Saint Sophia Cathedral

Saint Sophia Cathedral

In the city of Saint Sophia is a heap of stone and brick. This contrasts the incomprehensibility of it all over the city and attracts the attention of
This temple is simply called the Great Church.
It was created in 532-537 years. by order of Emperor Justinian. For the construction of the main cathedral of the Byzantine Empire were not invited to professional architects and a professor of mathematics and geometry, Anfimov of Thrall and Isidore of Miletus.

              Detail of the plan of modern Istanbul

In place of the vast basilica began to build a huge centric building with a dome, covering a huge cubic space. Four massive pillars supporting the ribbed dome on a small drum, hidden behind the construction of basilican plan. From the east and west is complicated by the vast dome of the semicircles and semi-dome Exedra, which is inscribed with three Exedra lower height.

The magnificence of this grand complex interior impressed contemporaries, and Byzantine architects did not dare to continue to compete with this monument: Sofia remained elusive summit, from which led the countdown, but which did not dare to approach. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 the Turks were sizing a half-century Aya Sophia, as they call the Temple, and then began to play its numerous mosques, in varying degrees, approaching as unattainable, as in the Byzantine period, the sample. But the Turkish architects, among whom was the famous Sinan, has always tried to not only copy the plan and interior features of Sofia, but also give the outward appearance of its mosques a new quality - they created a facade. What in the temple, there is no obvious pattern.

cross-section

The plan of the first tier

Originally lunettes of the cathedral was given too much light. In later revisions of his turned down, narrowed openings, giving the interior a mystical darkness of
Sophia built in accordance with a rare and apparently deliberate refusal of the principle of the external image. This is a slozhnosshity sail inflated by the wind, sail covers, and shadowing the interior, but not formally identified and decorated the outside. If there was just the dome, the temple can be compared with a tent, yurt, construction of any fabric on the frame. Only the frame in this case is distributed throughout the tissue and literally fused with it. This is a huge shell, stretched out over the temple space, the multicast, but a single dome, a grand and complex metaphor for the celestial sphere. On the part of this structure, geometrically calculated and verified the shell looks like a chaotic conglomeration of shapes, like a giant pile of building materials and structural elements, on top of which is a flat dome on a drum, it is not taking off impressions of amorphous and messiness of the whole.

In contrast to the appearance of the temple, the interior affects its structural
This amazing property of Sofia makes her very perception of the theater. On the distant view points, from the sea or on the other hand the Golden Horn, the monument is unknown mass. Today, it is not too stands out among the five or six mosques built by the Turks on a sample and having a clear silhouettes. When the mosque was not, the situation was different: the temple, as now, towering over the low buildings, but mostly gathered around her as tall and somewhat oplyvshy hill or mound. Suitable to the cathedral of the city blocks covered with a dome viewer sees a lot, which guessed buttresses, arches, and even some small dome hramiki two reference arrays, but does not see the whole dissolved in the piling building blocks, basic and additional amounts to the window openings of various shapes. And then when you log into the heap and stone turns plinfy saturated with the light of the majestic temple of wisdom arranged space.

The Byzantines believed that the canopy is suspended from Sofia to the sky a golden chain
This effect was unexpected Byzantine architects certainly take into account, but not for him, they left the facade of the Great Church, without any decorative treatment. In Sofia, Constantinople, we meet with the extreme phases of architectural thought that when you create a sacred space sees only from within the temple, and its shell materialized views as a metaphor for heaven. The appearance of the church - what is not, because the sky is not the reverse side, there is no appearance, but the interior. Therefore, outside of Sofia - something fatal inomirnoe. This otherness is not in regard to neighboring buildings, not to the city - it is otherness in respect of the world of material forms, a form which can not be. And it was she, a shapeless heap of ugly plastic, is an expression of what is inside - a world transformed by the divine presence.