Places
Hagia Sophia’s great dome and buttresses, with four minarets.
With the minarets added after 1453. Photo: Arild Vågen, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Place · Former cathedral

Hagia Sophia

Justinian’s church of Holy Wisdom, completed in 537: the cathedral of Constantinople until 1453, later a mosque, a museum, and a mosque again.

Location
Istanbul, Turkey
Building
Former cathedral (360–1453); a mosque since 2020
Tradition
Eastern Orthodox (as a cathedral, 360–1453); now a mosque
Religious use
A mosque since 2020 (a church 360–1453, a mosque 1453–1935, a museum 1935–2020).
Official website
No official website is recorded for this place in Wikidata, and none was confirmed.

Map Building location: Apple Maps · Google Maps — the building, not a confirmed visitor entrance.

For nearly a thousand years Hagia Sophia was the cathedral of Constantinople and the see of the Ecumenical Patriarch. It became the model for Eastern Orthodox church architecture.

In the Atlas

Each paragraph says whether it is documented history, a tradition handed down, or disputed.

  • Documented

    The present building, the third church of the name on the site, was built by Emperor Justinian I between 532 and 537 to designs by Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles.

  • Documented

    From its dedication in 360 until 1453 it was the cathedral of Constantinople, except from 1204 to 1261 when the Latin crusaders installed their own hierarchy.

  • Documented

    After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 it became a mosque. It was a museum from 1935 and was redesignated a mosque in 2020.

Reference draft. The statements were checked against the general reference sources below, read in a build session (Wikipedia at a recorded revision, and Wikidata). They have not yet been checked against scholarly or primary sources.

  • Reference work · Read in a build session

    Hagia Sophia — Wikipedia (English)

    Read on 28 Oct 2026 at revision 1379544167, fetched by the research workflow (research/fetched/places/hagia-sophia/wikipedia.txt). A general reference work, not a scholarly source; the statements here were checked against it.

  • Reference work · Read in a build session

    Wikidata item Q12506 (Hagia Sophia) — Wikidata

    Read on 28 Oct 2026: instance of, religion, diocese, coordinates and official website.