Church of the Saints Sergius and Bacchus

In an earlier post I referred to Hagia Sophia as the mother of all churches.  If that is the case, then the “Little Hagia Sophia” is the grandmother of the mother of all churches.  Built two centuries before Hagia Sophia, it was a significant accomplishment in what would later be the basic design elements of domed architecture.  What Hagia Sophia accomplishes by placing a circular dome in a square space, this church does with an octagon. 

One of the oldest of all Byzantine churches.

After 1453 the Turks converted this space into a mosque, as they did with every early church but one.  The oldest church in Istanbul is on the site of the Topkapi Palace.  Instead it was made into an armory storeroom.  I wasn’t able to visit it, however, since it is used now as a concert space. 

Little Hagia Sophia is still a mosque, so as I had done a few times before, I removed my shoes and entered reverently into the space.  I was struck by the similarity with Hagia Sophia.  There was the dome with the row of windows at the base.  The apse where the altar would be was done in much the same manner but on a much smaller scale.  Like Hagia Sophia, this church had its own cistern that was directly connected to a baptistery.  The Muslims have kept the baptistery and instead used it as a place for their ritual washing before prayer.  Unlike any other place for Islamic washing, this was located inside the Mosque. 

A recent renovation to the space has revealed the cistern.  Our guide pulled up part of the carpet so that we could see the way that the 4^th century Christians worked the water channels

Another unusual twist to this worship space was the use of compact fluorescence bulbs in the overhead chandeliers.  A 1700 year-old building going green.

All around the nave of the church was a Greek inscripton.  Several of the folks in the group could read Greek, and they read sections.  The Greek was added years later to glorify Justinian and Theodora.