But it was upon the bema of St. Sophia, as we have already seen, that the wealth and pious munificence of Justinian were most lavishly expended. It was shut off from the soleas by the inconastasis, which in Byzantine art is a screen resembling, in all except its position, the rood-screen of western architecture, and derived its name from the sacred pictures
represented upon it. In that of St. Sophia the material was silver, the lower part being highly wrought with arabesque devices, and the upper composed of twelve pillars, twined two and two, and separated by panels on which were depicted in oval medallions the figures of our Lord, his Virgin Mother, and the prophets and apostles. It had three doors; the central one (called
, "sacred door") leading directly to the altar, that on the right to the diaconicon, and that on the left to the prothesis. The figures on either side of the central door, following what appears to have been the universal rule, were those of our Lord and the Virgin, and above the door stood a massive cross of gold. The altar, with its canopy or tabernacle, has been already described. The synthronus, or bench with stalls, for the officiating bishop and clergy, are at the back of the altar along the circular wall of the bema. The seats were of silver gilt. The pillars which separated them were of pure gold. All this costly and gorgeous structure has of course disappeared from the modern mosque. The eye now ranges without interruption from the entrance of the royal doors to the very extremity of the bema;—the only objects to arrest observation being the sultan's gallery (maksure), which stands at the left or north side of the bema; the mimber, or pulpit for the Friday prayer, which is placed at the right or southern end of the ancient inconastasis; the mahfil, or ordinary preaching pulpit, in the centre of the mosque; and the mihrab, or sacred niche, which is at the south-east side of the bema.
It was more difficult, in converting the church into a mosque, to get rid of the numerous sacred pictures in gold and mosaic which adorned the walls and arches. Accordingly, instead of attempting to remove or destroy them, the Moslem invaders of the church were content with covering all these Christian representations with a coat of plaster; and thus in the late reparation of the mosque, the architect, having removed the plaster, was enabled to have copies made of all the groups which still remained uninjured. Of the principal of them M. Salzenberg has given fac-similes. On the great western arch was represented the Virgin Mary, with Sts. Peter and Paul. On the side walls of the nave, above the women's choir upon either side, were figures, in part now defaced, of prophets, martyrs, and other saints. M. Salzenberg has reproduced in his volume Sts. Anthemius, Basil, Gregory, Dionysius the Areopagite, Nicolas of Myra, Gregory the Armenian apostle, and the prophets Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Habakkuk. On the great eastern arch was a group consisting of the Virgin Mary, St. John the Baptist, and [{654}] the Emperor John Palaeologus, the last Christian restorer of the building; but these figures—and still more the group which decorated the arch of the bema, our Lord, the Virgin, and the Archangel Michael—are now much defaced. Much to the credit of the late sultan, however, he not only declined to permit the removal of these relics of ancient Christian art, but gave orders that every means should be taken to preserve them; at the same time directing that they should be carefully concealed from Moslem eyes, as before, by a covering of plaster, the outer surface of which is decorated in harmony with those portions of the ancient mosaic, which, not containing any object inconsistent with the Moslem worship, have been restored to their original condition. Accordingly, the winged seraphim at the angles of the buttresses which support the dome have been preserved, and, to a Christian visitor, appear in strange contrast with the gigantic Arabic inscriptions in gold and colors which arrest the eye upon either side of the nave and within the dome, commemorating the four companions of the Prophet, Abu-bekr, Omar, Osman, and Ali.
But there is one characteristic of St. Sophia which neither time nor the revolutions which time has brought have been able to efface or even substantially to modify—the strikingly graceful and elegant, although far from classically correct, grouping of the pillars which support the lesser semidomes and the women's choir. It would be impossible, without the aid of a plan, to convey any idea of the arrangement of this matchless assemblage of columns, which, as we have already observed, are even less precious for the intrinsic richness and beauty of their material than for the interesting associations which their presence in a Christian temple involves. Most of these may still be identified. The eight red porphyry pillars standing, two and two, under the semi-domes at either end of the nave, are the celebrated columns from the Temple of the Sun, already recorded as the gift of Marcia, offered by her "for the salvation of her soul." The eight pillars of green serpentine which support the women's choir, at either side of the nave, are from the Temple of Diana at Ephesus; and among the remaining pillars on the ground floor, twenty-four in number, arranged in groups of four, are still pointed out representatives of almost every form of the olden worship of the Roman empire—spoils of the pagan temples of Athens, Delos, Troas, Cyzicus, and other sanctuaries of the heathen gods.
Less grand, but hardly less graceful, are the groups of pillars, sixty-seven in number, in the women's choir above the aisles and the inner porch. The occasional absence of uniformity which they present, differing from each other in material, in color, in style, and even in height, although it may offend the rules of art, is by no means ungrateful to the eye. In the total number of the pillars of St. Sophia, which is the broken number one hundred and seven, there is supposed to be a mystic allusion to the seven pillars of the House of Wisdom. [Footnote 145]
[Footnote 145: Proverbs ix. 1.]
Such was St. Sophia in the days of its early glory—a fitting theatre for the stately ceremonial which constituted the peculiar characteristic of the Byzantine court and Church. On all the great festivals of the year—Christmas, Epiphany, Palm Sunday, Easter, Pentecost, and the Ascension; at the ceremony of the emperor's coronation; at imperial marriages; and on occasions, more rare in the inglorious annals of the Lower Empire, of imperial triumphs,—the emperor, attended by the full array of his family I and court, went in state to St. Sophia and assisted at the celebration of the divine mysteries. The emperor himself, with his distinctive purple buskins and close tiara; the Caesar, [{655}] and, in later times, the Sebastocrator, in green buskins and open tiara; the Despots, the Panhypersebastos, and the Protosebastos; the long and carefully graduated line of functionaries, civil and military—the Curopalata, the Logothete and Great Logothete, the Domestic and Great Domestic, the Prostostrator, the Stratospedarch, the Protospatharius, the Great AEteriarch, and the Acolyth, with the several trains of attendants in appropriate costume which belonged to each department,—combined to form an array for which it would be difficult to find a parallel in the history of ceremonial; and when to these are added the purely ecclesiastical functionaries, for whose number even the munificent provision of space allotted by Justinian's architect was found at times insufficient, some idea may be formed of the grandeur of the service, which, for so many ages, lent to that lofty dome and these stately colonnades a life and a significance now utterly lost in the worship which has usurped its place. As a purely ecclesiastical ceremony, probably some of the great functions at St. Peter's in Rome surpass in splendor such a ceremonial as the "Great Entrance" at St. Sophia on one of the emperor's days. But the latter had the additional element of grandeur derived from the presence of a court unrivalled for the elaborate stateliness and splendor of its ceremonial code.