mehmed II the Eastern Roman heritage was not something to be erased or demeaned, but to be embraced and absorbed.”
As a historian working on questions of identity, nationhood, and the violence inherent in these concepts, my concern with the decision and the way it is being debated is different: I think it is important to note that even if one could somehow overlook the pre-conquest life of this monument as a church which lasted nearly a millennium, and consider 1453 as the point of departure, the notion that the first conversion justifies the current one is not only legally, but historically unsound. As violent as the Fall/Conquest of Constantinople was, Aghia Sophia’s transformation into an imperial mosque was not simply an act of erasure or confiscation but also a re-consecration, at least as far as Mehmed II was concerned—to the Christian Orthodox it was a source of spiritual pain then, and to some that pain is just as fresh now (figure 2).
Figure 2. Aghia Sophia, 2017. Photograph by NSerrano. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-4.0.
The Aghia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) unlike Mount Rushmore, is a beautiful miracle of human endeavor: a cathedral completed ca. 536, during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian. Legend has it that its plan was delivered directly from the heavens to architect Isidore of Miletus inside a beehive, which you may be tempted to believe standing under its dome. For the Ottomans who converted it into a mosque after the armies of Mehmed II conquered Constantinople in May 1453, the Aghia Sophia was a symbol of imperial power and grandeur. To Ottoman imperial architects, it was a source of awe and inspiration, as well as a challenge to meet. And no architect took on this challenge with more talent and elegance than Koca Sinan (ca. 1489-1588), the chief architect during the reign of Suleyman I and his successor, Selim II. Sinan’s artistic engagement with Aghia Sophia can be observed in the form of his mosques, as well as his own writings. Gülru Necipoǧlu, author of The Age of Sinan, notes that “an iconographically meaningful visual dialogue with Aghia Sophia” was the exclusive reserve of Ottoman imperial mosques, which occupied the zenith of an architectural hierarchy that reflected the status of the edifice’s benefactor. Thus, for instance, only mosques endowed by a member of the imperial dynasty had more than one minaret. That was then. The Çamlıca Camii, inaugurated in 2019 by Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan, and currently the largest in Turkey, has six (figure 3).
Figure 3. Çamlica Mosque, 2018. Photograph by Håkan Henriksson. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-4.0.
My students are always surprised to hear that mosaics in Aghia Sophia, including the larger ones, were not covered until the reign of Ahmed I in the early seventeenth century. The faithful performing their prayers were apparently not bothered by the gaze of the Pantocrator. I doubt most people tweeting victory today could countenance such a sight. The conversion was a symbol of Islam’s victory over Christianity, but continuity was deliberately embedded within this transformation: when Islamic calligraphy was added to the embellishments of the church, the one placed near the mosaics depicting the Virgin and Child was a Quranic verse praising Mary (figure 4). And the church kept its name, albeit in a Turkicized form: Aya Sofya Camii.
Figure 4. Aghia Sophia, interior. By Gaspare Fossati. Litography by Louis Haghe. Swiss-Italian architects Gaspare and brother Guiseppe Fossati were commissioned by Sultan Abdülmecid in 1847 for the restoration of Aghia Sophia. The Seraphim around the central dome are clearly visible. Source: Library of Congress.
More importantly, for Mehmed II the Eastern Roman heritage was not something to be erased or demeaned, but to be embraced and absorbed. He considered himself, in addition to Khan and Sultan, Caesar. Therefore, it should not be surprising that one of the extant chronicles of his reign was composed in Greek. Historia, as it was named by its author Kritovoulos, a scholar of aristocratic origin whom Mehmed II had appointed the governor of the island of Imbros. Kritovoulos was inspired by Herodotus, and by one the sultan’s favorite books, Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander, which he is said to have read to him every day after the conquest of Constantinople. Mehmed II’s interest in Hellenic antiquities, collection of Greek manuscripts and veneration of Byzantine relics were all well known, and even disturbed some observers as irreligious. He envisioned Constantinople/Konstantiniyye as a universal metropolis, and himself as the rightful heir to Alexander the Great (contrary to public belief, Istanbul, which also comes from the Greek “eis tēn pólin,” became the official name of the city in 1930, and not in 1453). The rebuilding and repopulation of the city still reeling from the siege became the “great jihad” of his reign, while the conquest had been the “smaller jihad” according to the deed of his vakf mentioned above.
The Greek Patriarchate lost its seat in Aghia Sophia in 1453, but the twist in its history was that its union with the Latin Church, which came as the price of papal assistance and was met by opposition from some members of the Orthodox clergy, was aborted by the city’s fall to the Ottomans. Mehmed II summoned from exile an anti-union monk (and friend of Kritovoulos) by the name of Gennadios Scholarius and appointed him as Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church. Throughout the Ottoman centuries, Constantinople was not only the capital of the Ottoman Empire but also of the Greek Orthodox Church and remains so to this day—despite the efforts of successive Turkish governments to force it out of the country. In a way, the Ecumenical Patriarchate is the sole Ottoman institution that managed to survive into the Republican period.
Mehmed II’s eclectic understanding of political legitimacy and embrace of different cultural and religious traditions came from a secure position of power. It did not prevent him from eliminating those he saw as a threat to that power such as the imperial Komneni family of the Pontic Kingdom. The conversion of Aghia Sophia in 1453 should be evaluated from the vantage point of an emperor who was confident in the plans he had for the seat of his new capital, and those plans did not necessarily involve the complete erasure of the physical reminders of a bygone power now subsumed under that of the Ottomans. The process was selective: the statue of Constantine was toppled while the column on which it stood stayed.
It is also worth recalling the context of the wider rivalry between the Ottoman representatives of Islam and Christian monarchs of the time. While Islam was ascendant at one end of the Mediterranean, it was on the wane at its other extremity. Granada fell in 1492 to the armies of Isabella and Ferdinand, who subscribed to an entirely different brand of imperial ideology that was not amenable to accommodating subjects of different religions. The “Reconquista” effectively cleared the Iberian Peninsula of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants, including the conversos to Christianity, many of whom migrated to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, to the Ottoman Empire, which was all too glad to receive the newcomers seen as a source of labor and expertise, and a marker of imperial magnanimity.
The imperial capital went through another bout of rebuilding in the 1660s. This time, the occasion was not another siege but a fire that razed two thirds of the old city to the ground in the summer of 1660, and the political atmosphere was quite different: long wars had drained the treasury and a puritanical movement, called the Kadızadelis after their founder, was on the rise. Much like their contemporaries in New England, the Kadızadeli puritans sought to ban what they considered heresy and corruption of religious practice, which included vices like drinking and smoking, but also activities that had been well-established as legitimate Islamic practice such as the ceremonial dance and music of the sufi religious orders and communal public prayers performed together by Muslims and non-Muslims.
It was in this climate of political turmoil, military uncertainly, and economic failure that the mother of the sultan, who was a follower of the Kadızadelis, decided to use the fire as an excuse to reshape the city into a visibly Islamic one with the collaboration of the grand vezir. This project entailed the displacement, dispossession and impoverishment of already poor, and mostly Jewish residents of the old city around the Eminönü area. The centerpiece of the project was a new mosque complex that would dominate the waterfront at the entrance of the Golden Horn with its imposing presence. The completed project, Yeni Camii (or Eminönü mosque, as it is more commonly known today) is one of the most “instagramable” sights of an extraordinarily photogenic city, but few of the tourists taking selfies in the courtyard are aware of these less savory aspects of its history (figure 5).
Figure 5. Yeni Camii commissioned by Hatice Turhan Sultan (mother of Sultan Mehmed IV), built over the burned down Jewish neighborhood in Eminönü. Photograph by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-3.0.
In his authoritative article on the 1660 fire and the subsequent “Islamization of Christian and Jewish Space in Istanbul,” historian Marc Baer notes the strident language of the mosque’s deed of endowment: terms such as “the fire of divine wrath” punishing “Jews, who are the enemy of Islam” that spoke a language of intolerance. This was a striking departure from the norm for such documents—not to mention the pragmatic tolerance of the previous centuries. Even more striking were the Quranic verses chosen to adorn a publicly accessible gallery, from the surah (chapter) entitled Al-Hashr, relating the banishment of the Jewish Banu Nadir tribe from Medina. Baer points out that the “historical consciousness” thus displayed, connected the displaced Jews of Eminönü to the banished tribe of Medina, warning them of the punishment they were due. This act of consecration was a far cry from the post-conquest conversion of Aghia Sophia. The infidel was now the infidel within. According to Baer, the explicit narrative of Islamization used “current notions of the conquest of the infidel space, perhaps compensating for a lack of success elsewhere.” I attribute the cautious addition of “perhaps” to Baer’s scholarly restraint. The Ottoman Empire did not stand poised for predestined universal hegemony in October 1665 the way it did in May 1453.
“What are the prevailing values of our society at this point in time, I wonder, if we fail to see the honor in being the wardens of a holy place rather than scoring an easy victory over a non-existent enemy? ”
Public monuments, as lieux de mémoire, change meaning over their life span and become repositories of different and often opposing narratives. The memory a group attributes to them is a reflection of their collective values. The two separate narratives of re/de-consecration I have mentioned here were shaped by entirely different historical circumstances and dominant ideologies. The “reconquest” of Aghia Sophia in 2020 is also a product of the current political conjuncture in Turkey, which is more appropriately comparable to 1665 than 1453. The decision to appropriate a monument that is indisputably part of a universal patrimony should not have been taken with such lack of care, without any deliberation to truly understand the historical weight of such a decision. What are the prevailing values of our society at this point in time, I wonder, if we fail to see the honor in being the wardens of a holy place rather than scoring an easy victory over a non-existent enemy?
Eid al Adha starts on July 31 this year, and there will no doubt be a large crowd of Muslim faithful welcoming it in Aghia Sophia. When they bow in humility for the secde (prostration), I would implore them to consider what it would mean to the Christian Orthodox to be able to observe Easter Mass under that dome for the first time after nearly six hundred years. There was also a historical moment when such an arrangement could have been possible: Aghia Sophia could open its doors for religious observance on Eid and Easter, on Friday and Sunday. It would still continue to serve the secular public and there would have been no fight over which endowment, will, or registry should prevail. It would come back to life as a spiritual space open to all.
What I say may sound utopian under the current circumstances, but if I have learned anything from studying ethnoreligious conflict for years, it is that people find a solution when there is political will, and the means to enforce it. Turkey was once capable of realizing this dream, and there was one person with the clout to make it palatable to conservative Muslims: Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan, back when he was fluent in a language of inclusion, accommodation and liberal values. It could have been his legacy. I am sad that instead of a legacy of courage and humanity he settled for a legacy of complacency and division. I hope things will turn out differently in my adopted country, where I work in an office sitting on land stolen from Native Americans, located on a street named after a civil war hero who led a genocidal campaign against those very same people.
