Hagia Sophia, the Great Monument of Byzantine Constantinople

New York.- By Vicki J. Yiannias
The great church Hagia Sophia, built by Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, whose dome, rose more than 100 feet into the air, appearing, said Procopius, a contemporary of Justinian, “as though suspended from heaven by a golden chain.”

Hagia Sophia was the theme of the Modern Greek Program’s Fourth Annual Dr. Dimitri and Irmgard Pallas Lecture in Modern Greek Studies (co-sponsored by the Foundation for Modern Greek Studies), at the University of Michigan on February 9.

The illustrated lecture, Byzantium Revisited: The Mosaics of Hagia Sophia in the Twentieth Century was presented to an audience of more than 120 people by Dr. Helen Evans, curator of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s blockbuster exhibitions The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843-1261 in 1997 and Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557 in 2004.

Dr. Evans, who is Curator of Early Christian and Byzantine Art, The Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters The Metropolitan Museum of Art, began her lecture with the publicizing effects of a 1944 major exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art titled “Arts on the Soil of Turkey” in which representations of the restoration of the mosaics in Hagia Sophia were the works of greatest interest.

Dr. Evans explained that although the existence of the mosaics had been known from the nineteenth century, it wasn’t until that exhibit that the power and exceptional quality of the images were brought into public view. Simultaneously, an article in the Metropolitan Museum Bulletin addressed the historical importance of the works, which revolutionized public appreciation of the Middle Byzantine centuries, and major contemporary artists like Fernand Leger announced the role of the mosaics as an inspiration for modern art. Her talk explored the duality of these images as evidence of the exceptional arts of the Byzantine Empire and as inspirations to a generation of artists and art historians nearly a thousand years after their original execution.

“Constantine founded Constantinople. Justinian built the domed Hagia Sophia. Subsequent emperors between the ninth and thirteenth centuries embellished the great church with magnificent, monumental mosaics. But it would not be until the twentieth century that these masterpieces appeared again through the generosity of the Turkish Republic and the efforts of the Byzantine Institute. And it would be The Metropolitan Museum of Art that presented the works to the larger world in 1944. The public and scholarly interest that resulted in the twentieth century has rightly restored these works to a place of preeminence in the history of Byzantine art,” said Evans.

Dr. Evans also detailed the history of the surpassingly beautiful, awe-inspiring church which Justinian built, seeking to create a symbol of his power and that of the religion of the state. “The impact of the building, the seat of the Orthodox Church, did not diminish over time,” she said. “In 988, the envoys sent by Vladimir, ruler of Rus’ to Constantinople, would report that he and his people should become Christians in the Orthodox tradition because ‘they did not know if they were in heaven air on earth.”

Using many photographs, Dr. Evans discussed the labels of the mosaics in the exhibition and what they described about the subjects of the mosaics and other facts of their history, with fascinating details. The arresting text of one label regarding an image of the Archangel Gabriel repeated the legend that “such a flaming figure appeared to a boy during the construction of Hagia Sophia. The boy was guarding the workmen’s tools when the angel appeared and ordered him to find the workmen, who had stopped for lunch, and to bring them back to their labors immediately. The heavenly visitor swore by the Holy Wisdom whose temple is now being built’ that he would stand guard until the boy’s return. The emperor, overjoyed at this sign of divine favor, at once decided to call the temple Hagia Sophia and to forbid the boy’s gojng back, so that the angel, true to his promise, would guard the church forever.”

Vassilis Lambropoulos, C.P. Cavafy Professor of Modern Greek, Professor of Classical Studies & Comparative Literature, and Director of the Modern Greek Program at the University of Michigan said to The Greek News, “We are grateful to the donors, Dr. Dimitri and Irmgard Pallas, for making this annual lecture possible. Thanks to their generosity, we bring to campus an internationally eminent speaker for a major lecture which provided a look into some of the ways in which Byzantium was discovered in the twentieth century. It was fascinating to hear Dr. Evans, a leading authority not only in Byzantine culture but also in the history of modern Byzantine discoveries and exhibitions, tell the story of how just last century the mosaics of Hagia Sophia began to attract public attention, and even to influence modern art.”

Dr. Evan, thanked Dr. Dimitri Pallas for his support of this program, which is “so important for expanding an understanding of the history of the many centuries of Greek culture.”