This though, is just the outside of the sacred theater. Inside, forest of columns rises up in ecstasy. The walls, glass and gold and marble, light and dark, insubstantial and illusory, seem to simply fade away.

 

A perfect sea of space for God’s holy wisdom to come down and touch the earth, a perfect theater for the anthems of Byzantium. Lo, the lords of heaven and earth have come. Blood-red columns of Egyptian porphyry were taken, so it was said, from the Temple of Sun in Rome, the church’s wooden doors from Noah's Ark, the building's bronze was stripped from the temple of the Goddess Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the pagan world. No wonder the building has itself become a legend.

 

Poets said: The church combined the signs of sunset and the scale of quarries, the hues of birds and fish, and precious stones, all the textures and experience of their ancient everyday, the living pink, baby's fingernails, the rising of a bright red star Arcturus.

 

In Byzantine, in Greek, this church was called the Church of Hagia Sophia, the church of holy wisdom. All of Justinian's enormous empire, its wealth, its piety, its pagan heritage, was gathered up inside it.

 

Throughout the next nine centuries, this vast old building stood right at the center of Byzantium, the symbol of its true destiny on earth. And on the last day of Byzantium, the emperor and his troops came here to pray before they walked out onto the city walls to die. For these with the vaults that held the dream, the dream that was Byzantium.