Hagia Sophia in the Long Nineteenth Century

Emily Neumeier is Assistant Professor of Islamic art and architecture at Temple University, Philadelphia. She studies the visual and spatial cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, with a focus on the Ottoman Empire, and her research has been published in venues such as the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, and History and Anthropology. Benjamin Anderson is Associate Professor of History of Art and Classics at Cornell University. He is the author of Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art (Yale University Press, 2017) and co-editor of Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline? Toward a Critical Historiography (Penn State University Press, 2023), and The Byzantine Neighbourhood: Urban Space and Political Action (Routledge, 2022)

• List of FiguresNote on Contributors A Note on Translation and TransliterationAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Writing the Modern Biography of an Ancient MonumentEmily Neumeier and Benjamin Anderson1. Hagia Sophia’s Second Conversion: The Building Campaign of Mahmud I and the Transformation from Mosque to Complex (1739-43)Ünver Rüstem2. The Paradoxes of Hagia Sophia’s Ablution Fountain: The Qasida al-Burda in Cosmopolitan IstanbulTülay Artan3. The Calligraphic Arts in the Age of Ottoman Architectural RenovationEmily Neumeier4. From the Mouth of Angels: Folkloric Hagia SophiaBenjamin Anderson5. The Other Ayasofya: The Restoration of Salonica’s Ayasofya Mosque, 1890-1911Sotirios Dimitriadis6. 'That Domed Feeling': A Byzantine Synagogue in ClevelandRobert S. Nelson7. The Monument of the Present: The Fossati Restoration of Hagia Sophia (1847-9)Asli Menevse8. From Ceremony to Spectacle: Changing Perceptions of Hagia Sophia through the Night of Power (Laylat al-Qadr) Prayer CeremoniesAyşe Hilâl Uğurlu9. Temple of the World’s Desire: Hagia Sophia in the American Press, c. 1910-1927Robert OusterhoutIndex

A church for a millennium, a mosque for five centuries and a museum for ninety years, the Hagia Sophia has still much to reveal to those who wish to look beyond its current polemical context. This excellent collective volume offers such an opportunity, with a focus on a still understudied period of the monument’s recent history