The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories by Edward Hollis Page B
Authors: Edward Hollis
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Osman had undergone enough in their painful rebirth as the nation of Turkey? Surely it was enough that the sultan had been sent into exile, and that the caliphate had been abolished? What further humiliations prompted by the European enemy would the Father of the Nation heap upon his people?
Atatürk may have been a radical secularist, but he was nothing if not a canny politician. His clear blue eyes twinkled as he announced: “We have invited the Byzantine Society of the United States to begin excavations at Ayasofya. Ayasofya will become a museum.” The vaunting powers of Europe, who preached to others about modernity and liberal democracy, could hardly object to something so modern, so liberal, as a museum. And the people of Turkey, who could surely be forgiven a little nostalgia for their old customs, could be spared the humiliation of the conversion of Ayasofya into Hagia Sophia.
And nothing would give Atatürk greater pleasure than to exorcise such a pile of the superstitious spell that had afflicted it for centuries. A museum it would be, a historical document, a memento of yesteryear, connected to no one religion, the international patrimony of a disinterested modern mankind. Just as the golden chain that connected the dome of Hagia Sophia to heaven had been broken in a vision of moving flame on the night of 25 May 1453, so the invisible line that had connected the Ayasofya Mosque to the Kaaba in Mecca was now also severed. In 1929, some fourteen hundred years after it had been built, Ayasofya became a building, no more, nor less. It pointed nowhere in particular and was the center of nowhere.
The archaeologists of the Byzantine Society dug beneath the pavement in front of the building and found the remains of the basilica of Theodosius, burned down by the Blues and the Greens in the riots of 532. They scraped away the whitewash that covered the walls and found the glittering mosaics of Constantine and Justinian, of the Virgin Mary and Christ himself. They took away the carpets, and underneath them they found a purple stone: the Omphalos, which had once been the Navel of the World. But because Hagia Sophia had also been Ayasofya, the archaeologists did not take away the minarets, or the fountains, or the pews, or the
minbar
, or the mihrab itself. They allremain, the fragments of the spell that was cast when Mehmet the Conqueror climbed on the altar table, turned his face to Mecca, and said his prayers.
Petitions and campaigns to return the building to both Christian and Islamic use still abound, each citing the custom of centuries to justify their cause; others propose the use of Ayasofya as a memorial to the victims of the great clash of cultures that the building embodies, from the Crusades to the War on Terrorism. All sides agree that the Turkish government and UNESCO do not adequately fund the work required to keep the building standing, and all see political motivation—secularist, Islamist, Christian—in this parsimony.
In 2006, Pope Benedict went to Ayasofya. He stood in front of the mihrab and said his Ave Marias, while Islamist protesters prostrated themselves before the mosaics of Roman emperors and called out to Allah. No spells were cast that day, or if they were, neither Maria nor Allah seem to have heard them. The babble of the crowd echoed against a dark and empty dome, and their aimless feet trampled the stone that had once been the navel of the world.
The Santa Casa of Loreto
The Wondrous Flitting of the Holy House
T HE H OLY H OUSE C ARRIED BY A NGELS
Devotional engraving produced for pilgrims to
Loreto, nineteenth century
.
R EPRODUCTION
The Parthenon was a church for a millennium, longer by far than it had ever been a temple to Athene, and its transformation from one to the other took more than a single act of vandalism or conversion. For a thousand years every bishop of Athens would carve his name into the marble of the old temple to make it his own,
Atatürk may have been a radical secularist, but he was nothing if not a canny politician. His clear blue eyes twinkled as he announced: “We have invited the Byzantine Society of the United States to begin excavations at Ayasofya. Ayasofya will become a museum.” The vaunting powers of Europe, who preached to others about modernity and liberal democracy, could hardly object to something so modern, so liberal, as a museum. And the people of Turkey, who could surely be forgiven a little nostalgia for their old customs, could be spared the humiliation of the conversion of Ayasofya into Hagia Sophia.
And nothing would give Atatürk greater pleasure than to exorcise such a pile of the superstitious spell that had afflicted it for centuries. A museum it would be, a historical document, a memento of yesteryear, connected to no one religion, the international patrimony of a disinterested modern mankind. Just as the golden chain that connected the dome of Hagia Sophia to heaven had been broken in a vision of moving flame on the night of 25 May 1453, so the invisible line that had connected the Ayasofya Mosque to the Kaaba in Mecca was now also severed. In 1929, some fourteen hundred years after it had been built, Ayasofya became a building, no more, nor less. It pointed nowhere in particular and was the center of nowhere.
The archaeologists of the Byzantine Society dug beneath the pavement in front of the building and found the remains of the basilica of Theodosius, burned down by the Blues and the Greens in the riots of 532. They scraped away the whitewash that covered the walls and found the glittering mosaics of Constantine and Justinian, of the Virgin Mary and Christ himself. They took away the carpets, and underneath them they found a purple stone: the Omphalos, which had once been the Navel of the World. But because Hagia Sophia had also been Ayasofya, the archaeologists did not take away the minarets, or the fountains, or the pews, or the
minbar
, or the mihrab itself. They allremain, the fragments of the spell that was cast when Mehmet the Conqueror climbed on the altar table, turned his face to Mecca, and said his prayers.
Petitions and campaigns to return the building to both Christian and Islamic use still abound, each citing the custom of centuries to justify their cause; others propose the use of Ayasofya as a memorial to the victims of the great clash of cultures that the building embodies, from the Crusades to the War on Terrorism. All sides agree that the Turkish government and UNESCO do not adequately fund the work required to keep the building standing, and all see political motivation—secularist, Islamist, Christian—in this parsimony.
In 2006, Pope Benedict went to Ayasofya. He stood in front of the mihrab and said his Ave Marias, while Islamist protesters prostrated themselves before the mosaics of Roman emperors and called out to Allah. No spells were cast that day, or if they were, neither Maria nor Allah seem to have heard them. The babble of the crowd echoed against a dark and empty dome, and their aimless feet trampled the stone that had once been the navel of the world.
The Santa Casa of Loreto
The Wondrous Flitting of the Holy House
T HE H OLY H OUSE C ARRIED BY A NGELS
Devotional engraving produced for pilgrims to
Loreto, nineteenth century
.
R EPRODUCTION
The Parthenon was a church for a millennium, longer by far than it had ever been a temple to Athene, and its transformation from one to the other took more than a single act of vandalism or conversion. For a thousand years every bishop of Athens would carve his name into the marble of the old temple to make it his own,
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