Hagia Sophia
Hagia Sophia, the ancient Byzantine cathedral turned mosque turned museum in Istanbul, is the final destination of Robert Langdon's quest in Dan Brown's Inferno. It is the "gilded mouseion of holy wisdom" referenced in the poem on Dante's death mask, the site of Enrico Dandolo's tomb, and the location of the subterranean cistern where Bertrand Zobrist's plague, Inferno, was released.
Identity and History
Hagia Sophia, whose name literally means "Holy Wisdom," was originally built in A.D. 360 as an Eastern Orthodox cathedral. For nearly a thousand years, it was the largest church in the world. The Emperor Justinian, upon its completion, proudly proclaimed, "Solomon, I have outdone thee!" The building's history is marked by conquest and repurposing. In 1204, Enrico Dandolo and the Fourth Crusade conquered the city and turned it into a Catholic church. Later, in the fifteenth century, following the conquest of Constantinople by Fatih Sultan Mehmed, it became a mosque, remaining an Islamic house of worship until 1935, when the building was secularized and became a museum. The building's volatile past is a decorative reminder of the violence that has accompanied its history.
Architecture and Symbolism
The building's central dome, impossibly broad and ribbed in silver gray, rises over a hundred and fifty feet overhead. Forty ribs radiate outward from its central point like rays of the sun, extending to a circular arcade of forty arched windows. During daylight hours, the light that streams through these windows reflects off glass shards embedded in the golden tile work, creating the "mystical light" for which Hagia Sophia is most famous. The glistening golden cupola is often called "the dome of heaven itself." The museum displays in tandem both Christian iconography, from its days as a basilica, and Islamic iconography, from its days as a mosque. The fusion of symbols is evident in the massive apse, where the Virgin and Child gaze down upon a mihrab, the semicircular niche in a mosque that indicates the direction of Mecca. The building's prodigious size serves as a kind of shock treatment for worshippers, dwarfing those who enter.
Role in the Plot
Langdon, Sinskey, and Brüder arrive at Hagia Sophia after deciphering the poem on the back of Dante's death mask. The poem's line "Kneel within the gilded mouseion of holy wisdom" points directly to the building. They are met by a museum employee named Mirsat, who is a fan of Langdon's writings on Islamic art. Langdon asks to see the tomb of Enrico Dandolo, the treacherous doge of Venice who severed the heads from the Horses of St. Mark's and plucked up the bones of the blind Saint Lucia. Mirsat is initially puzzled by the request, as Dandolo's tomb is very plain. At Dandolo's tomb, Langdon kneels and places his ear to the ground, hearing the sounds of trickling water. Mirsat explains that the water flows to the city's ancient cistern, Yerebatan Sarayi, which means "the sunken palace." This is the location of Zobrist's plague.
The Cistern and the Plague
The cistern, Yerebatan Sarayi, is a massive subterranean room, nearly two football fields in length, with a ceiling spanning more than a hundred thousand square feet and supported by a forest of 336 marble columns. The water is about four feet deep. The cistern is a popular tourist attraction, with boardwalks over the water and even a small café. A concert poster reveals that the Istanbul State Symphony Orchestra has been performing Franz Liszt's Dante Symphony there for a week, underwritten by an anonymous donor. Brüder wades into the water and finds Zobrist's titanium plaque, but the Solublon bag containing the virus has already dissolved. The virus has been released for a week, and the entire cistern is teeming with it. The concertgoers, now infected, have already fled, spreading the virus globally. The stampede that follows Sienna's warning to the crowd causes chaos, and the doors are never sealed, leading to a complete failure of containment.
