Chapter 3 centres on case selection and methodological considerations. The discussion opens up with a brief analysis that details how the MENA is understudied from both a climate and gender representation perspective, before moving on to a discussion of why it is important to study representation and climate change in authoritarian settings, i.e., not only in the MENA, but broadly speaking. The discussion in the first part of the chapter also covers the status of the MENA as a so-called ‘climate change hot-spot’. A considerable section of the case selection rationale in chapter 3 is dedicated to the study of gender and climate change within the MENA, which illustrates how the MENA case aligns with studies elsewhere in the Global South, i.e., focusing on women at the micro level and their vulnerability. The final (second) part of the chapter goes into detail with the methodology after briefly outlining the approaches favoured in the extant academic literature, coving both qualitative and quantitative methods.

In the atrium of Justinian's Hagia Sophia, there stood a lead-covered canopy over a great stone vessel. ‘Wash your sins, not just your face’, the inscription admonished. The message was straightforward. This study, however, dwells on another, more oblique architectural inscription: the Qasida al-Burda (‘Poem of the Mantle’), composed by the eminent Sufi poet and mystic Imam Sharafaddin al-Būṣīrī (d. 1294), whose verses adorn the ablution fountain added to the atrium of Hagia Sophia in 1740.

Just like Byzantine holy wells, ablution fountains (şadırvan) allow congregants to perform the cleansing rituals required in the practice of worship – both were monuments erected in honour of the sanctity of water. The decorative sensibilities of the fountains placed in the courtyards of Ottoman mosques underlined this theme, proclaiming the virtues attributed to water in Islamic mysticism. The qasida decorating the entablature of Hagia Sophia's ablution fountain is not about water per se, however, but rather love for the Prophet Muhammad (Figure 2.1).

Eighteenth-century Istanbul was a hub for diplomats, dervishes and dealers – all drawn to the cosmopolitan Ottoman capital from across the Empire and beyond: Cairo, Damascus, Tabriz, Isfahan, Bukhara, and even India. Some of those were pilgrims who, striving to fulfil one of the five pillars of Islam, chose to travel to the Ottoman capital with the intention of visiting the Tomb of al-Ayyub and Hagia Sophia before continuing to the Hijaz, visiting other ‘Second Meccas’ and ‘Sufi Ka‘bas’ along the way.4 For both Istanbullus and those Muslims visiting the Ottoman capital, the public display of the Qasida al-Burda must have been understood as a deliberate choice. The motivations and stimuli that lay behind the choice of al-Būṣīrī's qasida for this prominent location have, however, not yet been adequately explained.

In 1908, the French architect Marcel Le Tourneau gave a lecture at the Académie des Inscriptions on the Byzantine architecture present in Thessaloniki. By that point, Le Tourneau had visited the Ottoman port city twice, on stipends given to him by the French Ministry of Public Instruction and the Fine Arts. The purpose of his trips was to catalogue and sketch the city's monuments in the wake of destruction caused by the fire of 1890 and the earthquake of 1902. After his return from Thessaloniki, Le Tourneau described to a rapt audience how he had entered the deserted church of Hagia Sophia, or the mosque of Ayasofya to the Ottomans, and discovered its amazing mosaic decorations now revealed thanks to the fire, having been covered with plaster since the building's conversion to a mosque in the sixteenth century (Figure 5.1). In his account, Le Tourneau described how he approached the Ottoman authorities with these findings, impressing upon them the importance of his discovery and inspiring them to finally repair the damaged monument. His lecture was received warmly, and Le Tourneau published two articles on Thessaloniki's extant Byzantine monuments together with prominent Byzantinist Charles Diehl before his untimely death on the eve of the First World War.

Le Tourneau's foray into Thessaloniki's damaged mosque was but a single incident in the building's long history. In this chapter, I will trace Ayasofya's restoration by the Ottoman authorities at the turn of the twentieth century, a transitory period that covers the final years of Ottoman rule over the city and the wider region. Ayasofya is representative of the Ottomans’ engagement with the Byzantine past, in terms both of its historical symbolism and the monumental remnants of that history within the empire's cityscapes.

From cathedral to mosque to museum – and recently to mosque again – Hagia Sophia is as famous for its conversions as it is for its extraordinary architecture. But one key stage in the monument's alteration history has tended to escape notice, overshadowed – understandably enough – by the more dramatic changes that preceded and followed it. Between 1739 and 1743, more than a hundred years before the Fossati brothers came along, Sultan Mahmud I (r. 1730–54) ordered a thoroughgoing renovation of Hagia Sophia that provided it with a library, primary school, ablution fountain and public soup kitchen. These additions turned what was already the Ottoman Empire's principal mosque into a true külliye, or religious complex, thereby bringing the monument more fully into the Ottoman fold. Besides their importance to Hagia Sophia itself, the buildings that Mahmud commissioned document a remarkable shift in Ottoman visual culture, capturing the very moment when a new architectural style – the Ottoman Baroque – came into being and forever changed the look of Istanbul. This chapter, which expands on my earlier work on the Ottoman Baroque, explores the political timing and purpose of Mahmud's Hagia Sophia campaign and its relationship to broader artistic developments of the eighteenth century. In particular, I shall discuss why the erstwhile church provided such a meaningful context for the new Baroque manner, whose locational and aesthetic association with the site gave it a crucial foothold during its emergence as a favoured state style.

This chapter distinguishes two images of Hagia Sophia as represented in folklore during the long nineteenth century. The first, by far the most familiar, renders Hagia Sophia into a symbol of Greek irredentism by means of a song. The second, far less familiar, appears in the works of Ottoman Greek scholars. These two folkloric Hagia Sophias form a natural pair. The first joins certainty regarding the building's meaning to a disregard for its matter. The second joins ideological ambiguity to a keen interest in the building's history, structure, décor and form.

The first printed anthology of Greek folk songs (‘chants populaires’) appeared in Paris in two volumes (1824–5) collected, translated and annotated by Claude Fauriel. A passionate republican and man of letters, Fauriel never went to Greece, but gathered songs from correspondents in Greece, Venice and Trieste. His second volume includes a song on the capture of Constantinople, at least according to the title that he furnished (‘La prise de Constantinople’). The Greek text is demotic and metrical, set in the fifteen-syllable politikós stíhos (‘political verse’ or ‘verse of the city’), the ‘predominant meter of Greek folk poetry’. It begins with a lament:

They’ve taken the city, they’ve taken it! They’ve taken Salonika! And they’ve taken Hagia Sophia, the great church, Where there are three hundred small bells and sixty-two large bells, For each bell a priest, for each priest a deacon.

The first line introduces the first of several ambiguities. It may describe the capture both of Constantinople, known in demotic Greek simply as ‘the city’, and of Salonika. Alternatively, ‘They’ve taken Salonika’ may specify the (single) city in question. The following lines do not clarify, since both Constantinople and Salonika boast a ‘great church’ of Hagia Sophia.

In September 1808, prominent Ottoman provincial magnates started to arrive in Istanbul. They were all summoned to attend a general consultative assembly that aimed to deliberate how to bring an end to the ongoing political crisis. When the governor of Konya, Kadı Abdurrahman Pasha, came to the Ottoman capital, he conveyed to Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–39) his desire to visit the imperial mosques, since he had never had the chance to be in Istanbul during the holy month of Ramadan. Cabi Ömer Efendi (d. c. 1814), an amateur Istanbulite historian, records that Kadı Abdurrahman Pasha was given permission to visit any mosque he desired, and additionally a firman was issued for him to be able to ‘view and contemplate’ (seyr ü temaşa) Hagia Sophia and other places in Istanbul.

Why did a Muslim Ottoman notable such as Kadı Abdurrahman Pasha need permission, much less a firman, to visit the mosques of the capital just like non-Muslim visitors did? Given the turbulent political context, and that the pasha in question was just one of many power magnates waiting outside the city walls with their armed forces, one might conclude that this was a special occasion in a delicate time and that a permission was necessary. Even if that was the case, however, why did Cabi Ömer Efendi separate the concept of ‘visiting mosques’ from ‘viewing and contemplating Hagia Sophia and other places’ in particular? What were these ‘other places’, and why was Hagia Sophia, which had been the palatial imperial mosque for the last 350 years, classified as a place for seyr ü temaşa? Did Kadı Abdurrahman Pasha's visit indicate the beginning of a change in the object of seyr ü temaşa in the minds of Ottomans?

Upon entering Hagia Sophia, a visitor's eyes tend immediately to drift upward to take in its cavernous interior (Figure 3.1). And, when they do, one of the first things that a viewer is bound to notice are the roundels of Islamic calligraphy hanging below the central dome, interspersed amid the upper galleries. These gargantuan panels, whose stark gold lettering leaps out from a field of dark forest green, remain one of the most visually strik- ing interventions from the large-scale renovation of the building ordered by the Ottoman sultan Abdülmecid (r. 1839–61) and led by court architect Gaspare Fossati (1809–83) in the mid-nineteenth century. Even in one of the most famous architectural monuments in the world, with innumerable design features competing to attract one's attention, the calligraphic roundels remain impossible to ignore. In some ways, this series of monumental panels could be understood as a unicum, conceived for the demands of outfitting this particular architectural space. Especially in terms of their size, there is no doubt that these panels are distinctive. Each roundel is approximately 7.5 metres in diameter, spanning the entire height of the building's second level. The panels are still held to be some of the largest examples of Islamic calligraphy in the world, an impressive statistic more than a century and a half after their creation.

Back then, no more than a century ago, European and American architects had at their disposal a rich language of European architecture from antiquity through the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century was the high-point of this architectural pluralism. Architects, clients and their publics understood these vocabularies of form, but then that repertory of style gradually disappeared, supplanted by the personal styles of architects or architectural movements. Historicist architecture came to be regarded as eclectic – a motley, disparate, even incoherent array of styles – as its architectural language or semantics of form ceased to be understood. The decades between the First and Second World Wars witnessed the confrontation between a nineteenth-century historicism that lingered into the inter-war period and a modernism that rejected the past. Since victors write history, an avant-garde architectural history arose that glorified the modernist revolution, provided enabling fictions for why the new was better than the old, and relegated what came before to historical oblivion. In America, modernism had become hegemonic by the 1960s, and its social and political offspring, urban renewal, purified cities of their now unfashionable older structures.

Without access to earlier styles, architects lost their ability to compose meaningful structures understood by the public. Once, the classical orders had been employed for banks and governmental buildings to lend them the gravitas of antiquity, the Gothic became the standard idiom for Protestant churches, and Catholic churches imitated the Romanesque or varieties of Renaissance and Baroque architecture with special reference to churches in Rome. American synagogues constituted a special variant of this history. Jewish congregations embraced modernism more readily than did Christian denominations.

Hagia Sophia, the colossal structure whose domes have defined Istanbul's skyline for a millennium and a half, has led – and continues to lead – multiple lives. The present volume tracks its constantly fluctuating status and meaning to a wide variety of stakeholders during the long nineteenth century, a crucial yet understudied period in the building's history, c. 1739–1934. We hope that it might serve simultaneously as a detailed examination of a fascinating moment in the biography of a building, and as a resource for considering its enduring significance in the present.

In the summer of 2020, while the chapters in this book were still under preparation, a Turkish high court ruled that the transformation of Hagia Sophia into a museum in the early twentieth century was unlawful. The effects of this ruling were immediate, paving the way for the site's re-conversion into a mosque in a matter of weeks. As responses to these events erupted across news networks, social media and countless op-eds, the urgency for an account of Hagia Sophia during the late Ottoman period became even more apparent. For, we contend, it was during the long nineteenth century that Hagia Sophia's contested status, its use as a sign for something else, first began to determine the fate of its physical fabric.

This volume begins with Hagia Sophia's transformation from a free-standing mosque to a multi-functional complex under Sultan Mahmud I (r. 1739–43). Contributors continue the story by examining the large-scale restorations of Hagia Sophia ordered by Sultan Abdülmecid (r. 1839–61) and carried out by the Swiss-Italian architect Gaspare Fossati. The book concludes with the abolition of the sultanate (1922) and the debates about the building during the first decade of the Turkish Republic, which culminated in the decision (1934) to turn Hagia Sophia into a museum.