Welcome or welcome back my dear bloggers to my daily blogs. I hope you all are in good health and are having a blast of a day. 

Hagia sophia, also the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque, is a mosque and also a major historical structure located in istanbul, Turkey. It served as an important area for religious, political and also the artistic life for the byzantines and also has given us many useful insights about that particular period. After sultan mehmed captured constantinople in 1453, he turned this monument into a mosque just as it was without much change.

The ruler of byzantium/ the byzantine empire, Constantius, started the construction of this church in 360 A.D. At that time, Istanbul was called Constantinople.

Hagia Sophia is an amazing architectural masterpiece and an important building both for Ottoman Empire and the Byzantine Empire.  It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since the year 1985. It has been destroyed 8 times yet and also been rebuilt over 8 times. It actually is built over a fault line and that makes it more vulnerable to earthquakes. 

At first it was built to be a church by Constantine on the land of a pagan god temple. It underwent many destructions by raids, sieges and also earthquakes but was rebuilt in the byzantine era. But after the fall of constantinople by the Ottoman Empire in 1453, the city was renamed to Istanbul( which we know now). Then the church which was looted and destroyed, turned into a mosque by sultan Mehmed II. And it remained as a mosque for  about 500 years, till 1934.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the first president of the modern turkey, decided to secularize Hagia Sophia and converted it into a museum. There were conflicts between the two religion for decades over this. After years of disputes and debates, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president, sanctioned the monument to be converted back into a mosque, in 2016. 

Its 107 columns, one of them is known as the wishing column, the perspiring column and one sweating column. The legend says that if you stick your finger in and it comes out wet, then your wishes will come true and you will get rid of all your illness.

And that was all for this blog. I hope you enjoyed this one. 

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