Hagia Sophia

Where it sits. Hagia Sophia stands on the first hill of the historic peninsula in Istanbul's Fatih district, at the eastern end of the Sultanahmet square, with the Blue Mosque facing it across a park, Topkapı Palace behind it and the Bosphorus a few hundred metres downhill. The building is oriented with its apse to the east and its bulk visible from the water, which is how most of its history saw it: as the first thing a ship entering the Golden Horn would recognise.

The building itself. The present structure is the third on the site, ordered by Justinian I after riots destroyed its predecessor and built with startling speed between 532 and 537 by two men described in the sources as mechanikoi rather than architects — Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, both mathematicians. Their solution to putting a circular dome on a square plan was a system of pendentives and half-domes that transfers thrust outward and down, allowing a dome about 31.2 metres across to sit some 55 metres above the floor with a ring of forty windows at its base, so that the crown appears to float. The first dome was too shallow and collapsed after earthquakes in 558; Isidore the Younger rebuilt it steeper. The interior is faced in marble quarried across the empire — Thessalian green, Egyptian porphyry, Phrygian purple — cut into matched slabs so the veining mirrors. For nearly a thousand years it was the largest enclosed space in the world.

Church, mosque, museum, mosque. It served as the cathedral of Constantinople and the setting for imperial coronations, marked by the porphyry omphalion still visible in the floor. It was sacked in the Fourth Crusade in 1204 and used as a Latin cathedral. After the Ottoman conquest in 1453 Mehmed II converted it to a mosque; four minarets were added over the following century, two of them by Mimar Sinan, who also added buttressing that probably saved the building. The Swiss-Italian Fossati brothers restored it in 1847 to 1849 and hung the eight enormous calligraphic roundels, about 7.5 metres across, by Kazasker Mustafa İzzet Efendi. It became a museum in 1934 under the young republic, and in July 2020 a Council of State ruling annulled that status and it reopened for prayer as a mosque, with figural mosaics screened during services. Byzantine mosaics uncovered from 1931 by Thomas Whittemore's team survive in the galleries: the Deesis panel with its extraordinarily subtle Christ, the Empress Zoe panel whose husband's face was recut three times, and the Comnenus panel. A Norse guardsman scratched his name into the marble parapet of the south gallery in the ninth or tenth century, and the graffiti is still legible.

On screen. Hagia Sophia's best-known screen appearance is in From Russia with Love (1963), where Bond visits the building to collect the consulate plan left by Tatiana Romanova, tailing and being tailed among the columns — location work filmed in Istanbul in the same campaign that took the production into the Basilica Cistern and the Grand Bazaar. Ron Howard's Inferno (2016) returned in earnest, staging the search for the tomb of Enrico Dandolo — the Venetian doge of the Fourth Crusade, buried in the upper gallery — before moving the action underground to the cistern. It appears in establishing shots in a long list of features set in Istanbul, and in Turkish historical productions and Netflix's docudrama treatments of the 1453 siege. One correction worth carrying: the celebrated motorcycle chase across tiled rooftops that opens Skyfall (2012) was shot over the Grand Bazaar and through Eminönü, and the mosque silhouettes in the background are not this building. Since the 2020 reconversion, feature filming inside has become effectively impossible.

What visiting is like now. Since 2024 foreign visitors enter through an upper-gallery route on a paid ticket with an audio guide, while the ground floor functions as a working mosque with free entry for worshippers; shoes are removed and heads covered for women in the prayer area. The gallery route is the better one for the mosaics in any case, and it takes in the marble ramp — not stairs — that empresses were carried up. Expect carpet over the historic floor at ground level and scaffolding somewhere: a long-term structural and seismic programme is under way.

Getting there and timing. The T1 tram stops at Sultanahmet, two minutes' walk. Queues build sharply from mid-morning; the first hour after opening and the last two of the afternoon are calmer. The gallery ramp makes part of the building reachable without stairs, but the entrance sequence, thresholds and crowd density make wheelchair access difficult in practice. Combine with the cistern, the Hippodrome and Topkapı, all within 500 metres.