Time and the Hagia Sophia
My wife and I spent the day in Istanbul, mostly on foot, mostly moving without any particular plan except to see the Hagia Sophia. Anyone who has read even a little about the city knows that the building is treated almost like a condensed version of the region’s history. You can understand why once you are inside. Guides like to say that the place has witnessed fifteen centuries of human activity, but you do not need a guide to sense that the building carries an unusual density of time. You can feel it long before you have sorted out what exactly you are looking at.
The interior is not simply impressive in scale. It is structurally confusing in a way that makes you slow down. The dome is too large for the eye to take in at once. The semi-domes and arches seem to overlap or drift into one another. Even the light behaves strangely, filtering through the upper windows in a way that obscures the true height of the ceiling. Nothing feels linear or simple. You can walk ten steps and feel as if you have moved into a different century.
We spent most of our time reading the small placards, sometimes checking a few details on our phones, sometimes trying to map what we were seeing to the historical moments we remembered from school. The building was completed in 537 under Justinian I. It was damaged, repaired, transformed, reinforced, repurposed, and reinterpreted so many times that the idea of a single identity for the place does not make sense. Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman hands have all shaped it, and modern Turkish authorities continue to preserve it. What stands today is a structure that has been repeatedly pulled forward through time by successive generations.
Walking out into the late afternoon light, we agreed that Hagia Sophia makes historical time feel strangely compact. A span of fifteen hundred years is a long period, yet when you stand inside the building it feels compressed into something much shorter. You are confronted with human time, which is long enough to build empires and monuments, yet short enough that we can still easily imagine the lives of the people involved.
Later that evening, after dinner, we talked about how different the experience would have felt if we had stayed outside after sunset. At this latitude in winter, the star field becomes visible fairly early. Somewhere above the northeastern horizon, if you look long enough, you can pick out a modest star in the constellation Auriga. It is called Epsilon Aurigae. It is not bright enough to dominate anything, but it is still visible with the naked eye in a reasonably dark sky.
When you see that star, you are seeing light that has been traveling toward Earth for about two millennia. It left Epsilon Aurigae around the same time that the Hagia Sophia was in early construction. The stonecutters and laborers who worked on the first version of the building would have looked up at essentially the same star, but the light they saw would have been from an even earlier period of history.
This comparison does not really produce any profound insight on its own, but it does create a useful tension between scales of time. We feel pretty comfortable with historical time. Two thousand years is distant but we can still comprehend it. We have artifacts, written records, architecture, and ruins. We can trace the continuity from then to now. Cosmological time is different. The numbers are so large that they begin to lose intuitive meaning. The age of the universe is about 13.8 billion years. The Milky Way contains hundreds of billions of stars. Distances are measured in light years because even the speed of light becomes a practical unit when dealing with the scale of space.
Seeing Epsilon Aurigae is a small reminder that each star represents a different moment of the past, streamed toward us at the only rate nature allows. You cannot see the universe as it is. You can only see the universe as it was. Istanbul, in contrast, allows you to see human history as it persists. Buildings age. Streets shift. Cultures evolve. Yet the physical traces remain.
If we had stayed out longer and let our eyes adjust to the night, we could have looked up and briefly connected those two kinds of time. A building that has survived fifteen centuries and a star whose light has been traveling for roughly the same span. One shaped by human intention. One indifferent to it. Both available to anyone willing to pause and pay attention.
