The great domed church of Holy Wisdom in Constantinople, completed in 537 CE under the emperor Justinian I — for most of nearly a thousand years the cathedral of the Eastern Orthodox world, interrupted by Latin Catholic rule after the Fourth Crusade, then an Ottoman mosque after 1453, a secular museum under the Turkish republic from the 1930s, and a working mosque again since 2020, making the single building a record of every power that has claimed the city.
One building has been one of the most important churches in Christendom, an imperial mosque, and a museum, and is now a mosque again. Each conversion left the previous one half-buried beneath it: Christian mosaics plastered over, then uncovered, then partly veiled once more. To stand under its dome is to stand inside an argument about who owns the past, conducted in stone and gold for fifteen hundred years.