From the Mouth of Angels: Folkloric Hagia Sophia

Accounts of the prominence of Hagia Sophia in Greek folklore have (under the influence of Michael Herzfeld’s study Ours Once More) emphasized irredentism: the desire, especially among intellectuals in the Kingdom of Greece, that the building be converted back into a church. This chapter reveals a different discourse, characteristic of the Greek communities of Constantinople, according to which a secret mass continued to be celebrated in the building despite its overt conversion to Muslim use. Hagia Sophia, in short, had never stopped being a church. Focusing on four authors (Patriarch Konstantios I, Skarlatos Byzantios, Jean Nicolaïdès and Eugène Michael Antoniades), this article explores how the emerging discourse of “folklore” provided a distinctive means for loyal Ottoman subjects to articulate the continuing Christian identity of Hagia Sophia.