CHURCH of HAGIA SOPHIA Where the spice roads of Persia meet the trail heads of Europa, where the Black meets the Mediterranean, a great city grows-up. Once it was named Byzantium. Then Conatantinople. Now we know it as Istanbul. Like most jewels, the city has been sought after and fought over by emperors throughout the ages. First the eastern seat of the Roman Empire, Byzantium was blessed by the Roman proclivity for monuments in stone. Then came the change-over to the new Christian religion and the struggle with new architectural forms. After the demise of two churches on the same spot, a new building style was discovered
.
Emperor Justinian chose a physicist and a mathematician as the new architects, and together these two men used ideas of geometry to achieve something never before achieved on such a grand scale. People spoke of these two architects as "having understanding," because it was only they who had the daring to stand under the huge stone arches and domes and to dismantle the wood platforms and supports, the wood on which the huge stone work was resting. Imagine building stone arches high above, then standing underneath all this and removing the wooden pieces one by one. Until there was not wooden support, and only you standing there in space, looking at the stonework suspended in that space! This is "understanding."
Isidore and Anthemius manifested this understanding to a degree never again to be rivaled for hundreds and hundreds of years. Justinian asked them to build Hagia Sophia, "church of holy wisdom," and it became the glint of divine light refracting from within the jewel city of Constantinople. Though the city would be traded back and forth between Christendom and Islam for a thousand years, forever would Hagia Sopia be maintained! During the height of her Islam period, Hagia Sophia hosted a few architects from the north of Europe, men who were searching for the majesty of Isadore and Antemius. Hagia Sophia moved the architects to a state of rapture by the way she floated in space, and the way she allowed light to enter.
So very different from the churches of the middle ages, built as dark places of contemplation, and sometimes as fortifications in the many times of strife. These visiting architects were just astounded. On their return home, they spoke movingly of God's presence in such a church filled with light. Churches needed to admit God's light into the sanctuary.
This the first stirrings of something coming, and so the great schools of geometry dedicated themselves to designing and building of the Gothic churches. This "church of the holy wisdom" is then the great-grandmother of most/all of what to follow, up to now and Modern architecture. First she was a church and cathedral ("seat of a bishop"), then a mosque ("place for prostrations"), and now a museum ("house of the muses"). She has been adaptable, she has inspired us to be adaptable and tolerant and flexible.
In this place of human beauty and sacred beauty, this church of "Holy Wisdom" we, Angela and Jason, offer "A Bowl of Tea in the name of Peace."
MOSQUE of SULEYMAN
An imperial mosque dedicated to Suleyman: Sultan, warrior, poet, statesman. He spent half his life doing what all emperors do: expanding his territory into other lands and controlling other cultures.
It took half his life before he finally understood that the health of his empire had to found from within, that expansion meant the expansion of majesty at the local level of the empire, at the human level. He lived at the time when the Spanish drove the Moors out of Spain. When the Jews fled from the Spanish Inquisition and found new homes in Constantinople. When hostages and conscripts from the lands conquered by Suleyman also found a new home here. Most were educated in the schools and universities of Constantinople. One of these was Sinan from ...?... He became the architect of this mosque. He designed the entire complex with the tomb for Suleyman, the huge mosque for all the citizens, and other buildings for public baths, kitchens for feeding the poor, hostel for travellers, a primary school, an Islam College, a hospital, and a medical college. Sinan took the Sultan's ideas and worked them into his stonework. Some of the inspiration came from the great church of the Hagia Sophia. The result was this mosque: more buoyant, with more light streaming in than ever before imagined. The vast space inside seems to reach up beyond the sky, high up into the heavens.
At this place of great human beauty, this place of sacred beauty, at this gift from the Sultan to the citizens of Constantinople, at this place of flaw-less design by the architect Sinan, at this place of exquisite hand-craft by thousands of workers, we (Angela and Jason) offer "A Bowl of Tea in the name of Peace."
Sinan the architect was buried just next to the mosque of the Sultan Suleyman. May these tea offerings in Istanbul at church and mosque benefit simple and ordinary people who are trapped inside wars of religion, and suffer greatly from killings, rape, torture, and hunger. May the children know a world of kindness, free from suffering brought-on by ruthless desire for territory and control and expansion.
"Kind-ness is my religion." Dalai Lama said this.