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ST SOPHIA AT CONSTANTINOPLE WIENER, Jacques: Turkey, 1864, Bronze, 59 mm Constantinople (Istanbul, ancient Byzantium), the largest city and seaport of the Turkish republic and the capital of Turkey until 1923, has always been one of the strategic cities of the world. It is the former capital of the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire. In 330 A.D. Constantine I (The Great) chose Byzantium as the site of New Rome, the capital of a unified Roman Empire, and renamed the city Constantinople. In 381 it became the seat of the patriarch of Constantinople (now the head of the Orthodox Church), the second most powerful bishop in Christendom (after the pope), and by the close of the 4th century, the city was the greatest religious and commercial center in the Western world. In 532 a great fire prompted Emperor Justinian I (532-537) to begin a rebuilding project that is now regarded as the apotheosis of Byzantine art and architecture. Most of the existing structure of the Hagia Sophia (St. Sophia) dates from this period. As the legend on the medal indicates, the building was converted to a mosque in 1453 and restored during the reign of the Sultan Abdul Medjid (Abd ul-Mejid) by the architect G. Fossati. St. Sophia has what is known as a pendentive construction. Byzantine architects perfected a way of raising domes on piers instead of walls, which permitted lighting and communication from four directions. The transition from a cubic plan to the hemisphere was achieved by four inverted spherical triangles called pendentives–masses of masonry curved both horizontally and vertically. The pendentive dome could rest directly on a circular foundation or upon a cylindrical wall, called a drum, inserted between the two to increase height. LINK to photo of Hagia Sophia (from GreatBuildings.com) |
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