Histories of the Hagia Sophia
There is no such thing as a true history – or, at least, no such thing as one true
history. There are multiple histories, as no one history can account and include everything. Each piece of writing about the past reflects either a conscious decision or unconscious bias on the part of the author to the version of history that they would like to present. The case in point here is the Hagia Sophia: two authors, Byzantine court historian Procopius, writing in De Aedifiicis, and contemporary architectural historian Richard Krautheimer, in Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, both write about the same place, but present their history in startlingly different ways.
Both histories of the Hagia Sophia begin with Emperor Justinian and the start
of his effort to create the greatest church of all time sing two men considered not as “architects,” master builders, but as mathematicians and engineers. From there, however, they diverge fairly quickly. It becomes a difference of quantitative and qualitative approaches to the church; Krautheimer presents the history of the building while Procopius presents the history of the space. In other words, Krautheimer is concerned with the physical structure, how the building works, and Procopius is the metaphysical space, the divine manifestation of God.
The two writings make this focus clear from the vary start, in the
organization of each one. After both devoting some time to the two unlikely men who designed such an impressive building, Krauthemier proceeds to set the Hagia
Sophia within its historical context, explaining the many additions that have been added over the years to give the Hagia Sophia its current day appearance, before beginning several pages given over to the structure of the building. On the other hand, Procopius almost rushes from his description of the builders to the building, reminding the reader of its beauteous reputation before describing the holy space in detail for several pages. But Procopius does speak of structure, and Krautheimer does provide spatial description, but it is starkly different from what the other has provided of the same. Krautheimer gives a fairly detailed description, but it is of the programmatic spatial relationships, not necessarily the beauty: he writes, of the center square, that “clearly articulated by this rhythm of threes, fives, and sevens…the spatial units are, nevertheless, not clearly delimited” (214), not as divinely elegant as Procopius would state it -‐ as in, “you could suppose [the eminences] to be precipitous mountain peaks (74). Similarly, Procopius takes the opposite approach of Krautheimer to structure, devoting only a paragraph, and writing, “most of these [devices of stability] are beyond my comprehension and I find it impossible to express them in words” (75).
It is also clear at this point that the type of language used by each writer
expressed the type of history each was writing, Procopius using flowery, rapturous prose, and Krautheimer with impartial scientific exactitude. Nowhere is this difference in historical approaches more apparent than when describing the dome and its reconstruction. To begin with, Krautheimer communicates the dome in terms of its structure, the ribbing, the pendentives, the buttresses, while Procopius says that “it seems not to be founded on solid masonry, but to be suspended from
heaven” (75). On the whole, it seems, in terms of the Hagia Sophia, Krautheimer is most concerned with cause and Procopius with effect.
However, if this is true, what is Professor Satkowski most concerned with –
what is the history he is presenting in class in comparison to Procopius and Krautheimer? A building, like the Hagia Sophia, is presented in class through a variety of different focuses, such as structure and effect, but with most of the information on a topic that Krautheimer and Procopius do not really focus on, and that is historical context. In other words, the Hagia Sohpia has become part of a larger architectural narrative with influences and influence over the centuries. It is a history of the building and space in terms of history itself. It may not be the one true history, but there is no such thing. Each history is part of a larger picture. Even something as simple as a building cannot be boiled down to the qualitative, quantitative, or contextual – it is a culmination of all these approaches and more.