The most important holy site was, of course, the ruin of Khersonesos, excavated by the imperial administration in 1827, where a church of St Vladimir was later built to mark the notional spot where the Grand Prince had converted Kievan Rus’ to Christianity. It was one of those symbolic ironies of history that this sacred shrine was only a few metres from the place where the French forces landed and set up their camp during the Crimean War.
2
Eastern Questions
The Sultan rode on a white horse at the head of the procession, followed by his retinue of ministers and officials on foot. To the sound of an artillery salute, they emerged from the main Imperial Gate of the Topkapi Palace into the midday heat of a July day in Constantinople, the Turkish capital. It was Friday, 13 July 1849, the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The Sultan Abdülmecid was on his way to reinaugurate the great mosque of Hagia Sophia. For the past two years it had been shut down for urgent restorations, the building having fallen into chronic disrepair after many decades of neglect. Riding through the crowd assembled in the square on the northern side of the former Orthodox basilica, where his mother, children and harem awaited him in gilded carriages, the Sultan arrived at the entrance of the mosque, where he was met by his religious officials and, in a break from Islamic tradition which specifically excluded non-Muslims from such holy ceremonies, by two Swiss architects, Gaspare and Giuseppe Fossati, who had overseen the restoration work.
The Fossatis led Abdülmecid through a series of private chambers to the sultan’s loge in the main prayer hall which they had rebuilt and redecorated in a neo-Byzantine style on the orders of the Sultan, whose insignia was fixed above the entry door. When the dignitaries had gathered in the hall, the rites of consecration were carried out by the Sheikh ül-Islam, the supreme religious official in the Ottoman Empire, who was (wrongly) equated with the Pope by European visitors.1
It was an extraordinary occasion – the sultan-caliph and religious leaders of the world’s largest Muslim empire consecrating one of its most holy mosques in chambers rebuilt by Western architects in the style of the original Byzantine cathedral from which it was converted following the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks. After 1453 the Ottomans had taken down the bells, replaced the cross with four minarets, removed the altar and iconostasis, and over the course of the next two centuries plastered over the Byzantine mosaics of the Orthodox basilica. The mosaics had remained concealed until the Fossati brothers had discovered them by accident while restoring the revetments and plasterwork in 1848. Having cleared a part of the mosaics on the north aisle vault, they showed them to the Sultan, who was so impressed by their brilliant colours that he ordered all of them to be liberated from their plaster covering. The hidden Christian origins of the mosque had been revealed.
Hagia Sophia, early 1850s
Realizing the significance of their discovery, the Fossati brothers made drawings and watercolours of the Byzantine mosaics, which they presented to the Tsar in the hope of receiving a subvention for the publication of their work. The architects had previously worked in St Petersburg, and the elder brother, Gaspare, had originally come to Constantinople to build the Russian embassy, a neoclassical palace completed in 1845, where he was joined by Giuseppe. This was a time when many European architects were constructing buildings in the Turkish capital, many of them foreign embassies, a time when the young Sultan was giving his support to a whole series of Westernizing liberal reforms and opening up his empire to the influence of Europe in the pursuit of economic modernization. Between 1845 and 1847 the Fossatis were employed by the Sultan to erect a massive three-storey complex for Constantinople University. Built entirely in the Western neoclassical style and placed awkwardly between the Hagia Sophia and Sultan Ahmet mosques, the complex was burned down in 1936.2
