Hagia Sophia

Justinian's 6th-century cathedral, mosque since 1453 — the dome that defined a millennium of architecture.

Editor's Note

Hagia Sophia, officially the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque, is a former church converted into a mosque in Istanbul's Fatih district. Built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I between 532 and 537, it became the world's largest interior space and, with its fully pendentive dome, is regarded as the epitome of Byzantine architecture. Serving as the cathedral of Constantinople until 1453, it was converted into a mosque after the Ottoman conquest, became a museum from 1935 to 2020, and was redesignated a mosque in 2020.

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Justinian rebuilt this church for the third time in 537, after the Nika riots burnt the previous version. For the next 916 years it was the largest enclosed space on earth — a single 31-metre dome floating on pendentives, a feat Roman engineers had failed at for centuries. The Ottomans turned it into a mosque in 1453 without changing the structure; the four minarets came later, one for each of the next four sultans.