Provocolate: Celestial Agia Sophia- Intimacy and Awe

Nothing prepared me for the celestial height of the dome of Agia Sophia- not the skyscrapers I grew up with in Manhattan, not the Cathedrals of the West. The scale of Agia Sophia is at once majestic and human. It is not just vast: you feel the vastness, in the same way the stars on a moonless night at the beach make you humble. Agia Sophia is daunting, but still so intimate.

The 40 windows at the dome's base fill it with ethereal light, but can do little to illuminate the floor so very, very far below. There are other windows throughout the space, but the visitors' way is lit mainly by chandeliers. These are much less elaborate than those found in a Greek Orthodox Church -simple, elegant lamps arranged in a single plan in floral shapes.

They are hung at at the distance from the floor they would be in a great ballroom. From above though, they seem just to graze the heads of the visitors, and this from the upper galleries, about a third of the way up.

The placement of lights breaks the space down into a comprehensible unit of human scale, serving to relate the visitor in size to the vastness of the whole. The doors leading in from the narthex are Alice-in-Wonderland "drink me" large-

Texture makes the space more palpable, less of an abstraction. There is a variety of moods: marble carved with the intricacy of lace:

And acanthus carved capitals top columns of patterned marble:

Folkloric painting adds accessible sweetness.

And tromp l'oeil "windows" acknowledge the mind of the viewer:

More tromp l'oeil surfaces, including nearly clumsy marble panels:

Celestial glory is humanized by tactile intimacy.

Just how high is it? Guide books give us a number- 55.6 m (182 ft). More relevant is the rareness of this experience of space. Notre Dame's nave, for example is 35 m. Supporting pillars define and segment the interior. The contemporary secular world is full of soaring hotel atriums- these may impress, but don't inspire, or daunt.Without the reminder of human scale and the palpable warmth of texture, space is an abstraction, a tribute engineering rather than to glory. Even in contemporary experience, Agia Sophia is extraordinary in its impact, joined by St. Peter's, the Cathedral of Seville, St. Mary's in Gdańsk . In the intimacy of experience, I found it unmatched.

Almost a thousand years would pass before a larger church was built- the Cathedral of Seville in 1506. This took over a hundred years to build (Notre Dame, nearly 200). Agia Sophia was built in just under 6 years, by 10,000 people. In 537, this must have felt like Heaven itself.