The Sultanahmet

Istanbul means "into the city," and in we went, hitting the old part of this old city (called "The Sultanahmet") hard in our first two days. 

Istanbul, however, was officially known as Constantinople until modern times, and much of the old city is dominated by the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks and the subsequent 470 years of history under the reign of the Sultans.

Course, it's no small potatoes that this was also the eastern seat of the Holy Roman Empire 1,000 years before the sultans rode in on their white horses, and plenty of Roman monuments remain too.  And yep, the Greeks before them.

First stop: The Aya Sofya

The Byzantine Emperor, Justinian, had the cathedral built in 537, representing a huge celebration of Christianity's spread as the official religion of the Empire.  It took five years to construct.  Then, in 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Turks, iit only took five days to destroy or plaster over all of the mosaics and Christian iconography in the church and convert it into a mosque.  In 1935, it became a museum.

The mosaics that can be seen today were found under the plaster, which preserved them for over 500 years.

It took twenty years to uncover the face of one (of several) angels just below the dome:

And it will take twenty years to complete the restoration work behind this scaffolding, which just started four years ago:

The dome is magnificent, and at the time (uh, the 6th century) it changed architecture forever.  A circular dome on top of rectangular base.  Nothing better for the next 1,000 years.

The Aya Sofya is now a museum, so it is accepted to view a mosaic of Virgin Mary holding baby Christ, located just above two disks with Arabic calligraphy of the words Mohamed and Allah (left and right, respectively).  Strange indeed, in today's world.

Okay, next stop is the Blue Mosque (seen below from inside the dome of the Aya Sofya), just across the courtyard! I'll capture it in the next entry.