Competing ‘iconographies’: Hagia Sophia, ideology, and the construction of a cultural icon then and now

Abstract

Abstract Besides their undoubted aesthetic value, monuments possess an ideological function. They are meaningful forms built to commemorate significant deeds or events or to celebrate individuals who are prominent within a community. Monuments become essential for the articulation of cultural identity and memory, through which political powers and intellectual élites seek legitimation and support. As historical objects operating in fluid and transformative cultural environments, their significance is constantly renegotiated to suit new ideological agendas. Rhetoric, and in particular rhetorical descriptions or ekphraseis, may offer insights into the way in which monuments have been seen and communicated over the course of time. While representing selective verbal–visual narratives, these texts can convey specific conceptions of the monuments and encourage interpretations that are distant from the original intentions of those who had them installed. On this premise, this paper proposes a more comprehensive interpretive framework for the analysis of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, a Byzantine monument recently brought to international attention by the Turkish government’s decision to change back its status from museum to mosque. This framework resorts to rhetoric and its unique capacity to unveil, across time and space, how the monument has been perceived, expressed, appropriated, reframed, and negotiated by people as an indivisible component of their culture.