The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories

by Edward Hollis

  A ROMAN BUILDING SEEN THROUGH MUSLIM EYES

  Miniature commemorating Selim II’s renovation of Ayasofya

  and his burial there. From Seyyid Loktun, ehname-i Selim Han (1581).

  APPROPRIATION

  The Parthenon might have passed into the insubstantial realm of dreams altogether had it not been turned into a church—dedicated first to holy wisdom, then to the Virgin—and afterward transformed into a mosque by the conquering Ottoman empire. Each time the function of the Parthenon was changed, the building was converted: the front door was blocked up with an altar, and the original altar removed to make way for a new front door. But as each successive conversion was laid over the last one, the hold of Athene over the Parthenon was enriched, for she was the virgin goddess of wisdom with a figure of Victory in her hand.

  The people of the Dark Ages did not just vandalize the architecture of antiquity; they also turned it to new uses. When the barbarians came to Rome, they did not simply sack it; indeed, the buildings they encountered were often too solidly built to demolish. But having no use for theaters, temples, and fora, they turned them into fortresses for their warriors, prisons for their captives, and enclosures for their cattle.

  These were often brutal conversions, but it is thanks to them that any theaters, bathhouses, or fora have survived at all. We have inherited hybrid buildings, double-coded with both their original and their subsequent purposes. The Theater of Marcellus in Rome, for instance, is both a theater and a palace; the Forum of Trajan both a marketplace and a fortress.

  Ayasofya in Istanbul was once Hagia Sophia, the great church of the Roman Empire, and the place where that empire made its last stand. Its conversion into a mosque is a late example of the appropriation of an antique building. The terms of that appropriation were particularly controversial, and still are, since it involved nothing less than moving the center of the world.

  The Ayasofya we possess today is both church and mosque, both an antiquity and a very modern problem. It stands as a testament to the simultaneous reverence and scorn with which the inhabitants of the Dark Ages treated the buildings they had inherited from their classical forebears.

  ONCE UPON A TIME the center of the world was Constantinople, mistress of Europe and Asia and the Middle and the Euxine seas; and at the center of Constantinople stood the church of Hagia Sophia, which means, in Greek, “holy wisdom.” At the center of Hagia Sophia, which was the center of Constantinople, which was the center of the world, there was a purple stone called the Omphalos, which was the navel of them all.

  On 28 May 1453 the emperor of the Romans, who was called Constantine, was standing on the Navel of the World. He raised his eyes to the mosaic of Christ Pantocrator, the Last Judge, in holy and hopeful pleadings. This mighty judge resided at the apex of a dome some 100 feet in diameter and some 185 feet high, which was pierced with countless windows and set with thousands of oil lamps. This dome was supported on four gigantic arches, the junctions between which were inhabited by six-winged seraphs. To the east and west these arches were supported on semidomes as wide as the dome itself. These were also pierced with windows and were themselves supported on three smaller semidomes—a cascade of vaults so breathtaking that people told one another that it must be hung from heaven on a golden chain. These vaults were filled with a mosaic pantheon of angels, prophets, prelates of the Orthodox Church, and the families of the emperors; and above the altar, in the most holy vault of them all, was depicted the Virgin Mary accompanied by two angels.

  Now, as the emperor Constantine stood on the Omphalos, the open space beneath the image of the Virgin was filled with clergy, so many of them that their jeweled robes seemed to be nothing more or less than the mosaics of the walls set into motion. Before these priests stood the altar, and in front of the altar there was a silver screen set with icons. From time to time one of the priests would appear in the door of this iconostasis in a cloud of incense. Bells would shake, and the people gathered on the other side of the screen would prostrate themselves before him. The rest of the time they stroked and kissed

  the solemn faces of the saints, encrusted with silver and blackened by centuries of adoration.

  And the priests and the congregation used the words they always used at the acclamation of emperors:

  For the glory and elevation of the Romans

  Hearken, O God, to your people

  Many, many, many,

  Many years upon many,

  Many years for you, Constantine, Emperor of the Romans.

  And Constantine imagined, for a moment, that he was the first Constantine, whose Christian empire had stretched from Caledonia to Arabia, Mauretania to Armenia, who had founded Constantinople, and who had built the original Hagia Sophia in the year of Our Lord 360.

  THAT FIRST CHURCH had been shaken to its foundations by an earthquake fifty years after it had been built, and it had then been rebuilt by the emperor Theodosius; but the Hagia Sophia in which this last Constantine stood had been born in another tremor, of a political nature. In January 532, five years after the emperor Justinian had taken the purple, a riot between the Blues and the Greens in the Hippodrome spilled out onto the streets of Constantinople. For a week the emperor was confined to his Sacred Palace as the mob rampaged through the city. On the night of 12 January, they burned Hagia Sophia to the ground.

  Justinian was in despair, and he had boats made ready to take him away; but his empress was made of sterner stuff. Theodora’s father had been a bear-baiter for the Greens, her mother had been a prostitute, and so had the empress, some said. She was used to the hurly-burly of the Hippodrome, and the crowds did not terrify her. “Purple makes a fine shroud,” she snorted, and she counseled the emperor to stay and die if necessary. Justinian, more afraid of his wife than of the mob, sent his general Belisarius to the Hippodrome. Trapped between the

  banks of seats, some thirty-five thousand rioters were slaughtered there on 18 January, and order was restored.

  Then Justinian called Isidore, a mathematician of Miletus, and Anthemius, an architect of Tralles, and had them devise a new Hagia Sophia to replace the one that had been burned down in the riots. Only a month later, on 23 February, the foundation stone for the new church was laid, and from then on work on the basilica proceeded with an unnatural speed. Some whispered that Justinian was a devil; others said that angels were helping the workmen, watching over the building site and ensuring that their tools were not stolen. It was said later that Justinian tricked one of these angels to stay and watch over the church once it was finished.

  Two days after Christmas 537, the emperor went in procession to Hagia Sophia. When he entered the new building, Justinian stepped out in front of all of his court; he stood under the magnificent dome, hung from heaven on its golden chain, guarded by the angel he had bewitched, and he cried out, “Solomon, I have outdone thee!” It was a hubristic moment; for as Procopius, the secret historian of Justinian’s reign, observed at the time, the dome “seems somehow to float in the air on no firm basis, but to be poised aloft to the peril of those inside it.” Nemesis was duly served: twenty years later there was an earthquake, and that magical floating dome, its heavenly chain momentarily severed, collapsed in a heap of brick and a cloud of dust.

  Justinian was not one to be discouraged. He summoned the son of the mathematician of Miletus, also called Isidore, and within three years the church was complete again. This time the dome was even taller than it had been before. At its reconsecration, Paul, the silentiary of the court, stood beneath it and declaimed, “Wondrous it is to see how the dome . . . is like the firmament which rests on air,” wisely and quickly adding, “though the dome is fixed on the strong backs of the arches.”

  Hagia Sophia was subsequently subjected to numerous tremblings of the earth, shaken in 896, and 1317, and 1346; but it always withstood the shocks and became even more magnificent than before. After each earthquake emperors, architects, and engineers added more masonry to the building, so that the do
me would remain standing; and while the interior retained its celestial splendor, the outside of the

  church came to resemble a labyrinthine Babel that never quite reached the heaven to which it aspired.

  In the iconoclastic fury of the eighth and ninth centuries the church was stripped of its images, but in the tenth century they were returned from banishment even more beautiful than they had been in the first place: Christ Pantocrator, Mary, the saints, the angels, and the emperors were woven into embroideries of mosaic on dome and vault and wall. The emissaries of Prince Vladimir of Kiev visited the restored church and reported, “We knew not whether we were in heaven or earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations.”

  In 1206, when the Venetians sacked Constantinople and carried off the bronze horses and the treasures of the Hippodrome, they also attacked Hagia Sophia. They broke into the church, murdered the people they found taking sanctuary inside, and set a prostitute on the imperial throne. In a final insult, they buried Enrico Dandolo, the doge of Venice who had contrived Constantinople’s misfortune, in an aisle of the church. (His tombstone is still there.) But in 1261, the Romans returned to Constantinople, and the emperor Michael Palaeologus proceeded directly to Hagia Sophia to be ceremonially acclaimed like all the emperors before him—above the Omphalos, the Navel of the World, under the dome that was suspended from heaven by a golden chain.

  IN 1453, STANDING in the same place as all his predecessors, surrounded by his people and his priests, enveloped in a cloud of incense, the last emperor Constantine forgot, for a moment, that he was a petty despot whose empire extended no farther than the walls of his city. He forgot that the jewels in his crown were made of glass, and that there was no more money. He forgot that the patriarch of the Orthodox Church had fled into exile, disgusted by Constantine’s alliance with the pope; and he forgot that the aid promised from Italy in return for that alliance had never arrived. He forgot that, until this night, his subjects had shunned him and his church of Hagia Sophia

  because he had sold their souls to the Western barbarians who had been the downfall of the city so many times before.

  He forgot, for a moment, that Constantinople had been under siege for nearly two months; and he forgot that in the previous three days there had been three terrible portents. The first sign was an eclipse of the full moon that sent everyone to their beds in terror. When they awoke in the morning, the emperor attempted to rally the people by carrying the Hodegetria in procession. This icon of the Virgin possessed magical powers: it directed processions of its own accord and was said to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Constantinople. Constantine hoped it would do the same this time. But as the acolytes carried the Hodegetria out into the street it fell to the ground, and when the people ran forward to pick it up the icon stuck fast. As they attempted to lift it, rain began to pour, and the procession had to be abandoned. The Virgin of the Hodegetria, it seemed, had deserted her people. This was the second sign, and the people went to their beds in redoubled terror.

  The first to see the third sign were out at sea, because when the citizens of Constantinople awoke on the third day they found their city swaddled in a fog so thick that the dome of Hagia Sophia could only dimly be seen. For centuries, ships had used the dome to guide them into the city, for at night the thousands of oil lamps guttering within it shone out over the water; and the sailor, in the words of Paul the Silentiary, would not “guide his laden vessel by the light of Cynosure, or the circling Bear, but by the divine light of the church itself.”

  That night the lights of the dome of Hagia Sophia were lit as usual and shone out over the waters; but soon they began to behave very strangely. The monk Nestor Iskander later recalled seeing

  a large flame of fire issuing forth; it encircled the entire neck of the church for a very long time. The flame gathered into one; its flame altered, and there was an indescribable light. At once it took to the sky. Those who had seen it were benumbed; they began to wail and cry out in Greek: Lord have Mercy! The light itself has gone up to heaven.

  Everyone knew that the golden chain was broken, the angel was departed, and that the next day would be the last day of the Roman

  Empire. It was too late for sectarian divisions, too late to blame the emperor for having asked the Italians for aid, too late to shun the Omphalos. And so on 28 May 1453 they gathered in Hagia Sophia to pray one last time. When the service was over, the emperor collected his Senate and his generals around him, and, weeping, he made one last desperate plea: “Hurl your javelins and your arrows against them, so that they know that they are fighting with the descendants of the Greeks and the Romans.” Then he went out to defend the city. The people raised their voices to heaven in desperate prayer, but heaven no longer heard them.

  ON THE OTHER side of the city walls the armies of Islam had also seen the signs, and they were ready. They had been waiting for them for some time.

  In 628, the emperor Heraclius had received a letter from an unknown desert tribesman. It read:

  In the name of Allah the most Beneficent, the most Merciful: this letter is from Muhammad, the slave of Allah and his apostle, to Heraclius . . . Peace be upon the followers of guidance. I invite you to surrender to Allah. Embrace Islam and Allah will bestow upon you a double reward. But if you reject this invitation you will be misguiding your people.

  The emperor laughed. He had just defeated the king of Persia in battle, and he had no intention of surrendering to anyone, or embracing Islam, or Allah, whatever they might be. But within eight years half his empire had fallen to the desert tribesmen, and within another thirty the armies of Islam were encamped by the walls of the city whose name they mispronounced as Istanbul. It took four years to drive them off. They returned four decades later, and they even started to till the soil around the city as if it were their own, until the Rumi—the Romans—of Istanbul drove them away again.

  Since Muhammad had written his letter to Heraclius, the armies of Islam had spread their faith as far west as Spain, as far east as India, as far north as the walls of Vienna, and as far south as the deep Sahara; but there was one city that resisted their advance. Istanbul was, they said, the “bone in the throat of Allah.”

  A bone in the throat of Allah it might have been, but the armies of Islam knew that Allah would swallow Istanbul one day. They told one another a story about the dome they saw from the sea, riding over the city like a ship in full sail. Ayasofya, as they called it, had been built in time out of mind, they said, by one of the emperors of the Rumi or by Solomon himself; but on the night of the birth of the prophet Muhammad, the dome of the great church had collapsed. Attempts to rebuild it were unsuccessful until the Rumi sent emissaries to see the prophet, and he gave his consent to the reconstruction. He told the emissaries to rebuild the dome with a mortar composed of sand from Mecca, water from the sacred well of Zem Zem, and his own spittle. They returned to Istanbul with this miraculous mixture, and ever since the dome of Ayasofya had held firm, waiting for the day when the armies of Islam would take possession.

  In January 1453, Mehmet of the tribe of Osman raised a horsetail on a lance in the courtyard of his palace in Erdine, and in so doing called the people of his empire to arms. On 23 March they set out, and at the beginning of April they made their camp before the walls of Istanbul. They had been waiting ever since. Now Mehmet, the sultan, saw the darkened moon and the flame ascending from the great dome, and he remembered the prophecies; he knew that the time for waiting was over. At half past one in the morning he gave the order to attack. By sunrise his troops had planted the standard of the prophet Muhammad on the walls of Istanbul.

  Constantine, the last emperor of Constantinople, had disappeared; his body was found later, identifiable only by his crimson shoes embroidered with the imperial eagle. Those of his subjects who could neither escape nor hide rac
ed to the great church, where, amid tinkling bells and clouds of incense and a chanted drone, they reminded one another about prophecies of their own. The armies of Islam will be turned back at the Column of Constantine in the Forum, they said, and then an avenging angel will drive them out of the city all the way to Persia. The emperor, resurrected, will ride up to Jerusalem, and the empire will be taken up to heaven.

  But none of these prophecies came to pass. Instead the people heard the crash of weaponry on the Beautiful Doors of Hagia Sophia, which once upon a time had been the doors of the temple of Zeus at Pergamon. As the soldiers burst in, the priests picked up the sacred vessels and the sacraments they were using. The eastern wall of the apse opened up, and they disappeared into it, never to be seen again until the emperor rides once more to Jerusalem and the empire is restored.

  Anyone who resisted was slaughtered on the spot, and the rest were herded together and led out of the church like cattle to market. The soldiers of the armies of Islam fanned out across the church, ripping out lamps and furnishings. They took sacred vestments for saddle cloths, and they cut up icons for the gold and the gems that covered them. All good Muslims abhor images of living things, for, as they say, Allah is the only creator; it is blasphemy to usurp his creative will, even if only in the service of art. The mosaics and the icons of Hagia Sophia had presumed to depict angels and prophets, the living and the dead, and so they were all abhorrent blasphemies and superstitious idols. They deserved the indignities the soldiers heaped upon them.