Hagia Sophia
Located in the center of Istanbul, the Hagia Sophia was built as a church in the fourth century, a cathedral to last for the ages. Turned into a mosque by the Turks, the building continued to be a place of sacred worship. So it remained until it was converted into a museum, a public, profane place. What remains of the church? Of the mosque? What makes us think that the monuments we build are permanent? That what we conceive to be important today will somehow be important to anyone in the future? During my lifetime a war was fought and lost by us in Viet Nam. Just last week I purchased a piece of clothing made in Viet Nam. Putting aside issues of exploitation, low paying jobs, transfer of manufacturing capacity overseas, each an issue unto itself, I was struck by the irony of the fact that the clothing I was about to put on was sewn together by one whom I could have been sent to kill by my government because someone other than myself considered it important to kill Vietnamese people in the name of democracy. From deadly enemy to trading partner in under forty years.
What seems important NOW generally is doomed to a place in one’s fading memory. What predictions are made for the future generally doesn’t happen THAT way. What we have in the continuum of time is NOW, which is always already replaced by NOW. In the NOW I am response-able, able to respond. Only when I am unable to respond does the continuum of time cease to exist.
For the Hagia Sophia, an extant inert structure, the response-ability of time is external to the bricks and mortar of the building itself. The building is a passive non-participant in the affairs of human beings. It is what we say it is at any given moment. The structure is unable to change itself. We can only respond to the structure in the NOW of existence.
Only the rocks last forever. A Lakota proverb
The Hagia Sophia by Roger Passman, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
