The view in the picture above is the one that I am most familiar with. I didn't know until I got their that this would have been the view from the empress's own viewing area. The Byzantines, like some modern-day Muslims and orthodox Jews, separated the women from the men in worship.
When I left for my trip, I gave my substitute a set of documents that I typically use this time of year. Among them is one about the conversion of the Russian people. More than a thousand years ago, Vladimir of the Russians went religion shopping. He sent emissaries to various Roman Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish faiths. He ended up paying the most attention to the group that came to Constantinople.
This is what the emissaries said about Hagia Sophia: "We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor... We only know that God dwells there among men."
Hagia Sophia is magnificent. Built more than a millennium before St. Peters in Rome, it stands as the mother of all churches.
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