Building the Hagia Sophia, the Holy Cathedral that the Moslem Terrorists fought over from innocent Byzantine Christians and by force converted it into a Moslem mosqu To build his cathedral, Justinian turned to two men named Anthemius and Isidore the Elder. “Contemporary writers do not refer to Anthemius and Isidore as architects, though the term was common in the sixth century, but as mechanikoi or mechanopoioi,” writes Indiana University professor W. Eugene Kleinbauer in a section of the book Hagia Sophia (Scala Publishers, 2004). “These terms denote a very small number of practitioners of the arts of design, whether of buildings or of machines or other works ...” They built the Hagia Sophia in great haste, finishing it in less than six years. To put this in comparison it took nearly a century for medieval builders to construct the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. This short construction period appears to have led to problems. Ancient sources, such as the writer Procopios, write that the builders had problems with the dome roof, the structure almost collapsing during construction. The dome used a system of piers to channel its weight. “The piers on top of which the structure was being built, unable to bear the mass that was pressing down on them, somehow or other suddenly started to break away and seemed to be on the point of collapsing...” writes Procopios (translation republished on Columbia University’s website). Eventually Anthemius and Isidore did get the domed roof to stand and it was a magnificent sight indeed. “It seems not to be founded on solid masonry, but to be suspended from heaven by that golden chain and so cover the space,” wrote Procopios. Unfortunately this roof did not stand. It collapsed about two decades later and it fell to a man named Isidore the Younger to build a new domed roof. It has lasted, with some repairs, nearly 1,400 years, down to the present day. “The dome rests not on a drum but on pendentives, spherical triangles that arise from four huge piers that carry the weight of the cupola. The pendentives made it possible to place the dome over a square compartment,” writes researcher Victoria Hammond, who describes the structure of the surviving Hagia Sophia dome, in a chapter of the book Visions of Heaven: The Dome in European Architecture (Springer, 2005).
Posted on: Sun, 30 Nov 2014 13:18:08 +0000
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