It is, by informed consent, one of the world’s great historic buildings. Once a church, then a mosque and now a museum, Haghia Sofia in Istanbul is a Byzantine masterpiece of vast proportion and ornamentation. Generations of visitors have marvelled at the huge nave, the soaring dome and the remains of 9th-century gold-leaf mosaics. Me, I prefer a single detail that features in few guidebooks and gets overlooked by many tourists: a piece of graffiti craftily done by a Viking in the same century as those shimmering mosaics.
On the smooth top of a marble balustrade leading to the galleries is incised the name ‘Halvdan’ in runic script, plus a few other characters that no doubt mean the equivalent of ‘woz ’ere’.
Halvdan would have been part of the Viking force that attacked Constantinople in 860AD ‘like a swarm of wasps’, according to the then Patriarch of the city, Photius I. But what was he doing in Haghia Sofia? And what did this pagan wild man from the frozen north make of this earthly heaven of a building?
In such details and unanswerable questions lies the magic of the former Constantinople. But don’t just take my word for it. Istanbul’s most famous living son, the writer Orhan Pamuk, has a theory that over the centuries visitors to this unique city have tended to concentrate on the obvious, the monuments, while overlooking the essence of the place. He develops this idea in a book published in 2003 in Turkish and in English in 2005.
Istanbul: Memories of a City is not a guidebook to the city in which he was born, in 1952, and which he has never left. It is an extended meditation on the mood of Istanbul: a painting of the city rather than a map. But it can nevertheless be used as a kind of guidebook for the soul.
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