Santa Sophia stands apart from all other buildings

Santa Sophia stands apart from all other

buildings, unique in beauty, with the faint face of the Christ still visible on

its wall; Christian in soul though now for so long dedicated to the glory of

Allah and of his prophet. I shall not easily forget my disappointment when I

stood for the first time in its shadow. I had been on Seraglio Point, and,

strolling by the famous Royal Gate to look at the lovely fountain of Sultan

Ahmed, I saw an enor- mous and ugly building decorated with huge stripes of red

paint, towering above me as if fain to obscure the sun. The immensity of it was

startling. I asked its name.

“Santa Sophia.”

I looked away to the fountain, letting my

eyes dwell on its projecting roof and its fretwork of gold, its lustrous blue

and green tiles, splendid ironwork, and plaques of gray and brown marble.

It was delicate and enticing. Its mighty neighbor was almost repellent. But at length not without reluctance, for I feared perhaps a deeper disappoint-ment I went into the mosque by the Porta Basilica, and found myself in the midst of a vast harmony, so wonderful, so penetrating, so calm, that I was con-scious at once of a perfect satisfaction.

At first this happy sense of being

completely satisfied seemed shed upon me by shaped space. In no other building

have I had this exact feeling, that space had surely taken an inevitable form

and was announcing itself to me. I stood beneath the great dome, one hundred

and seventy-nine feet in height, and as I gazed upward I felt both possessed

and re-leased.

For a long time I was fully aware of

nothing but the vast harmony of Santa Sophia, descending upon me, wrapping me

round. I saw moving figures, tiny, yet full of meaning, passing in luminous

distances, pausing, bending, kneeling; a ray of light falling upon a white

turban; an Arab in a long pink robe leaning against a column of dusky red

porphyry; a dove circling under the dome as if under the sky. But I could not

be strongly conscious of any detail, or be enchanted by any separate beauty. I

was in the grasp of the perfect whole.

The voice of a child disturbed me.

Somewhere far off in the mosque a child

began to sing a great tune, powerfully, fervently, but boyishly. The voice was

not a treble voice; it was deeper, yet unmistakably the voice of a boy. And the

melody sung was bold, indeed almost angry, and yet definitely religious. It

echoed along the walls of marble, which seemed to multiply it mysteriously,

adding to it wide murmurs which were carried through all the building, into the

dimmest, remotest recesses.