The “Church of Holy Wisdom”, also called Agia Sophia, is in
Constantinople – now Istanbul. It was built by the emperor
Justinian after the riots of AD 532. Anthemios and Isidoros were
two of the Greek architects who designed it. It took six years to
build and about ten thousand men worked on it. The first stone
of the foundations was laid by the emperor himself. The building
had brick walls, marble linings inside, amazing mosaics made
up of tiny cubes of coloured glass, marble or gold and massive
marble pillars. Of all its fascinating features though, perhaps the
most remarkable is its huge, shallow dome, supported on piers
made of limestone. There are also smaller half-domes around
the largest, supported by arches – a typical feature of Byzantine
design for big buildings. Agia Sophia is well over 45m high and
over 60m long and wide. Today we are accustomed to seeing
buildings as large as this, sometimes even larger. But in
Justinian’s time, Agia Sophia must have been truly awe-inspiring
