Constantinople is a city for which even the question of where to begin is political. To begin in 330 CE, with Constantine’s dedication of his new imperial capital, risks reproducing the fiction of foundation itself: that an emperor could make a city anew through an act of naming. Constantine did not build on empty ground; he appropriated and radically transformed Byzantion, an existing Greek polis under Roman rule. [1]
Nor did the city acquire a single identity thereafter. Byzantion, Constantinople, New Rome, New Jerusalem, Konstantiniyye, Istanbul: these names do not simply record successive historical periods. They make claims about what the city is, where its history belongs, and which pasts should organise the present. Bogdanovic has shown how identities as “New Rome,” “New Jerusalem,” “Queen City,” and simply “the City” produced a relational sacred geography in which Constantinople could signify an imperial and Christian world extending far beyond its walls.[2] The city was being interpreted even as it was being made.
This essay approaches that process as translation: not as a neutral metaphor for cultural change, but an act of selection. Something is carried forward; something is altered, obscured, renamed, displaced, or rendered newly intelligible. Crucially, not everyone possesses equal power to make their translation authoritative. The question, therefore, is not simply how Constantinople changed, but who has possessed the authority to translate it, through what media, and with what consequences.[3]
Hagia Sophia provides a recurring material test of this argument. Byzantine and Ottoman interventions coexist within the same architectural fabric, a resistance to singular classification that Steiner and Neumeier describe as monumental “mutability.”[4] An art-historical approach makes that mutability materially legible through architecture, surfaces, light, sound, movement, and spectatorship. Buildings, mosaics, drawings, travel accounts, photographs and museum displays are themselves among the media through which Constantinople has been made visible and knowable.
These processes also unsettle the historical categories used to organise Constantinople. “Byzantium” itself is retrospective: as Stouraitis stresses, the inhabitants of the polity modern scholarship calls Byzantine overwhelmingly understood their political community as Roman.[5] Said’s critique of Orientalism raises a related question of representational authority: why do some ways of describing and organising a place acquire greater institutional power than others?[6] Translation must be situated within intersecting histories of empire, conquest, religion, colonial knowledge and nationalism. Material remains constrain interpretation, but no observer encounters them from an unmediated position.
Making Constantinople: Empire, Sacred Geography, and the Imagined City
Constantinople’s first great imperial translation was not, in any simple sense, from paganism to Christianity, but from Byzantion into an image of empire. Constantine inherited a Greek polis already shaped by centuries of habitation, Roman patronage and religious practice.[7] His transformation after 324 depended on an existing material landscape even as it sought to exceed it. Constantine’s building programme expanded the city, monumentalised its ceremonial centre, and drew upon Greek and Roman traditions while asserting new imperial presence.[8] To call this a “foundation” is already to adopt the language of imperial power: it privileges the ruler who renamed and monumentalised the landscape over the communities and histories that made that transformation possible.
Constantine’s city did not speak in a single visual or religious language. Traditional cultic and civic institutions persisted alongside emerging Christian foundations.[9] Christianisation was itself a process of translation rather than replacement.
The Column of Constantine demonstrates how such meanings accumulated. Its imperial and solar associations became entangled with traditions of Christian and biblical relics, while its positions on the Mese placed it within ceremonial movement through the city.[10] Roman imperial and Christian vocabularies could therefore occupy the same monument, allowing an expanding repertoire of association. Across the following centuries, churches, relics, inscriptions, processions, and the reinterpretation of urban topography increasingly produced Constantinople as Christian sacred geography.[11] Sacred space organised political belonging as well as religious experience.[12]
Under Justinian I (r.527-565), Hagia Sophia brought these relationships into architectural form. The present building, dedicated in 537, cannot adequately be understood as a technical achievement alone. Pentcheva demonstrates how marble, gold, light, reverberation, chant, and bodily movement produced a multisensory sacred environment.[13]Procopius similarly describes the building through light, material splendour, spatial perception, and the astonishment of the moving gaze: the dome appears suspended from heaven, while the building’s shifting visual effects lead the visitor toward an experience of divine presence.[14] Architecture did not merely accommodate ritual, it participated in assemblage of making the sacred perceptible.
That experience was inseparable from imperial power. As Skedros demonstrates, Byzantine political thought increasingly bound imperial legitimacy to the protection and definition of orthodoxy.[15] Hagia Sophia functioned not only as sacred architecture but as a material theatre of Christian empire. Yet that identity was never simply given: ritual had to be repeated, monuments repaired, sacred histories remembered, and doctrinal boundaries maintained. [16] The image of an eternal Christian capital was, paradoxically, something that required continual production.
The Fourth Crusade of 1204 violently exposed the instability of Constantinople’s Christian imperial identity. The crusaders who captured the city were themselves Latin Christians, yet conquest transformed churches, relics, and monuments into objects available for appropriation. Hagia Sophia became a Latin cathedral, while relics, liturgical objects, and other material wealth were removed and dispersed across Western Europe.[17] Conquest made Constantinople’s sacred material portable. In Venice, objects removed from the Byzantine capital did not remain inert fragments of a lost context: incorporated into new architectural, liturgical, and civic settings, they could be refashioned into new claims about possession and identity.[18] The event permanently complicates any simple Christian/Muslim or East/West geography. As Skedros argues, 1204 fractured Byzantine political authority and contributed to the articulation of Orthodox political identity increasingly against the Latin West. [19] Constantinople was recovered in 1261, but the rupture could not be undone.
Byzantine Constantinople, therefore, cannot serve as the stable “original” against which 1453 is measured. Long before Ottoman conquest, the city had been appropriated, sacralised, looted, restored, and repeatedly claimed by competing authorities. Its monuments were already performing the political work of translation: making inheritance look like continuity, appropriation like legitimacy, and historically produced authority like sacred order.
Conquest Without Erasure: Translating Byzantine Constantinople into Ottoman Istanbul
In 1453, the authority to translate Constantinople changed hands. Mehmed II’s conquest of Constantinople transformed the city’s political and religious order. Ottoman Constantinople was produced through selective engagement with its inherited fabric rather than through wholesale replacement. The city had to be repopulated, reorganised, inhabited, and made politically legible within a new order.[20] Mehmed could not inherit the city without also inheriting its past. What followed was therefore neither uniform preservation nor systematic erasure, but a selective translation of the old city into an Islamic imperial capital.
Hagia Sophia makes that selectivity immediately visible. Its conversion from cathedral to imperial mosque changed the building’s religious and political functions without eliminating the sixth-century structure through which Byzantine imperial Christianity has been monumentalized. Ottoman interventions accumulated within and around the inherited fabric, while elements of its Christian visual past survived under changing conditions of visibility.[21] The result resists the binary of preservation and destruction. Hagia Sophia survived precisely by being transformed.
Preservation could itself become a technique of conquest. Retaining the conquered city’s most powerful monument allowed Ottoman sovereignty to be articulated through material continuity. Mehmed did not have to create new legitimacy from nothing. Yet this was an exercise of unequal power. Conquest gave Mehmed the authority to transform sacred space; Constantinople’s Christian inhabitants did not share that authority. Byzantine rulers themselves had used appropriation, spolia, ritual, and monumentalisation to naturalise their own claims to the city. What changed in 1453 was who possessed the power to make an interpretation materially dominant.
Mehmed’s relationship with the past was not uniformly adversarial. Necipoğlu describes Mehmed’s court through “visual cosmopolitanism and creative translation,” a framework that better captures the selective appropriation of inherited forms than a binary of preservation and destruction.[22] Ottoman authority could draw upon Byzantine, Roman, Islamic, Persianate, and other visual traditions without treating those traditions as stable or equivalent inheritances. Ottoman Constantinople was constructed not by eliminating the city’s Roman and Byzantine influence, but by selectively making that inheritance serve new claims to sovereignty.
The Fatih complex entered into a particularly charged relationship with the Church of the Holy Apostles, one of Byzantine Constantinople’s most important churches and site of imperial burial. The precise archaeological relationship between the two structures remains debated. [23] Replacing the Holy Apostles with an Ottoman imperial foundation nevertheless inserted Mehmed into a landscape already associated with Constantinople’s rulers.[24] Hagia Sophia and the Holy Apostles represent contrasting modes of translation: one survived through conversion; the other through displacement and replacement.[25] Absence can be politically produced just as visibility can. The Fatih kulliye also reorganised urban life through religious, educational and charitable institutions: architecture did not merely illustrate the new political order; it participated in producing it. [26]
By the sixteenth century, Sinan’s Süleymaniye engaged Hagia Sophia through what Necipoğlu calls a “competitive discourse,” invoking the Byzantine monument’s authority while seeking to surpass it.[27] Comparison did not subordinate Ottoman architecture to a Byzantine model; it made the prestigious architectural past available as a field in which new imperial authority could compete. Ousterhout demonstrates how Byzantine forms and spolia could be appropriated within early Ottoman architecture, complicating any simple opposition between cultural continuity and conquest.[28] Reused material does not carry a stable meaning from one context to another. Flood’s comparative work on spolia sharpens this point: appropriation itself can become an act of historical inscription, enabling older material to participate in new political and cultural geneaolgies.[29] Conquest did not erase Byzantine Constantinople or make it irrelevant; it made it a resource to be rewritten.
Benjamin’s account of translation offers a useful language for these material transformations. Translation belongs to the afterlife of the original: it enables a work to persist by becoming something it was not before.[30] Constantinople’s architectural afterlives make the politics of that process material. Buildings do not choose the conditions of their translation. Survival, alteration, reuse, and disappearance depended on those with the power to determind which past remains visible. The significance of 1453 lies not in the moment when one city disappeared, and another suddenly replaced it, but in a redistribution of authority over the city’s material archive.
Rulers, however, were never the city’s only translators. Constantinople was also being watched, walked, described, drawn, and remembered by those who lacked the power to rebuild it. Architecture could make an interpretation materially dominant, but representation could make another Constantinople portable. Travel accounts selected and rearranged the city for audiences elsewhere, and what became visible depended upon who was permitted to see it.
Moses Almosnino’s sixteenth-century Ladino account disrupts the assumption that travel writing about Ottoman Constantinople was necessarily a Western Christian encounter with an Islamic “East.” Writing from within a Sephardic Jewish intellectual and communal context, Almosnino produced a Constantinople conditioned by his own linguistic, religious, and diplomatic position. Its later editorial history makes translation more literal still: Jewish communal material was suppressed or reorganised for another audience.[31] Representation often determined which Constantinople travelled.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu exposes another dimension of this problem. Her gender granted her access to female Ottoman spaces that were inaccessible to male travellers, enabling her to challenge some of their claims about Ottoman women. Yet greater access did not produce an unmediated Constantinople.: her account remained a situated interpretation shaped by the conditions under which she encountered and described the city. [32] John Bell ‘s roughly contemporary account consequently offers another partial Constantinople, conditioned by different routes, privileges, and expectations.[33] Access structures interpretation.
The problem is not simply that travellers were subjective. All observers are. The more important question is which representations acquire authority. Said’s Orientalism provides a framework for understanding how representations of an imagined “East” became entangled with European structures of knowledge and power.[34] Constantinople occupied an especially unstable position: geographically European, politically Ottoman, architecturally Roman and Byzantine, it could simultaneously be represented as an Islamic “East” and excavated imaginatively as the surviving remains of Christian Constantinople.[35]
By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this authority to represent was increasingly institutionalised through architectural survey, archaeology, photography, and art history. These practices did not merely record the city; they selected the pasts that could be made legible within it. Ousterhout describes a Western scholarly imagination in which Ottoman Constantinople could appear as an “Oriental veneer” obscuring an older Christian and Greco-Roman city awaiting recovery.[36] Representations could then acquire an afterlife of their own. Nelson shows that Charles Greco’s 1924 Tifereth Israel synagogue in Cleveland drew upon Hagia Sophia through a visual culture of photographs and publications.[37] The object being translated was already a translation.
The Republican museumification of Hagia Sophia in 1935 institutionalised another shift in authority. Byzantine mosaics, Ottoman calligraphy, marble revetment, mihrab, and architectural structure were presented together within a secular heritage framework. Museumification did not end the monument’s translation; it changed its translators.
Heritage institutions determine what is designated significant, how it is conserved, and the narratives through which visitors are taught to understand it.[38] Worshippers increasingly became visitors and sacred surfaces became objects of historical and aesthetic interpretation. The building appeared universal, partly because the political choices that produced that universality had become less visible.
The 2020 reconversion of Hagia Sophia to a mosque exposed the instability of that settlement. It might appear to reverse 1935 but there was no historical condition to which Hagia Sophia could simply return. Eighty-five years of conservation, archaeology, scholarship, photography, tourism, and heritage discourse had transformed what the building meant and what visitors expected to encounter.[39] Byzantine mosaics, once obscured, had become internationally familiar images; Ottoman interventions had become heritage objects; and Hagia Sophia had acquired a global audience that could not simply be undone by changing its institutional designation.
The politics of the contemporary monument consequently concern more than whether it is labelled mosque or museum. They concern movement, visibility, and access. Decisions about where visitors may enter, when worship takes priority, and when Christian imagery is covered determine which layers of the monument different bodies are permitted to encounter.[40]
The authority to translate Hagia Sophia has become almost literal: the authority to determine who gets to enter, who gets to look, and what they are allowed to see. Constantine could build; Justinian monumentalise; crusaders loot and convert; Mehmed preserve, demolish and repurpose; travellers describe; scholars classify; conservators reveal; museums interpret; states regulate access. None of them encountered an untouched city. Each inherited previous translations and acted upon them. Constantinople’s history survives materially because those translations accumulate.
Conclusion: No Final Translation
Constantinople has never been a stable object waiting to be understood. From Byzantion to contemporary Istanbul, successive authorities have selected from the city’s inherited material and representational archive, making particular pasts visible while obscuring others. Translation therefore offers more than a metaphor for cultural change: it describes the process through which historical authority is continually produced.
Hagia Sophia makes both the possibilities and the violence of that process material. Its survival has depended not upon the preservation of a stable identity, but upon repeated transformation. Church, mosque, museum, monument, heritage site, and mosque again do not constitute discrete lives neatly replacing one another. They accumulate within a fabric that constrains each new attempt to define it. Survival does not preserve meaning intact.
Nor has transformation belonged exclusively to rulers. Travellers made Constantinople portable, scholars and photographers rendered particular pasts visible and reproducible; heritage institutions determined what should be considered and how it should be encountered; states continue to regulate movement, visibility, and access. These forms of authority are not equivalent, but each demonstrates that interpretation becomes historically consequential when it acquires the power to organise material, knowledge, or experience.
The question is not which Constantinople is authentic, but who has been able to claim authenticity, through what means, and what those claims have made visible or invisible. No empire, religion, discipline, or nation-state has succeeded in fixing the city’s meaning permanently. It survives as an archive of repeated acts of interpretation. There is no final translation of Constantinople: only the continuing struggle over who is authorised to translate it.
[1] Paul Magdalino, “From Byzantion to Constantinople,” in Cities as Palimpsests? Responses to Antiquity in Eastern Mediterranean Urbanism, ed. by Elizabeth Key Fowden, Suna Çağaptay, Edward Zychowicz-Coghill, and Louise Blanke (Oxbow Books, 2022), 225–26.
[2] Jelena Bogdanović, “The Relational Spiritual Geopolitics of Constantinople, the Capital of the Byzantine Empire.” In Political Landscapes of Capital Cities, ed. Jelena Bogdanović, Jessica Joyce Christie, and Eulogio Guzmán (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2016), 99-100.
[3] The use of “translation” here extends beyond Benjamin’s linguistic argument to material, visual, and institutional processes. Benjamin Walter, “The Translator’s Task,” trans. S. Rendall. TTR: Traduction, terminologie, redaction 10, no. 2 (1997), 153; Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 1-28. Benjamin’s conception of translation as a work’s continuing afterlife provides a point of departure here, while Said foregrounds the unequal institutional conditions through which representations acquire authority. The analogy does not imply that linguistic translation, conquest, architectural reuse, and museum display are equivalent processes; rather, it identifies a shared problem of selection, transformation, and authority.
[4] Shannon Steiner and Emily Neumeier, “A Church is Never Just a Church: The Mutability of Monuments,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 8, no. 1 (2021), 216-18. Their argument explicitly challenges stable classifications of Hagia Sophia as simply church, mosque, or museum, and provides the concept of monumental “mutability” used here. Their discussion also notes the continued visibility of significant mosaic decoration for considerable periods following the Ottoman conversion.
[5] Yannis Stouraitis, “Is Byzantinism an Orientalism?: Reflections on Byzantium’s Constructed Identities and Debated Ideologies.” In Identities and Ideologies in the Medieval East Roman World, ed. Yannis Stouraitis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), 22-25.
[6] Said, Orientalism, 1-28.
[7] Magdalino, “From Byzantion to Constantinople,” 225-27. Byzantion possessed an acropolis and agorai, temples, theatres, baths, and administrative buildings, as well as established routes through which civic and sacred life were organized.
[8] Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos, “The Founding of a City,” In Constantinople: Ritual, Violence, and Memory in the Making of a Christian Imperial Capital, 1st ed., vol. 9. (University of California Press, 2020), 49-50. Notes both the enlargement of the walls and the way Constantine’s building programme cultivated Greek and Roman inheritance while asserting dynastic and imperial claims.
[9] Falcasantos, “The Founding of a City,” 50-51. Emphasises the coexistence of emerging Christian foundations with traditional cultic and Roman civic institutions in the city, complicating retrospective narratives of an immediately Christian capital.
[10] Bogdanović, “Relational Spiritual Geopolitics,” 106-7. Traces the Column’s accumulation of imperial and Christian associations and its integration into the city’s liturgical and ceremonial topography; later traditions associated the Column with both imperial solar imagery and Christian relics, exemplifying the accumulation of sacred and imperial meanings around the monument.
[11] Bogdanović, “Relational Spiritual Geopolitics,” 107. Traces the progressive Christianisation of urban topography through relics, walls, inscriptions, etc.
[12] Falcasantos, “Founding of a City,” 60-61. The palace-hippodrome relationship drew upon earlier Roman imperial models, while the Milion consciously supplied Constantinople with an analogue to Rome’s Milliarium Aureum. Falcasantos identifies the Augusterion, populated with imperial images and situated at the convergence of civic, commercial and religious spaces, as a potential site in which incense, proskynesis, games and dancing could enact allegiance to the imperial person
[13] Bissera V. Pentcheva, “Hagia Sophia and Multisensory Aesthetics,” Gesta 50, no. 2 (2011): 93,101. Treats Hagia Sophia as an integrated visual, acoustic, and corporeal environment; in Paul the Silentiary’s ekphrasis, the central space beneath the dome is described as the kallichoros, an “airy central performance stage.” Pentcheva uses the term to describe both performance space and performance itself: choros encompasses the space in which dance and song unfold.
[14] Procopius, On Buildings (De Aedificiis), ekphrasis on Hagia Sophia, in Cyril Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 312-1453 (Toronto, 1986): 76.
[15] James C. Skedros, “You Cannot Have a Church Without an Empire’: Political Orthodoxy in Byzantium,” In Christianity, Democracy, and the Shadow of Constantine, ed. by George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou. (Fordham University Press, 2017): 220-23. Discusses the Byzantine emperor’s role as defender of the church and quotes Justinianic legislation prescribing Christian orthodoxy within the empire; also he traces the persistence of this imperial responsibility in later Byzantine political theory.
[16] Bogdanović, “The Relational Spiritual Geopolitics..,” 106-7.
[17] Mariëtte Verhoeven, “Meaning-Making in an Imperial and Papal Context: The Relics of Gregory Nazianzen and John Chrysostom,” Church History and Religious Culture 102, no. 3/4 (2022): 328-29. Verhoeven records the plundering of imperial tombs and the large-scale dispersal of Constantinopolitan relics into the Latin West after 1204, noting that fragmentation also generated competing claims to possession of the same sacred bodies. After the Byzantine recovery of Constantinople in 1261, visitors still reported relics of Gregory Nazianzen and John Chrysostom at the Holy Apostles even though Western institutions has claimed portions of them.
[18] Holger A. Klein, “Refashioning Byzantium in Venice, ca. 1200-1400,” in San Marco, Byzantium, and the Myths of Venice, ed. Henry Maguire and Robert S. Nelson (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2010): 198-200, 218-20; Thomas E. A. Dale, “Cultural Hybridity in Medieval Venice: Reinventing the East at San Marco after the Fourth Crusade,” in San Marco, Byzantium, and the Myths of Venice, 151-53. Klein documents the relocation and reuse of Byzantine sacred objects after 1204, while Dale treats appropriation as an act of meaning-making and cultural translation dependent on its new Venetian context.
[19] Skedros, ‘You Cannot Have a Church Without an Empire,’ 223, 228-29.
[20] Gülru Necipoğlu, “Visual Cosmopolitanism and Creative Translation: Artistic Conversations with Renasissance Italy in Mehmed II’s Constatinople,” Muqarnas 29 (2012): 1-2.
[21] Bissera V. Pentcheva, “Hagia Sophia: Byzantine Alterity in the Core of Ottoman Identity.” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 8, no. 1 (2021): 223–33; Steiner and Neumeier, ‘A Church Is Never Just a Church’
[22] Necipoğlu, “Visual Cosmopolitanism and Creative Translation,” 1-4. The language of cosmopolitanism and translation should not obscure the unequal conditions of conquest through which these exchanges occured
[23] Ken Dark and Ferudun Özgümüş, “New evidence for the Byzantine Church of the Holy Apostles from Fatih Camii, Istanbul.” Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 21(2002): 393-413; Julian Raby, “From the Founder of Constantinople to the Founder of Istanbul: Mehmed the Conqueror, Fatih Camii, and the Church of the Holy Apostles,” in The Holy Apostles: A Lost Monument, a Forgotten Project, and the Presentness of the Past, ed. Margaret Mullett and Robert Ousterhout (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2020): 247-86. Dark and Özgümüş identify pre-Ottoman remains beneath the Fatih complex; Raby proposes a stronger spatial relationship, but the precise correspondence of the structures remains inferential.
[24] Raby, “From the Founder of Constantinople to the Founder of Istanbul,” 269-79. Raby’s reconstruction of the relationship between the Fatih complex and the earlier imperial landscape remains necessarily provisional in the absence of decisive archaeological evidence.
[25] Raby, “From the Founder of Constantinople to the Founder of Istanbul,” 282. Raby makes the distinction starkly: Mehmed “ordained the fate of both Hagia Sophia and the Holy Apostles. One he preserved, the other he demolished.”
[26] Raby, “From the Founder of Constantinople to the Founder of Istanbul,” 251-57, 282. Raby describes the sultan as defining the city “demographically, spatially, architecturally, ceremonially, ideologically, and of course, religiously.”
[27] Necipoğlu, “Challenging the Past: Sinan and the Competitive Discourse of Early Modern Islamic Architecture.” Muqarnas 10 (1993): 169–80.
[28] Robert Ousterhout, “The East, The West, and the Appropriation of the Past…” Gesta 43, no. 2 (2004): 165-76, esp 170.
[29] Finbarr Barry Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval "Hindu-Muslim" Encounter. E-book, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009): 121-23. Flood’s geographical and historical contexts differ from Ottoman Constantinople; his value here is comparative and methodolgical. He emphasises that displaced objects are redefined and reimagined in new contexts, and that recontextualisation can articulate political change while constructing continuity through selected fragments of an earlier order.
[30] Walter Benjamin, “The Translators Task,” (1997): 153. Benjamin’s discussion concerns linguistic translation and afterlife of a work; the architectural analogy here is mine. What carries across is not an equivalence between texts and monuments, but the proposition that persistence can depend upon transformation rather than unchanged preservation.
[31] Olga Borovaya, “The First Ladino Travelogue: Moses Almosnino’s Treatise on the Extremes of Constantinople.” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 10, no. 1 (2018): 106–26. Borovaya demonstrates that Almosnino’s seemingly observational account was heavily mediated through classical and medieval texts; moreover, Jacob Cansino’s 1638 edition suppressed specifically Jewish material, reordered the work, and marketed it to a Christian audience as a conventional travelogue.
[32] Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Vol 1:1708-1720, ed.by R. Halsband. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965)
[33] John Bell, Travels from St, Petersburg in Russia, to Diverse parts of Asia. Vol. 2 (Glasgow: R. and A. Foulis, 1763)
[34] Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 1-28.
[35] On the retrospective construction of “Byzantium” and the predominantly Roman political self-identification of the medieval Eastern Roman polity, see Yannis Stouraitis, “Is Byzantinism an Orientalism?”, 19-47.
[36] Robert Ousterhout, “Visualising Constantinople as a Palimpsest,” 48-61.
[37] Robert S.Nelson, “That Domed Feeling’: A Byzantine Synagogue in Cleveland,” in Hagia Sophia in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Emily Newumeier and Benjamin Anderson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024), 169-96
[38] Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 29-34. Smith terms the dominant professional and institutional framework through which heritage value is identified and legitimised the “Authorised Heritage Discourse.” Her model is useful here because it treats heritage significance not as an inherent property of monuments, but as something produced through cultural and institutional practices.
[39] Jennifer Hattam, “Revisit Hagia Sophia,” The Architectural Review, no. 7 (2025): 6-15. On the contemporary monument, Hattam emphasises how changes in institutional status, conservation, tourism, and visitor experience have altered the ways in which Hagia Sophia is encountered.
[40] Jennifer Hattam, “Revisit Hagia Sophia,” 6-15. Contemporary visitor arrangements make the politics of access materially visible: different routes and restrictions shape which parts of the monument and which layers of its Christian and Islamic visual history different visitors can encounter.
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