Thanks, Walter, for weighing in. I thought that, in fact, I had given rather short shrift to the “religious aspects” of Hagia Sophia’s importance compared to its use over the centuries as symbolic and rhetorical space within imperial cultures etc. Your sentiments about its weaponizing of that space to bring the hapless “unwashed masses” under religious authority sounds like the anti-religious campaigns of various totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Would you then be in sympathy with the Bolshevik campaigns against Orthodoxy in the USSR? I ask, because the western Left did make the case following on Marx’s dictum of religion being the “opiate of the masses.” However, Wikipedia reminds us that “the full quote from Karl Marx translates as: ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people’. Often quoted only in part, the interpretation of the metaphor in its context has received much less attention.” I would want to argue then, that it is capitalism that has created this void in the sighing human heart and has offered no substitute for religiouslonging.

Thanks, George, for this rumination. Hagia Sophia is indeed a panorama of unbroken history which now also includes the Islamist resurgence you mention. But in my view this is not so much a resurgence as an intensification of a continuity that began when the Conqueror inserted his triumphalist rhetoric back a thousand years into that of Byzantium. Erdogan does not have to appeal to Byzantium these days but he does insert himself into an ongoing Ottomanist rhetoric that goes back its own half-millennium.