Hagia Sophia and The (Changing) National Identity of Churches
Nayeli L. Riano
20 Aug. 2020
Hagia Sophia
“Great edifices, like great mountains,” wrote Victor Hugo, ”are the work of centuries.” Hagia Sophia has certainly donned many hats over the years, all of which have shaped the building and her legacy. The church was originally built as a Roman Catholic basilica by Justinian I to mark the height of Christianity in Constantinople. It later became a part of the Eastern Orthodox Church. When Mehmed the Conqueror took control over the city after the Fall of Constantinople, it became an Islamic mosque for the Ottoman Empire. In more recent times, Hagia Sophia has been visited as a museum every year by millions of tourists who come to Istanbul to witness one of the most impressive and ancient buildings of the Byzantine period.
There is, of course, a long tension between Christianity and Islam that has contributed to the criticisms regarding the recent decision to convert Hagia Sophia to a mosque. Decisions to change the denomination and use of a church, however, have been historically political and nationalistic. Although churches are primarily places of worship, they have not always been respected or treated as such. The best-known churches of our collective cultural patrimony have been adapted, one could say desacralized, by their respective leaders for political gain and to set themselves apart from other nations religiously, culturally, and intellectually. Hugo said it best himself in his description of great edifices, adding that “Time is the architect, the nation is the builder.”
Hugo’s statement reveals a prevalent sentiment of his age: Large, beautiful buildings, especially numinous ones, were one part a glory to God, one part a glory to the Nation. Up to the early modern period, a church’s aesthetic splendor was an extension of the nation whose impressiveness reflected on its rulers. Erecting these buildings, then, was a demonstration of political might that would inspire national pride in its citizens and intimidate foreign rivals. Naturally, these churches came to convey the spirit of a nation, raising an important question for the intellectual historian today: What remains of the relationship between “the church” (whatever its denomination) and national identity? A peoples’ sense of collective “identity” often overlaps with their nation’s ties to an established church, but these ties have weakened over the years in some places, and strengthened in others.
Consider, for example, one of Hagia Sophia’s sister churches in the West, the unmistakable subject of Victor Hugo’s writings above: Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Despite France’s old reputation as a cultural and national defender of the Catholic faith, the tides of history in France have shown how a ruling party (or individual) can alter the use of a sacred space to better capture the political ideology of the time. The cathedral’s secular renaming to the “Temple of Reason” during the height of the French Revolution is one such instance. This revolution, which was inherently anti-Catholic from its naissance, embarked on a long, anti-clerical campaign of dechristianization across France that destroyed and plundered most of its churches to elevate a new sense of French nationhood founded on Reason, not faith. In celebration of this feat, the so-called Culte de la Raison celebrated their parodic “Festival of Reason” in Notre Dame in 1793, explicitly making fun of Catholicism and extolling the virtues of the Enlightenment. Statues of saints were torn down and replaced with those of philosophers, and the church was commended not to God, but “à la philosophie.” Notre Dame may have gone back to serving its original function as a Catholic Cathedral, but her religious role has certainly been subjected to her country’s various mood swings, which continue to fluctuate today in a growingly secular Paris.[1]
A journey across the English Channel reveals another example of the relationship between a church’s role and a nation’s identity. St Paul’s Cathedral in London has also been altered over the years. It is said that the location may have originally been the site of a Roman temple, and up until the Reformation and Henry VIII’s reign, it was a Catholic Cathedral. The iconoclastic fervor of Henry’s time, however, stripped the church of its Roman Catholic relics, such as St. Erkenwald’s shrine that was plundered. The rest of “Old St Paul’s” gave way after The Great Fire of London in 1666, and its 17th century design by Sir Christopher Wren now comprises what we know as St Paul’s Cathedral. Today it stands as a grand structure whose changes over the years relate the entire history of the Anglican Church and shed light on the impact of the Reformation.
For another location rich with relevant anecdotes of church adaptation and nationhood, we need look no further than Spain. Muslim Moorish kingdoms ruled parts of the Iberian Peninsula during the Al-Andalus period, and these kingdoms erected an array of mosques scattered throughout Spain and Portugal. After Muslims conquered the Visigothic Kingdom is Spain, their church in Córdoba was divided between the two religions and shared for seven decades. Abd al-Rahman I bought the Christian part to build the Great Mosque of Córdoba in 785 and it was expanded over the course of Muslim dominion in Spain, which lasted over five centuries. After Christians took control of the city in 1236, however, King Ferdinand III converted The Great Mosque into a cathedral, as he did with numerous mosques and synagogues after the Reconquista. The Great Mosque is now known by its ecclesiastical name, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption and is defended by many Spaniards as a symbol of Spanish identity and Catholicism.[2]
These three churches and their roles grew during the late medieval and early modern period, but they have continued to evolve throughout modernity, much like nationhood itself. They are but a small example of churches whose roles have changed to reflect the changing spirit of their nation. Whether or not a church should fluctuate with the times is another question altogether, but we can assume that the use of these churches will continue to change, nonetheless. The intention underlying Hagia Sophia’s conversion to a mosque is nothing new. Numerous Christian churches in the west were similarly manipulated to set aside their roles as beacons of faith; raising, instead, their status as cultural embodiments of a nation’s identity at a given time.
[1] We can also call to mind Napoleon’s self-coronation in this same location almost ten years later, in which he famously took the crown from Pope Pius VII’s hands and placed it on his own head, thereby rejecting the notion that a monarch receives his crown from the Church; or the recent talks to rebuilt Notre Dame as a museum with a public, rooftop greenhouse.
[2] It is also known as the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba.
Nayeli L. Riano is a graduate of the University of St Andrews, where she did her MLitt in Intellectual History.
