The Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople: A World Heritage Center

What I would like you to do in this paper is to write about a church or a mosque. The above listed are suggestions. Please include a good, concise description of the building, its form and plan and any elements of decoration that it contains, and use the following questions and points to stimulate your thinking about the building:

Could you talk about the building “Hagia Sophia”, also known as the Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople

- Please only use the reading that I put on the file as working cited !!!!!!!!!!

--What are the most important features of the building?

--Is the building associated with an important site? The grave of a saint, for example, or an earlier religious building or temple?

--Where did the congregation stand? What direction did they face? What feature(s) in the building indicated this direction?

--Where were images placed in the overall decorative scheme and what does their placement say about their meaning and function?

--The case of the Mosque would involve thinking about the word of God and how it is visualized in the building

Prompt for the Second Paper Assignment

Length:  3 pages, double spaced, with a Times New Roman 12 pt. font

Include:  footnotes, where appropriate, and a list of sources consulted (including websites).  You can use MLA or Chicago Style for footnote and bibliography formatting.

Serving religion in Christianity and Islam 

We have had the opportunity to look at a number of great religious edifices of the early Middle Ages.  For example: 

--the Basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome built by the first Christian emperor Constantine the Great in the early fourth century

--the Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople built by the emperor Justinian I in the sixth century 

--the Great Mosque of Damascus, which took shape under the Umayyad Caliph Al-Walid in the early eighth century 

--St. Peter’s does not survive in its medieval form (it was rebuilt in the Renaissance), but can be studied through reconstructions and drawings made of it when it was still standing.  The other two buildings are still extant, with quite a bit of their original architecture and decoration intact.

What I would like you to do in this paper is to write about a church or a mosque.  The above listed are suggestions.  Please include a good, concise description of the building, its form and plan and any elements of decoration that it contains, and use the following questions and points to stimulate your thinking about the building:

--What are the most important features of the building?

--Is the building associated with an important site?  The grave of a saint, for example, or an earlier religious building or temple?

--Where did the congregation stand?  What direction did they face?  What feature(s) in the building indicated this direction?

--Where were images placed in the overall decorative scheme and what does their placement say about their meaning and function? 

--The case of the Mosque would involve thinking about the word of God and how it is visualized in the building

In addition to the lecture slides from the podcasts and Zoom meetings, there is a great resource for images and illustrations in Artstor (www.artstor.org (Links to an external site.)), which is accessible through the Geisel Library website.  All you have to do is register for it and create a password (using your VPN).  Then you can browse the database of images by entering names and terms to find things.

Could you talk about the building “Hagia Sophia”, also known as the Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople

-         Please only use the reading that I put on the file as working cited .