Kostantiniyye part 2

6. I loved Agia Sophia -- for a start, isn't it cool to have a church dedicated to Holy Wisdom? The bit about Wisdom calling in the market-place is the main place in the Bible where God is referred to as female; I remember my uncle Paul, who is a URC minister, telling me that when I was quite small, because he comes from the civilised non-sexist side of my family. The Orthodox church interprets her as Christ before he was incarnated and they have a good icon, where Wisdom has a bright red face for reasons I forget.
Unhappily, I could tell that Fiona was distinctly unimpressed by Agia Sophia. It's true it's not in the greatest shape. The dome is huge, and a good section is filled with a construction of iron scaffolding so immense as to be impressive in its own right. (Apparently this is for surveying purposes, and they will move it every ten years until they have looked at the whole building, and then they can decide what to do about its terrible structural deformations.) The massive calligraphic roundels, put up in the nineteenth century, disappointingly turn out just to say the names of Allah, Muhammed, the caliphs, and the prophet's grandsons, rather than anything profound about God. The building was converted from the head church of Orthodoxy to a great mosque within three days of the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and only a few mosaics survive. One is the Virgin and Child; apparently a similar image was the only one not destroyed by Muhammed when he cleansed the Kaaba at Mecca, which I completely don't understand. There's also a very fine fourteenth-century deisis, and various emperors and empresses giving things to Christ. I liked the one of that termagent Zoe and her husband -- whose name and face had been changed at least once according to political circumstances. But it seemed sad that the whole place is no longer used for anything sacred. Ataturk turned it into a museum in the 1920s, and it has a very secular busy air, no one keeping their voices down. I'm biased, and would have liked it to have been a church, but at least if it were a mosque there would seem some point to its not being a church any more. When the army of Mehmet the conqueror breached the defences of Constantinople the orthodox priests who were celebrating the liturgy in Agia Sophia are said to have gathered up the sacred vessels and disappeared into the walls behind the altar, where they await the return of orthodoxy to the empire.