This essay is published here on the occasion of the first prayers following Hagia Sophia’s reversion to a mosque, July 24, 2020.
It was spring 1964—a difficult year for the Orthodox Greek brothers
of Constantinople, because of the well-known anti-Greek acts of the
Turks, due to Cyprus. I was in the Theological Academy of Chalke (whose
operation unfortunately has since been forbidden by the Turks). Great
Lent had just started. In the Holy Trinity Monastery of Chalke, cantor
Stanitsas chanted with his students: “Open for me the gates of
repentance, O Life-Giver.” It was then that I experienced and understood
Orthodox Byzantium: with all its grandeur it humbly repents in front of
the Living and True God, as simply as washing in the morning or eating
our daily bread.
I set out with a colleague and friend, a student of Theology in
Chalke, to visit and worship at the “Aya Sophia,” as people called it in
my country without knowing what it meant. For me it was the Great
Church then. I used to hear about it, and it was something like a dream.
When we entered the Hagia Sophia, I remembered St. Symeon the New
Theologian: “If you have heard from someone about a city, its squares
and its streets, the buildings and the rest of its beauty, and if you
ever find yourself in this city, even if you recognize from what you
have heard the streets and the city plan, you are still not sure it is
the one you have heard so much about, until he himself tells you that
this is the city he was talking about.” Of course, St. Symeon used this
example to discuss the revelation of the Lord Himself to him and the
confirmation of a true epiphany to him by his spiritual father, Symeon
the Pious. When I entered the Hagia Sophia, I saw and realized that this
is God’s Holy Wisdom. I was a hieromonk, but forced to be without a
cassock, because it is forbidden in the city.
Upon entering the Church, I made the sign of the cross. The Turkish
guard reacted strongly, but my friend explained to him in his language
that I was a foreigner and did not know it was forbidden to make the
sign of the cross in the Hagia Sophia. Crossing the doorsteps of the
main church, in the nave, I realized, in some still unknown way, that
the Hagia Sophia in its bright dimensions is heaven coming down to earth
or rather landing at this very moment, and at the same time it is earth
going up to heaven or rather taking off and becoming heaven at this
very moment. I believe that this experience of the Hagia Sophia was
granted to me the sinner by Him Who made the Heaven Earth and the Earth Heaven.
I later found in St. Maximus that “God’s Holy Church”—and of course
St. Maximus had in mind primarily the Great Church of Christ, the Hagia
Sophia—“bears the type and image of God, having energy in His imitation
and type.” The same Saint also says, “God’s Holy Church is a type and
image of the whole universe,” and also, “God’s Holy Church pictures man
symbolically, and it is pictured by him as man … because God’s Holy
Church is Man!”
Better, the Church of God, the Wisdom of God, is the God-man, as her
holy founder and emperor, Justinian, would say. And he did say it in
practice by building the Hagia Sophia. Because, in that which is of
Christ, word becomes act, as the incarnation of the Divine Word became
Christ’s realization, according to the Holy Fathers (St. Irenaeus); that
is, the Divine Economy of the Holy Trinity, which Christ, “being one of
the Holy Trinity,” according to Justinian’s hymn, “realized within
Himself for us and for our salvation.” This Divine Economy of Christ,
the incarnate Wisdom of God, the materialization of the pre-eternal
Divine Light, which shone once and for all from Tabor, Justinian
financed; that is, he built this Church, the Hagia Sophia, as testified
and presented in the text by Charalambos Stathakis. And the Hagia Sophia
has remained a model for all the churches of God, throughout the world
and throughout the centuries.
A contemporary Serbian architect, Predrag Ristic (known in Greece as
Agapios Christides), writes that “the best churches in Orthodox Serbia
constitute a eulogy of the Temple of Temples, the Wisdom of Wisdoms, the
Church of Churches, the Assembly of Assemblies—the Catholicon of
Catholicons for the monks of Mount Athos—of the Holy Wisdom of God
(Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople, which is beyond all philosophies and
philosophers, all architectures and architects, as an image and type of
the Church = Ship of Christ. In it the Mystery of Christ, Who is the
Joyful Light of the world and of eternity, becomes word and liturgy in
the simple and clear language of the fishermen, in the way of the Cross
and the Resurrection.” And Ristic, the master architect, concludes:
“Blessed are they who have selected this Church-Ship, ‘the boat of
Christ which will never sink,’ as St. John Chrysostom would preach from
the ambo which still stands in front of Hagia Sophia today.”
History has not ended. It certainly continues as the history of the
saving Economy of God; the history of Hagia Sophia continues, too. We
Orthodox suffer from history (we are “the suffering earth” as the
Apostolic Fathers would say), but we are not exhausted and do not become
disappointed by history, and of course we do not get trapped in
history, because we are freely besieged for the sake of the Reign of
God. We remain in Freedom, “in which we were freed,” by Jesus Christ Who
Is and Was and Is to Come, the Alpha and the Omega of the Seven Lamps
(= Churches) of the Apocalypse; that is, the Great Church of Christ, the
New Zion, the earthly-heavenly New Jerusalem. And the “mystery in the
world,” of the Church of the Living God, is still being built.
The historical drama and the traditional liturgy of the Hagia Sophia
will go on until the Coming of Christ. We experience it when we visit it
and when its light shines in our heart. The Hagia Sophia remains “the
depiction in space, with light transfigured by matter, of the God-man
Jesus Christ.”