But about that Hagia Sofia thing. It is phenomenally huge. Seriously. Words cannot describe how big this thing is. Apparently, after it was built Emperor Justinian came in, looked around, and said "Solomon, I have outdone you." So yeah, it's pretty big, about as big as Justinian's ego.
Aya Sofya began, of course, as a Byzantine church.
But it was converted into a mosque soon after the Ottomans set up shop in 1453 (by soon after I mean immediately after - Mehmet took the city on May 28th and Aya Sofya was rededicated as a mosque later that afternoon).
Obviously the minarets took a little bit longer to be put up.
Aya Sofya typifies the Ottoman practice of converting churches into mosques. They became quite adept at it, though really it wasn't a particularly complicated process - put up some minarets, plunk a mihrab in the corner, whitewash anything explicitly Christian, and, last but not least, affix some big ole seals of Islamicity to the whole thing.
Interesting thing about the big circley things in Aya Sofya, actually. They're too big to have been brought in through the gates, so they were probably built on site inside the building. Wow!
For several hundred years the Ottomans did a pretty good job of assimilating anything useful from the West (and for a while there was little enough of that) and making it Turkish. Somewhere, though, that changed. They went through a brief period where they should have been assimilating a lot more than they were (the printing press was ignored for a terribly long time). Later, as it dawned on them that the West was in many ways winning the race towards... um... winning... they began trying to assimilate themselves into the West in whatever ways possible. The Ottomans eagerly imitated European cities' love of tulips and European militaries' love of bands, not realizing that both of these things were originally Ottoman characteristics that the Europeans had themselves imitated centuries before. Such examples are humorous, yet they're also rather tragic at the same time. The Ottomans were clearly capable at one point of discerning which European innovations to imitate, as well as doing some innovating themselves. Yet at some point they seem to have lost that and begun imitating Europe wholesale.
Thank God they're not doing that anymore.
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