Today, Hagia Sophia is one of the world’s most extraordinary mosques — but it’s more than that. It’s also a symbol, a cultural phenomenon, and a monument.

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.

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 ...

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.

The Hagia Sophia remains a highly popular tourist destination, attracting millions of travelers. Here is a detailed look at this ancient UNESCO World Heritage Site in Istanbul, Turkey.

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 ...

“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, ...

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.

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 ...

Turkey has begun a new phase in 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.

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 emerged as Ancient Rome ...