#hagia sophia mosaics

[travelhagiasophia]

When visiting Hagia Sophia, consider these helpful tips to make the most of your experience. Firstly, plan your visit for weekdays, preferably Tuesdays to Thursdays, to avoid the weekend crowds. Arriving early in the morning shortly after the opening time allows for a more peaceful and immersive exploration of the monument. If possible, visit during the shoulder seasons of spring (April to May) or autumn (September to October) to avoid peak tourist numbers. Be mindful of local events and holidays to plan your trip around potential busy periods. Lastly, respect the cultural significance of Hagia Sophia, and dress modestly out of respect for its religious history and current status. Love Hagia Sophia! Learn about some amazing facts about Hagia Sophia here: 8 Amazing Historical Facts About Hagia Sophia

[pagingcs]

Byzantine mosaics, assorted locations

[ukdamo]

Today's Flickr photo with the most hits: the Deesis mosaic in Hagia Sophia. Virgin Mary, Christ, John the Baptist (x 2.5 life size) - late 12th CE.

[nastyacitrus]

[nudeartpluspoetry]

Mosaic in Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey

[10siglosdehistoria]

Mosaic of the Nikopoia in the Basilica of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (Istanbul, Turkey), dated 867.

Mosaico de la Nikopoia en la basílica de Santa Sofía de Constantinopla, (Estambul, Turquía) datable en 867.

Mosaico della Nikopoia nella Basilica di Santa Sofia a Costantinopoli (Istanbul, Turchia), datato 867

(English / Español / Italiano)

Its inauguration in the Hagia Sophia took place on 29 March 867 during the patriarchate of Photius and the reigns of Michael III and Basil.

The mosaic of the Virgin Mary and the Divine Infant is the first mosaic from the period after iconoclasm (6th-9th century).

It has stood for centuries in the niche of the arch and is one of the most beautiful in St Sophia.

*****

Su inauguración en Santa Sofía tuvo lugar el 29 de marzo de 867, durante el patriarcado de Focio y los reinados de Miguel III y Basilio.

El mosaico de la Virgen María y el Divino Infante es el primer mosaico del periodo posterior a la iconoclasia (ss.VI - IX).

Ha permanecido durante siglos en el nicho del arco y es uno de los más bellos de Santa Sofía.

*****

La sua inaugurazione nella Basilica di Santa Sofia avvenne il 29 marzo 867 durante il patriarcato di Fozio e i regni di Michele III e Basilio.

Il mosaico della Vergine Maria e del Divino Infante è il primo mosaico del periodo successivo all'iconoclastia (ss.VI - IX).

Si trova da secoli nella nicchia dell'arco ed è uno dei più belli di Santa Sofia.

[dreamsofbeasts]

Seraphims on the ceiling of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey. (2023)

[aicollider]

Embark on a journey through time. All expanses paid.

You step into the time machine and dial in the year 1915 and the location of Istanbul, Turkey. As you emerge from the machine, you are greeted by the bustling sounds and smells of the city. The air is filled with the scent of spices, roasting lamb, and the smoke from countless tobacco pipes. The first thing that catches your eye is the towering Hagia Sophia, its massive dome and intricate mosaics…

[gemsofgreece]

Turkey is about to convert another Greek Orthodox church to a mosque in Istanbul. They have been doing it relentlessly with many churches in the country, the most well known example being Hagia Sophia of course. This time they are about to convert the Church of Chora, a 4th century monastery which is particularly notable for having some of the best preserved religious art, icons and mosaics of the Byzantine style. It is the prime example of the Paleologan renaissance of the 13th century which was critical for the post-Byzantine and modern Orthodox style as we know it nowadays. Of course all the monument’s masterpieces are going to be covered for the church to be converted into a mosque.

It should be noted that as a city of 15 million, it already has more than 3,000 mosques, yet the need to turn historical churches to mosques seems to feel most urgent to them for some reason. Surely the reason must not be that Istanbul feels threatened by the presence of the remaining 2,000 Constantinopolitan Greeks (aka those who survived the islamisation, the pogroms, the deportations, the death marches and the genocide 🙃). So what is this urgency about?

Taking into consideration that from the next year they are also adding the irredentist fabrication of “Blue Homeland” (since when are Turks indigenous to islands for them to have a blue homeland?!?!?! 😂😂😂) to their schoolbooks, aka Turkey’s claim to half of Greece’s territorial waters in the Aegean Sea and all the islands located in these waters, and because it is obvious to me that a country of 80+ million cannot possibly feel threatened by a country of 10 million, I conclude once again that Turkey is simply threatened by the very easy modern international access to historical sources. So you have to start the brainwashing and the hate speech from an as early age as possible and you have to erase all signs of an alternative view of history from your streets to fight all the contradictory facts that can be learned from international sources within seconds from your phone.

[anthos11]

The Holy Quarter by Max Bedulenko - The Christ Pantocrator of the Deesis mosaic (13th-century) in Hagia Sophia (Istanbul, Turkey)

[brammariek]

WAIT WHAT she actually animates beyond the door even tho we can’t see her after we talk to her? I wonder if the devs had originally had her accessible for a time

SHE DOES! it's just a few seconds looking at each paintings, and you can see her through the focus if you stand close to the vault door, so she's very much there, and she's very much walking around.

now since she doesn't have anywhere else to go (that we know of) I'm assuming she stays in the vault until Aloy brings Sylens "to heel" as she says. Thing is, you're not supposed to stay in an art vault for very long periods of time, because the air quality and humidity needs to be very exact for art to be preserved, the gasses in the air are not ideal for human lungs. When i visited a museum with my university, we were allowed entry to one of the storage vaults, to see how conservation works, and how art pieces are stored when not on display, and IIRC you're not supposed to stay there for more than... an hour, maybe 2 at a time? so that makes me curious as to how much of Tilda's body has been altered with the nano-tech the Zeniths have. (I haven't played burning shores yet, so i have no idea if more lore is revealed there, but my guess is that we learn a bit more about them)

Like the paintings were already really old when Tilda got her hands on them, the oldest piece being Lidded ewer, by Adam van Vianen, 1614, and the Aloy being born in 3021, that makes the piece at least 1427 years old by the time Aloy sees it, compared to it's 410 years today in our timeline. that is impressive conservation considering no-one was there to monitor the vault and it's content at all. like in comparison, art that is 1427 years old to us, is from 597 ad, that's when England adopted the Julian calendar, so wer're talking Byzantine art period, like the Hagia Sophia was built between 532-37 AD. and as a visual reference to what a lot of western art looked like around that time, here is a mosaic panel of Empress Theodora, from around the 540s, in the church of San Vitale in Ravenna.

like this is the span of time we're talking about, this is so fucking old, and i just fhjdshafjkds have a lot of thoughts around that.

ofc we can assume that conservation tech was pretty evolved from what it is today, but i still believe human hands would have a large part in conservation... as an art-history student, i just have a lot of thoughts around Tilda and her vault FJKDSJLKF

[catholicpriestmedia]

"Saint John Chrysostom, Pray for Us!" #SaintoftheDay

📷 The Mosaic depicting Saint John Chrysostom in Hagia Sophia, Istanbul #Wikipedia. #Catholic_Priest #CatholicPriestMedia

[emaadsidiki]

Blessed Mother Mary & Baby Jesus Mosaic

[nevzatboyraz44]

The Hagia Sophia, originally built as a cathedral, is an extraordinary structure located in Istanbul, Turkey.

Its a vast history that spans over 1,500 years.

Commissioned by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, the Hagia Sophia was completed in 537 AD.

For nearly a thousand years, it served as the world's largest cathedral and the center of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

Its grand dome, intricate mosaics, and innovative architectural design were awe-inspiring achievements of their time.

In 1453, the city of Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, led by Sultan Mehmed II.

The Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque, and Islamic elements were added to its interior.

Minarets were erected, and Christian iconography was covered or removed.

It remained a mosque for almost 500 years, becoming a symbol of Ottoman architecture and culture.

In 1935, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, transformed the Hagia Sophia into a museum as part of his efforts to secularize the nation.

This status persisted until 2020 when the Turkish government decided to convert the Hagia Sophia back into a mosque.

......

Aslen katedral olarak inşa edilen Ayasofya, İstanbul'da bulunan olağanüstü bir yapıdır.

1.500 yılı aşan geniş bir tarihi var.

Bizans İmparatoru I. Justinianus tarafından yaptırılan Ayasofya, MS 537 yılında tamamlandı.

Yaklaşık bin yıl boyunca dünyanın en büyük katedrali ve Doğu Ortodoks Hıristiyanlığının merkezi olarak hizmet vermiştir.

Büyük kubbesi, karmaşık mozaikleri ve yenilikçi mimari tasarımı, zamanlarının hayranlık uyandıran başarılarıydı.

1453'te Konstantinopolis şehri, Sultan II. Mehmed liderliğindeki Osmanlı Türklerinin eline geçti.

Ayasofya camiye dönüştürüldü ve iç kısmına İslami unsurlar eklendi.

Minareler dikildi ve Hıristiyan ikonografisi kapatıldı veya kaldırıldı.

Yaklaşık 500 yıl boyunca cami olarak kalmış, Osmanlı mimarisinin ve kültürünün simgesi haline gelmiştir.

1935 yılında, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nun yıkılıp Türkiye Cumhuriyeti'nin kurulmasının ardından, modern Türkiye'nin kurucusu Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, milleti laikleştirme çabalarının bir parçası olarak Ayasofya'yı müzeye dönüştürdü.

Bu durum, Türk hükümetinin Ayasofya'yı tekrar camiye dönüştürmeye karar verdiği 2020 yılına kadar devam etti.

[byzantine-suggestions]

@suburbanbeatnik OK SO:

As far as the “mixing up different historical eras” problem goes, this actually happens in a lot of different novels. Theodora by Samuel Edwards is the most blatant example I can think of at the moment—near the end of the book, a horde of Huns, inexplicably led by Khosrow, starts marching on Constantinople while Justinian is in his plague coma, and Theodora sells the crown jewels (I don’t believe the narrative specifies the buyer) to fund Belisarius and his troops, who are the city’s last defense. Khosrow is similar to Mehmed II, Theodora takes on the role of Anna of Savoy, and the overall political situation is implied to be very bad for Byzantium, with Constantinople on the brink of total failure and most of the empire's territory gone. (Like, there’s discussion of Justinian and Theodora meeting the invaders at the gates so they can die together, because they think the whole empire is collapsing.) The story does end with the Byzantines winning (using Greek fire, another anachronism), and Theodora gets her jewels back (I do not remember how), but yeah, the author completely blended two very different periods together. Different variants of this exact plot appear in different novels—a *lot* of books treat the 540s as politically similar to the 1200s or 1300s, and a *lot* of books have Theodora sell her crown for some reason or another, usually to fund the defense of the City or one of Justinian’s schemes. (One book–maybe one of the ones by Marié Heese? I can’t think of the title, sorry)—had her sell her jewels to fund the building of the Hagia Sophia. (She gets them back in that book, too—I think Narses literally just discovers an enormous stockpile of gold somewhere, and that fixes the financial problems.) And a lot of different books put Belisarius in a Heraclius or Basil-like role, although I’m less well-versed in Belisarius books than I am in Theodora books. (The Sarantine Mosaic by Guy Gavriel Kay definitely did this—the character of Leontes is pretty much Heraclius and Belisarius combined, while Valerius and Aliana are straightforward Justinian and Theodora equivalents, except for the fact Aliana is the equivalent of an iconodule rather than a Monophysite. But that gets a pass, imo, because it’s not pretending to be totally accurate.)

Religious inaccuracies and mixups are also really common overall, especially in older books. One Victorian-era book called Blue and Green, or the Gift of God: A Novel of Old Constantinople was very bad with this, presumably because the author was a British Protestant who made no secret of his disdain for the “pagan heathenism” of the Byzantine Empire. (His descriptions of religious ceremonies are very funny, because he describes them as, like, Christian ceremonies, if Christian ceremonies had strippers and drugs. The inciting incident of Theodora’s spiral into prostitution is her doing an erotic dance at a respectable, aristocratic wedding—not a bachelor party, an actual wedding—and this is presented as normal.) Really, you can probably just check out any Byzantine book from before, say, the 1980s on archive.org, and there’ll be weird religious anachronisms all over the place. Lots of authors bring iconoclasm or the East-West Schism (the one that happened in 1054) into the sixth century, I guess because those are more recognizable and dramatic than the Monophysite thing. Authors tend to put Justinian and Theodora on the opposite sides of these conflicts, and Theodora is usually on whatever side they consider “wrong,” which differs significantly from book to book depending on the author’s religious leanings.

Regarding the Theodora/Macedonia thing—Ross Laidlaw’s Justinian: The Sleepless One definitely did this (there were a couple of cringe sex scenes in this book—he always referred to Macedonia as “the other one,” I guess to avoid saying her name a bunch of times? It’d be like “Theodora felt the other one’s lips...” and so on. It sounded so strange.) Macedonia was Theodora’s main love interest—Theodora does marry Justinian, and she likes him well enough as a person, but she’s pretty explicitly gay and uninterested in men, and she has an affair with Macedonia until Macedonia dies in an earthquake. I believe Stella Duffy’s Actress, Empress, Whore duology also had Theodora and Macedonia hook up, but Duffy’s sex scenes were less fetishistic and cringeworthy, and their relationship didn’t last for the entirety of the novel. Theodora having sex (or sexually charged interactions) with Antonina, Macedonia and her other female friends is reasonably common in shitty Theodora novels in general, but it’s never, like, a plot point. It’s just an excuse for the author to write about attractive young women getting it on in the Roman baths, or whatever other fetish-y nonsense piques his interest.

These points aren’t even the weirdest things about most of these books, though. I should just sit down one day and do a full post about all of the absurd things that happen in Justinian and Theodora stories, because shit gets real weird in most of them. Messy historical anachronisms and fetish-y male-gaze lesbian sex scenes are nowhere near the strangest aspects of some of these books—remind me, one day, to talk about all of the Penis Diseases these authors invent to explain away Justinian and Theodora's infertility.

[trustfallwithgod]

Built in 537 AD, the Hagia Sophia was the world's largest church for a thousand years... When the Roman Empire shifted its capital from Rome to Constantinople, it needed a monumental centerpiece.

"O Solomon, I have surpassed thee!", cried Emperor Justinian upon completion.

But it hadn’t been a church for centuries. After the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453, it spent 5 centuries as a mosque before becoming a museum.

Eastern Christianity's ancient wonder, was more recently converted to a mosque in July 2020. A few months later, its symbolic replacement was completed in Serbia, modeled on the majestic dome of the original.

Now, it has been revived in Serbia. But why Serbia?

Like the Hagia Sophia, Serbia too fell under Ottoman occupation in the 1400s. It was the start of several punishing centuries for Serbian Christians, during which the Ottomans cruelly burned the body of Saint Sava, the father of Serbian Orthodoxy.

Once free of Ottoman rule in 1878, plans hatched to rekindle Serbian national identity with a new church in Sava's name. Similar projects were happening across the newly-independent Balkan states, like Bulgaria's Alexander Nevsky Cathedral:

the interior mosaics are the real wonder. They took years longer to finish and cost as much as the structure itself did to build. It's the world's largest mosaic composition, with over 50 million pieces.

The ensemble had to wrap Serbian saints in with the universal Christian story, across 161,000 square feet of curved surface — without being distorted when viewed from the ground.

Culminating in the central dome's icon of Christ's Ascension — this mosaic alone weighs 11 tons.

"Weaving in millions of glittering pieces into one single message of brotherhood and solidarity".