Seminar. Medieval Art: Hagia Sophia: The Politics of Built Space

On July 10, 2020 the Turkish government ordered that Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, one of the great buildings of the world, be converted from a museum into a mosque. This building has served as an Orthodox and a Catholic cathedral, a mosque, and a museum. Each iteration can be read as an articulation of changing political and cultural circumstances that inscribe themselves in turn upon the fabric of this building. This course will map this changing history taking students from the fourth to the twenty-first century.