Archaeology & History The Many Lives of Istanbul’s 1,500-Year-Old Architectural Icon Throughout its centuries-long existence, the Hagia Sophia has been a place of worship for different religions.

For 482 years, Hagia Sophia was a mosque (1453-1935). During those years, most of its mosaics were destroyed or covered with stucco, due to Islam’s ban on representational imagery.

Hagia Sophia was built as a church over a Roman temple, and was subsequently converted into a mosque and then a museum. Since 2020 it is used as a mosque once more.© Yasin Akgul/AFP/Getty Images ...

The Ottomans built four minarets, covered Hagia Sophia's Christian icons and luminous gold mosaics, and installed huge black panels embellished with the names of God, the prophet Mohammad and ...

The Hagia Sophia, located in Istanbul, Turkey, is a major historical and artistic monument famous for having been used by different religions. The UNESCO World Heritage Site was originally ...

Turkey has begun a new phase in sweeping restorations of the nearly 1,500-year-old Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, focusing on preserving the monument’s historic domes from the threat of earthquakes.

Turkey is set to begin restoration and reinforcement work on the dome of the Hagia Sophia, in one of the biggest repair projects carried out on the 1,486-year-old structure, experts said on Monday ...

“Both Hagia Sophia and Chora embodied Byzantine and Ottoman pasts, and they became symbols of co-existence and multi-faith living practices. Their conversion fundamentally implies a hierarchy, ...

Bigger and better The current Hagia Sophia was built in the 6th century when Constantinople — as Istanbul was then called — was the heart of the Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire that ...