Not quite: “In 1453, Mehmed II conquered Constantinople, and although his troops plundered what they could carry, the building was saved and turned into a mosque,” writes The New York Times, which makes it sound like the building was saved by sheer luck.
In fact, the Turks treated Hagia Sophia with honor. In contrast to other churches that had been seized and converted into mosques, the conquerors refrained from changing its name, merely adapting it to the Turkish spelling. (“Ayasofya” is the way it is written in Turkey today.) Mehmet, says Ilber Ortayli, director of the Topkapi Palace Museum, the former residence of the Ottoman emperors, “was a man of the Renaissance, an intellectual. He was not a fanatic. He recognized Hagia Sophia’s greatness and he saved it.”
Remarkably, the sultan allowed several of the finest Christian mosaics to remain, including the Virgin Mary and images of the seraphs, which he considered to be guardian spirits of the city. Under subsequent regimes, however, more orthodox sultans would be less tolerant. Eventually, all of the figurative mosaics were plastered over. Where Christ’s visage had once gazed out from the dome, Koranic verses in Arabic proclaimed: “In the name of God the merciful and pitiful, God is the light of heaven and earth.”
Fergus M. Bordewich, A Monumental Struggle to Preserve Hagia Sophia, Smithsonian Magazine, Dec. 2018.