ABSTRACT
The reason a structure is built, the location it occupies, and the style chosen for that structure, often tell an important story about the moment of construction. For art historians, the story often ends there. However, buildings can have lives well beyond the moment of construction. The function of the building may change or may take on new symbolic meanings. Even abandoned structures can become sites of political or cultural debates, ones often tied to questions of identity on local, national, or global levels. For example, in the sixth century, the Hagia Sophia was built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I as a church and served as the seat of the patriarch of Constantinople. In 1453, when Mehmed II conquered Constantinople, he had the church converted into a mosque. The structure functioned as a mosque until the twentieth century when, with the establishment of the Republic of Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the building was transformed into a museum. Today, the function of the building is debated: should it continue to be a museum, restored to function again as a mosque, or should the even older function, as a church, take precedence? Each function, museum, mosque, or church, has powerful implications regarding the history of Istanbul, the identity of the people of Istanbul and more broadly of Turkey, and the place of the Byzantine and Ottoman pasts in those identities. Debates such as this give insight into the cultural climate of a given moment and convert seemingly static structures into sites of multilayered cultural significance.
