Constantinople, within conquerors and conquered...
On the stage of world history, there have been large cities and small towns, of which only one was known by provincials not by the name given by Emperor Constantine, but by the urban and social attribute of πόλη, the city par excellence, the only city that fulfilled certain standards of urban comfort in those Middle Ages whose end was believed to have coincided with the end of the respective city, namely Constantinople. Once founded on the site of the ancient colony Byzantium, it had to face a series of sieges, each more dramatic. After it faced numerous attacks, in the end it fell on May 29, 1453, being conquered by the Ottoman Turks. Only the city of Constantinople had a different fate, its final political occupation, leading to the quasi-total artistic conquest of the conquerors. Although its name was erased from the world maps, its current name being that of Istanbul, although churches that were not destroyed were turned into mosques and the fate of the most important ones, Saint Sophia and Chora, the Kariye Djami, whose aesthetic value led to their conversion into museums, it is uncertain, a strictly architectural reading, putting aside any Christian or pagan insignia (Holy Cross, respectively crescent) and focusing solely on forms, volumes and architectural structures, find that most of the mosques in the conquered city, as well as elsewhere, strikingly resembles the Hagia Sophia. And browsing Islamic architecture reveals that after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, a new architectural structure of the mosques, of central type, evolved from traditional Christian architecture. So, minarets can tear the air near the Saint Sophia, the crescent can replace the cross on top of the dome, its muezzins can trumpet the prayer times through the specific oriental undulations, but, beyond that, the architectural structure of Islamic mosques carries over the centuries the mark of the largest Christian Byzantine church, Hagia Sophia, as a testimony to a historical paradox, a Constantinople between conquerors and conquered...
MIHAELA PALADE
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