No matter how thronged with tourists the thoroughfares are, the fact that you are walking on grounds founded nearly 1,700 years ago will send tingles through your feet, creeping up to that history geek in your head like the Roman Empire advancing across this very same geography during that time. You think about the astonishing feats, whether engineering, mathematical, artistic, architectural or otherwise, performed then and you wonder how we've only come so far only to invent Autotune, Lindsay Lohan, and a computer that wins at Jeopardy!. To forget these infirmities for a while, I threw myself into the crowd tidal waving into Aya Sofya, definitely the most magnificent monument in the country.
One thousand and seven hundred years of majesty. That's monumental royalty.
Aya Sofya is Emperor Justinian's attempt at restoring the greatness of the Roman Empire, completed in 537 A.D. and the greatest church in Christendom until the Conquest in 1453. Mehmet the Conquerer then converted it into a mosque, where it functioned before it was transformed into a museum in 1935. It's astounding and majestic, and a lot to take in. Your camera doesn't know where to point first and when your lens finds its landing spot, it doesn't quite understand how to handle what's in front of it. You stop trying and just gape, starting from enormous gilted Arabic calligraphy to beautiful mosaic to stunning domes that put to shame any modern effort to out-tallest-building-in-the-world.
The archangel Gabriel, looking down.
But I don't think I truly got it until I watched a group of priests and nuns stop to pray and kiss the Church of the Divine Wisdom's marble walls. Humility and faith, I realized, was what made Aya Sofya the most important landmark and preservation in Turkey.
Faith in the Fatih district.
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