The Decay of Great Wisdom: The Hagia Sophia in Disrepair

I recently had the great fortune of visiting the Hagia Sophia, the great Byzantine-era construction that adorns Istanbul’s Golden Horn. The building itself has worn many masks over the preceding fifteen centuries with its most prominent shift being the God that is prayed to within its walls. Atatürk, the father of the Turkish republic, turned the site into a museum in 1935 in an attempt to modernise the nation and its most glorious historical places. It was reconsecrated as a mosque by President Erdoğan in July 2020. The reasoning given was that the Atatürk had acted unlawfully against the waqf – a sacrosanct charitable endowment under Islamic law – under which Sultan Mehmed had converted the then-church into a mosque. Whatever one’s religious persuasion, it is beautiful to see such a building once more restored to divination.

However, it has come with a dire consequence: the speakers that play the adhan – call-to-prayer – five times a day are reverberating so loudly that they are damaging the gold on the mosque’s exterior, particularly around the minarets. The walls are beginning to peel and its marble tiles are shattering at an extraordinary rate. I overheard a tour-guide telling a group that the mosque is “falling apart”. One of the most beautiful buildings in the history of the world is falling apart. This ought to be more than just a little tidbit of a headline that may be seen only by a small throng of people. One of the great relics of early European history is beginning to crumble. 

Since Erdoğan reverted its museum status, the building sees 40,000 worshippers and tourists a day. It was announced in September of last year that, thankfully, the mosque would undergo restoration projects, though it is feared that it will take decades to future-proof the historic building. And the worshippers, somewhat understandably, will not stop coming.

But what does a crumbling mosque mean? Especially a mosque that served as the centre of the Catholic Church for the guts of a millennium? Especially a mosque whose tenure as a museum was one of the shining lights in the Ataturk's modernisation of the country? The crumble of the mosque’s dazzling artwork is simultaneously symptomatic and symbolic of the divide that is growing in the world between the East and the West, not only religiously, but also socio-politically. The fractious relationship between Christianity and Islam is worsening, exacerbated by the Arab Spring and the global rise of religious fundamentalism – a trend that is definitely not confined exclusively to Islam.

Don't let the poor quality of my photography fool you - the faded colours of the church-cum-mosque in the distance only entice one further into the beauty and resplendence of what lies inside.

That isn't to say that, before this mosque started to fall apart, the Western and Eastern hemispheres of the world were historically united. However, a growing areligious "othering" is occurring in the West that differs from its older precedents. A growing desire to view the world and its inhabitants as an amalgamation of separate entities has poisoned the Western view of the East. There is no desire stronger than the desire to be divided.

We in the West tend to look at 9/11, Charlie Hebdo, and countless other recent terrorist attacks to fuel an “anti-Eastern” agenda. We tend to overlook the fact that this chasm, really, formed as a result of the Crusades, a decidedly Western, Roman Catholic agenda. Ever since the Crusades, ceaseless wars holy and territorial have waged in the Middle East, the Muslim population slowly driving away all non-Muslim populations in all but one key, sensitive territory: Israel. Various attempts at peace accords in the region – mostly concerning Israel and Palestine – have heretofore failed, with dire consequences. Rabin was assassinated after the ’93 Oslo accords. The Second Intifada occurred almost exclusively as a result of the failed Camp David summit. The closer one gets to peace, the greater the dividing force that emerges.

Let us not forget that three religions share this region as their holy land. The Christians that were driven from their Holy Land grew to disdain the Muslims who drove them out, leading to the expansion of fundamentalist violence that we have seen across the world this past half-century. Despite the similarities between Islam and Christianity – they are the two most similar of the five major world religions – fighting has continued on unabated for centuries and one must fear that it will only continue further. There are remarkable similarities between the two religions, though.

Both religions are monotheistic and Abrahamic; both believe in the same God, except for some fundamentalists on both sides; both believe in Jesus the prophet; both stem from the Middle East. There are countless more similarities in scripture and practice, just as there are countless differences between to the two religions. It is a bizarre and extremely harmful thought to suggest that those who practice the two religions could not live in harmony. Looking into the history of a city like Alexandria shows that the two religions, alongside multiple others, have lived in harmony before. 

There are, of course, countless examples of places in the world where two different groups of religious people cohabiting has led to violence. However, in a world that is increasingly becoming less religious, these theological, fundamental differences may subside in the future. There is a world where humans can live together without fear of inter-religious persecution and violence.

The black and gold of the interior shocks one upon entry. The ceiling seems lifted and far higher above the ground than it is. There is a beautifully celestial quality to it.

If the Hagia Sophia does not fall into disrepair, it could fall the way of Mecca and be closed off to all non-Muslims which would also be a tragedy for all those seeking merely the building’s beauty and history. Either way, there is a chance this glorious monument, built initially as an eastward extension of the West, could be out of the Western reach. The decay of the Hagia Sophia is a symptom of the decline in East-West relations. It seems the distance between the two cultures is only bound to grow. The mosque has indeed survived since it was built in the 6^th-century AD, but it has only just survived and will probably fall the way of the famed Library of Alexandria. It must be seen before we can no longer see it. Otherwise, it will become just another footnote in the annals of history that’s lost to growing hostilities between the West and the East.

The Western bungling of the Middle East, seen most prominently in Israel and Palestine, is a great harbinger of discontent for Arabs in the region. There is no sign of this stopping, either. So long as the West supports anything but a two-state solution, there will be discontent, there will be ire, there will an insurmountable desire to bring disorder upon our world. A church-cum-mosque that is crumbling far away from the hostilities may only be the beginning. That does not mean it should be forgotten, ignored, or allowed to waste away. The tides of history flow ceaselessly against such beautiful works of art and remove them from its annals. This does not need to happen.