Pentcheva, Bissera

professor of art history at Stanford University, author of Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space, and Spirit in Byzantium, co-founder of the Icons of Sound project

The Q&A is moderated by a Dumbarton Oaks host addressed only as "Anna", who reads out the audience's written questions.

The Concept and Experience of Holy Wisdom in Hagia Sophia — Bissera Pentcheva

Andrea Cirla · Jun 27, 2025 · partial coverage

• Hagia Sophia
• Bissera Pentcheva
• Byzantine aesthetics
• Neoplatonism
• Rumi
• Brethren of Purity
• light
• acoustics
• Icons of Sound
• Dumbarton Oaks

Coverage note: full - automatic transcript of a recorded lecture followed by a long Q&A; the opening introduction is not in the recording.

Core ideas

Pentcheva presents Hagia Sophia as a polyvalent symbol that can either silence or include. She proposes an approach through aesthetics, since sensory experience comes before language and cultural difference. She sets Byzantine mystagogy (Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, the ekphraseis of Procopius and Paul the Silentiary) beside Islamic mystical texts: the 10th-century Brethren of Purity's epistle on music and the poetry of Rumi, dear to the Ottoman sultans. A shared Neoplatonic strand, she argues, is the "foreignness within identity" that bridges the two religions. Quoting Julia Kristeva on the stranger who lives within us, she offers the juxtaposition as a mirror against today's neo-Ottoman triumphalism. Her first theme is the choros, the circular void under the dome that Procopius and Paul describe as spinning upward like a helmet. It echoes the circular, linear and spiral motions of the angels and the soul in Pseudo-Dionysius. Natural light performs the same circular dance. Animations show the building's axis aligned with the sunrise of the winter solstice, Christmas and the church's dedication. Shafts of light descend, turn the polished Proconnesian marble floor into "pools of water" and leave the interior in diffuse light during the Eucharist. She notes that today's carpets and LED lights spoil this effect, since the floor was meant to be the most reflective surface.

Wisdom (Sophia) is defined in scripture as a spotless mirror and image, and Pentcheva follows this through the building. The dome diffuses light downward. The cross in a circle at the apex of the dome works as a chiasm, an inverted symmetry like Psalm 8 or the butterfly patterns of book-matched marble, that imprints spirit in matter. For Gregory of Nyssa, the mind is a mirror that recovers the divine image by reflection, an icon understood as performance rather than representation. For Maximus, love drives the intellect to be wholly circumscribed by God, like iron in fire. She finds the same ideas in the Brethren of Purity, whose souls leave the body "like pearls from an oyster shell", and in Rumi, who found God only in his polished heart. The wordplay of marmaron (marble), marmarygma (glitter), the murmuring sea and margarita (pearl) ties the opalescent marble to the Bosphorus and to Rumi's sea of souls, where waves dissolve form into union. Sound follows the same logic. The vast marble volume gives up to eleven seconds of reverberation, high frequencies "rain down" like light, and chant mirrors angelic singing in human echo. In a recording by Cappella Romana with the building's acoustics reconstructed (Icons of Sound), melismas dissolve the word "Sophia" just as the self dissolves in henosis. The voice of the elite psaltai at the ambo makes the dome an "icon of sound", Christ present without figural images. Following Walter Benjamin on translation, she sees Rumi's poetry as a translucent translation of the space, and argues that the building's universal value lies in letting all its historical voices resonate.

In the Q&A, Pentcheva invites scholars of Islam to pursue links with Sufi sama and the circling of the Kaaba. She says the carpets reduce both light and reverberation, and calls the reconversion a "bad translation" in Benjamin's sense: an empty gesture hiding economic and political instability, accompanied by an official website that erases Byzantium. She dreams of a museum where both Christian chant and Quranic recitation could sound. Contrasting Hagia Sophia's light from above with the low, garden-like light of Sinan's and Mehmed Agha's mosques, she notes that these great Ottoman architects were themselves Christian-born Janissaries, "otherness at the center of identity". Other answers cover the damage done to the gold mosaics by the Fossati restorations, the many choirs and congregational refrains that made everyone a performer, the church's links with urban processions, and its night-time image as a lighthouse.

Excerpts