As you approached slowly, some stocking-footed figure carrying his boots would run in past you and take his place in the praying rank. In the huge carpeted expanse, dim in the distance under the dome, there were rows of worshippers sitting back on their ankles, bowing prostrate till their foreheads touched the ground at the lead of the cleric in the niche which still pointed them to Mecca and the Black Stone. Then, too, a few months ago only, you could stumble on the magic of the ancient worship, feebly retained perhaps but always bringing you on to a new level of emotion. To-day a polite official in everyday dress leans over a smart deal table, just where the hodjas were, and takes your stick or your umbrella and your ten-piastre fee. Their white turbans round the hardly seen brown fez were almost the only reminder of the East that you had come upon in the new Istanbul. Only a little time ago black-soutaned hodjas (priests) came out of their cubby-hole when you reached the door and bent to put you into the great shabby black slippers in which you were bound to enter, clean, the holy ground. Worship will never he renewed in the church. To put the Cross instead of the Crescent above its dome was an idea that ruled chancelleries and filled the correspondence columns of the newspapers. The whole of the nineteenth century saw it a symbolic centre of the rival political ambitions of Holy Russia and then of imperial-minded Greece, and then of Allied Western Christendom. For nine hundred years the greatest cathedral of imperial Eastern Rome, for four hundred and eighty years the greatest or, at any rate, the most famous Turkish mosque, for all time the greatest triumph of large-scale Byzantine building, it has tranquilly slipped into the state of a rather empty museum.Īn unexpected fate, marking new times.
Saint Sophia, whose dedication to Moslem worship was for a long the very symbol of their dominance at Constantinople.
They have abandoned the use of Saint Sophia as a mosque. They have become preservers of Christian art. The Turks have carried out another quiet revolution. New discoveries – a Christian mosaic of 1,000 years ago
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