When I returned to Hagia Sophia, I got a chance to look at the mosaics with a German specialist in Byzantine history. He apologized for not being an art historian, but he was marvelous in talking about the political importance of the various mosaics. Some of them displayed emperors and empresses that I had heard discussed during the symposium.
These mosaics and the ones at the church at Chora have been preserved because the Muslim took over Constantinople. The Islamic authorities wanted to quickly rid their churches of their Christian images before turning them into mosques. So they either painted over them or put plaster on them. When restoration occurred in the 20th century, there were the mosaics preserved for 500 years under the paint and plaster.
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