Outdoing Solomon
29 October 2005
Istanbul’s heart is packed with sparkling mosques, timeworn basilicas and a massive Ottoman palace. Where the Roman hippodrome once stood, three pillars mark time back to prehistory: the walled obelisk was erected by the Byzantines 1,000 years ago; the swirl of green metal that is the Serpent Column was cast a thousand years before that; and the Obelisk of Thutmose III, shipped from Egypt by Theodosius the Great, is 3,500 years old.
Beside all these, and eclipsing them in my eyes, is the squat red pile of the Aya Sophia: the Church of the Holy Wisdom of God, symbolic centre of Istanbul, supreme architectural masterpiece of late antiquity and the spiritual culmination of my journey across Europe.
When it was built, in 537 CE, contemporary western Europe was a dark-age backwater where life consisted of eating gruel and living in huts, barbarian warlords consumed a meagre food surplus, no one took baths and hardly anyone could read. Contemporary Constantinople was the axis of west Eurasian civilisation, a haven of human high culture, capital of a vast Empire and the greatest city in the world. The Aya Sophia was where its people set out their relationship with infinity.
It predates all the major churches in western Europe by a solid 600 years and was the largest ever built until the one at Seville a millennium later. It was converted to a mosque by Mehmet the Conqueror and a museum by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. It’s borne witness to 73 emperors and 31 sultans; when Justinian, the Emperor who built it, entered the finished cathedral he is said to have exclaimed: “Solomon, I have surpassed thee.” He had.
I went to see it alone, with reverence, this afternoon. It’s been emotional.
For hours, wandering beneath its giant dome, I daydreamed about the millennium and a half of drama that has played out there. It was here that Heraclius – the greatest Roman since Caesar – completed his homecoming after bringing to an end the five-century long Roman-Persian wars. He had charged the Persian flank at Adana, broken their armies at Nineveh, shattered their Empire and wrested the True Cross from their grip. On 14 September 628 CE, in a solemn mass of thanksgiving, the holiest relic of Christendom was raised within these walls.
It was here, on 16 July 1054, that Christianity broke into Schism. An Italian legation burst into the great church and, in the presence of a congregation assembled for the Eucharist, laid the papal Bull of Excommunication on the high altar, throwing the city into chaos and opening a wound between Catholic west and Orthodox east that still bleeds today.
Picked out in mosaic are the ancients. There’s Constantine and Justinian themselves, offering the city and church to Jesus; John ‘the Beautiful’ Comnenus (a heroic warrior king, but not a looker – his soul was beautiful, his nickname ironic) and arch-femme fatale and imperial ball-breaker, the outrageously beautiful Empress Zoe.
Zoe’s first husband, Emperor Romanos III, curtailed her expenditure (i.e. shopping) only to be found dead in his bath. Zoe married her second husband, Emperor Michael IV, later that day but upon his death the new emperor, Michael V, banished Zoe to a nunnery. That was a mistake. Zoe was ruthless, popular and being a nun wasn’t really her style.
She soon returned, usurped Michael, gouged out his eyes and packed him off to be a monk. Her final husband, Emperor Constantine IX, outlived her. Lucky fellow.
As I made ready to leave, I stumbled upon the tomb (bones removed) of one Enrico Dandolo, the Doge of Venice who orchestrated the sacking of Constantinople by the armies of the Fourth Crusade in 1204: one of the darkest episodes of murder, rape and cultural vandalism there has ever been.
Standing beside his burial place, musing on how the treasures of antiquity were lost and the greatest seat of Christianity brought low, I realised that the crowds had cleared. Gripped by the moment, I checked no one was looking, leapt the rope barrier and danced on the man’s grave.
I left feeling satisfied and in a rather good mood.
Days since leaving London: 156
Major world cities (and present day location) by population, 600 CE:
Constantinople (Turkey) 500,000
Ch’ang-an (China) 500,000
Loyang (China) 400,000
Ctesiphon (Iran) 300,000
Alexandria (Egypt) 200,000
Teotihuacán (Mexico) 100,000
Tikal (Mexico) 50,000
Rome (Italy) 50,000
Somali word of the day: ‘guree’ meaning ‘to make room for someone to sit on a loaded camel’
