| Drawn by Leitch. | Engraved by J. Sands. |
THE MOSQUE OF SANTA SOPHIA AND FOUNTAIN OF THE SERAGLIO.
When Constantine dedicated his great city to Christ, he thought it right to erect in it a suitable edifice for Christian worship, on a scale of magnificence commensurate with his capital; he therefore built one of the first public temples, to the new faith, that had been permitted since the destruction of Christian churches and the extirpation of their congregations by the decree of Diocletian, and he dedicated it to the Ἁγία σοφία, “the Holy and Eternal Wisdom of God,” as manifested in his blessed Son. During the discordant schisms which unhappily rent the Christian church, this splendid structure was reduced to a state of ruin, and it was reserved for the emperor Justinian to re-edify it. He had the old foundations cleared away, and purchased, at a considerable expense, a larger area on which to erect it. To obtain funds for the purpose, he suspended the pensions he had granted to learned men, and melted down the silver statue of Theodosius the Great, which weighed 7400 lb. Ten thousand men were employed, whose exertions were stimulated by encouragements and rewards. The emperor himself appeared among them, and paid them every night, in pieces of silver, for the work they had executed during the day. He was seen divested of his imperial robes, in a simple tunic of linen, examining their progress, and applauding and conferring gifts on the most expert and industrious artisans. In five years and eleven months, the vast building was completed; and when he had thus accomplished his splendid undertaking, he exclaimed with exultation, “I have conquered thee, O Solomon.” The city was at that time so subject to earthquakes, that private houses were generally constructed of wood, to obviate their destructive effects. This magnificent work had scarcely been completed, when it was shattered by one of those rude and frequent shocks; but the indefatigable emperor again repaired the shaken ruins. From some unknown physical cause, the violent concussions ceased to shake the place, so that slight and scarcely perceptible shocks occur only at intervals of many years; and the church of Santa Sophia is now as it was left by the last re-edification of Justinian.
When the Turks entered the city, they rushed to this building, to massacre or make slaves of all who took refuge there; they then proceeded to demolish it, as the most eminent place of infidel worship. In this critical moment, the sultan entered, and arrested the destruction just as it had commenced. He announced, that he gave to his soldiers the plunder of spoil and captives, but the public edifices he reserved to himself. He at once conceived the idea of converting this magnificent Christian church into a Mohammedan mosque; and as he had transferred the government of the Osmanli to the most splendid capital, so the worship of Islam should be celebrated in the most splendid edifice in the world. In order to accommodate the interior to the new rites, the effigies and pictures which covered the walls were erased, and all trace of such representations was effaced by a simple and uniform colouring: the arms of the cross were, with little violence of alteration, bent up into the form of a crescent; and, to silence the sound of a bell, so revolting to the followers of the Prophet, he caused a minaret to be erected at an angle, to invite the faithful to prayer by the sound of the human voice; and having thus purified it from what he supposed to be superstitious and idolatrous emblems, he sat down cross-legged in the sanctuary, and caused himself to be shaved there. He then ordered the Koran to be read in place of the Bible, offered up his prayers, and finally suspended the curtain that had once closed the door of the temple at Mecca. He made no further alteration in the Christian church, and it remains as it was left by Justinian, unchanged for 1300 years, the most perfect and splendid monument of the arts of the Lower Empire.
The general model of a Christian church was that of a cross; the stem represented by the nave, the cross by the transepts, and the upper part by the choir: but from the inequality of the parts, the western churches laboured under a disproportion from which the eastern were exempt. The arms of the Greek cross are all of equal length, and Santa Sophia is built on its model; it has therefore a symmetry which the Latin churches have not, though founded on the same symbol. The ground-plan is that of a cross enclosed in a square whose sides measure 243 feet, but, including the portico, its length is 269. Over the centre of the cross rises the dome. This dome is called “aërial,” because it is so constructed that its height is only one-sixth of its diameter, and its curve so flat that its convexity seems to correspond with that of the sky, and be a portion only of the great firmament, let down, and suspended, as the Greeks say, by a chain. To effect this, it is built of materials of the least possible gravity, pumice-stone, specifically lighter than the water on which it floats, and bricks from Rhodes five times less weighty than those of ordinary burnt clay. The vast dome, thus reduced in weight, is further secured by the pillars on which it rests. These are ponderous piles of freestone, made of blocks hewn into cubes and triangles, united by huge cramps of iron. It is partly by this judicious distribution of its materials, that the vast edifice has stood so long unshaken by those shocks of earthquakes, which have prostrated so many other edifices in the same period.
The mosque is entered by a portico twelve yards in breadth; this communicates with another by nine gates with marble arches, closed by valves of rich bronze cast in high relief: this opens into another parallel to it. These vestibules formed what is called the narthex, or pronaos, of the Greek Christian church. Here stood the font where catechumens were baptized, and penitents were placed before they presumed, or were deemed worthy to enter the naos, or body, of the sacred edifice. From hence they passed into the interior by five doors of plain bronze.
The first object that strikes, on entering the body of the edifice, is the vast aërial dome, rising to the height of 180 feet above the flooring, reposing on four massive arches, forming the segments of semi-domes, and supported by others still less. The dome is perforated by twenty-six windows, and a multitude of others appear in the perspective. On each side are colonnades supporting galleries, one of which was reserved for the emperor, and called the Gallery of Constantine. Round the base of the dome runs another gallery, at a great elevation. It is splendidly illuminated during the evenings of the Ramazan and other Turkish festivals, and produces a magnificent effect. Different parts of the edifice are supported by 104 pillars, amongst which are eight of porphyry removed by Constantine from the temple of the Sun at Rome, and six of green jasper from the temple of Diana at Ephesus. The sun was the tutelary deity of the emperor while he continued a heathen; when he adopted a better, he removed those ornaments of the temples both of Apollo and Diana, to enrich the temple of Christ. The walls and domes are encrusted with mosaic, which forms various figures and devices. They have been nearly obliterated by the Turks. There yet remain, however, great winged seraphims in the four angles under the central dome, whose faces are mutilated because they represented the human countenance. The rest are covered over with Arabic inscriptions from the Koran, and among them the 104 attributes of Allah, which every Turk is bound to repeat over in his daily prayers. The mosaic of the dome is constantly falling from its cement, and is found to consist of small cubes about the size of playing-dice, of various-coloured glass, which the imaums collect and sell to Franks, who have them formed and set in crosses, and thus commemorate that faith for which the mosque was originally built.