Hagia Sophia before Hagia Sophia. A study of the Great Church of Constantinople from its origins to the Nika Revolt of 532
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Monograph |
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| Description | The foundation of the Great Church of Constantinople in its physical form as a building and its legal status as the seat of the episcopate of the city dates back to the early months of the year 360. The new church represented the crowning of a large-scale religious and political operation conducted on the basis of a specific agreement between the imperial authority and the local ecclesiastical hierarchy. It also constituted an important commissioning episode for Constantine’s son and heir, Constantius II. The Great Church of Constantinople was the instrument with which an episcopate with limited prestige with respect to those of the large Eastern metropolises, such as Antioch or Alexandria or Jerusalem, managed to make its increasing power more visible. At the same time, as had already occurred in other large cities in the eastern half of the Empire, the new episcopal church quickly became a symbol of pride for citizens and a place for exchange and clashes at political and religious level. This situation also involves a form of total identification between citizens’ aspirations and the architectural symbol of local ecclesiastical power. The large edifice built by Constantius and radically restored in the first years of the fifth century by Arcadius and Theodosius II not only disappeared centuries ago, but it was replaced, in the same spot and only a few years after its final destruction in 532, by one of the most famous masterpieces of early Byzantine architecture, the Great Church (Hagia Sophia) of Justinian. It is therefore very easy to understand how the building that predated the one we can happily admire today was rapidly forgotten or relegated into a sort of nebulous “prehistory”. Therefore, the main aim of this book would be to study the pre-Justinianic phases of the Great Church not as if they were a “prehistory” but rather as a living part of the newly formed urban fabric, that of early Byzantine Constantinople. |
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