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By Root 1003 0

objects, unless they are talking about their great-great-grandfather’s black-walnut chest that crossed the Atlantic in a sailing ship. Nevertheless, I can sense the pain of Hagia Sophia. Whenever I walk into the building—first a church, then a mosque, now a museum—I apologize silently for the defilements, insults, and betrayals. Most are the work of man. Nature is also guilty of its share of bad deeds, but here I cannot level blame, except at gods I do not understand.

I can think of only one reason why I feel this way. My heart always goes out to the defenseless, and from the first time I saw Hagia Sophia, nearly twenty years ago, I knew it was in need of a hero. Too bad, for the sake of the building, it turned out to be me. On the face of it, Hagia Sophia should not move me. I am not from Europe or Asia, and it looks over both. I am not a Christian, nor am I a Muslim. I am no scholar of Byzantium, that’s for sure. Yet Hagia Sophia affects me in ways no other building ever has.

I have traveled three times to Istanbul, always eagerly, and I believe nothing can deter me from returning, certainly not the terrorist attacks on two synagogues this past November. The bombings seemed designed to punish Turkey for its temperate politics and nonsectarian policies. These are uncommon virtues among Muslim nations, and I would go back just to express my appreciation, even if the city didn’t stir me so and the kabobs weren’t so good.

Istanbul is a repository of wonders all the more startling for the casualness with which they are displayed, but whenever I am there, Hagia Sophia is where I spend a disproportionate amount of my time. I do not ceaselessly gape at fragments of late-Byzantine mosaics, although I never fail to climb up to the galleries and pay my respects to the Deesis Mosaic, much as I would never visit Paris without stopping in to see the Winged Victory. The depiction of a grim, stately, omnipotent Jesus Christ in this thirteenth-century mosaic is to me both compelling and chilling, quite unlike any other I know. Mostly, I just stand awestruck on the irregular marble floor, looking up at a dome more than one hundred feet across and more than two hundred feet high, wondering how it could possibly have been built. I understand that I am supposed to feel this way about the Pyramids, but they are just piles of stones, whereas the roof of Hagia Sophia is a cloud.

I do not remain locked in a state of awe and contemplation the entire time I am on the museum grounds. I also like the snack bar. It is among the most naturally agreeable sanctuaries in the city, cooled by breezes off the Bosphorus, shaded by plane trees, safe from carpet hustlers trying to drag you to the shop of their second cousin who is offering a rare kilim just in from Azerbaijan.

I will now do Hagia Sophia an injustice by compressing its history into a few sentences. It was built in less than six years, thanks to a novel construction technique pioneered by the Orthodox Christian emperor Justinian I: He looted foreign lands of marble columns and other ready-made materials. Upon completion, Hagia Sophia was so grand that it required a staff which included sixty to eighty priests and seventy-five to one hundred doorkeepers.

Nature got in the first licks. A series of earthquakes between AD 553 and 557 brought down the original dome, which was by all accounts even loftier than the current one. Subsequent water seepage caused the loss of an enormous number of the thirty million gold-painted tiles that once covered the interior walls—visitors in the mid twentieth century reported hearing the tinkle of ancient tiles dropping to the marble floor. Earlier, Mark Twain wrote that guides picked gold tiles from the walls to hand out as souvenirs.

In 1204, soldiers of the Holy Roman Empire’s Fourth Crusade, an extraordinarily debased lot, captured Constantinople and stripped the church of all the gold, silver, books, vestments, relics, and icons they could carry away. (This particular Crusade was all about conquest and looting anyway.) Hagia Sophia was the first victim