Orthodoxy has to a remarkable extent been moulded round one single church building, far more influential than even those crucial Western sacred places, the Basilica of St Peter in Rome and the Abbey Church of Cluny. This is the Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople, whose fabric has fared better than Cluny’s, but whose fate as a church converted to a mosque encapsulates the traumas of Orthodox history (see Plate 5). It owes its present form to the partnership of a Latin-speaking boy from the Balkans and a former circus artist of dauntingly gymnastic sexual prowess: the
...more
