Please everybody listen to this gorgeous and interesting podcast from NPR on what choral singing in Hagia Sophia would have sounded like and how it was reproduced through the work of an art historian and a sounds engineer. It’s very moving.
Sorry about the above photo. I generally don’t ideologically approve of things like airbrushing the Muslim elements from photos, like the ones you see all the time in Greek circles of the exterior of Hagia Sophia with the minarets removed, but those hideous green billboards have got to go at some point (see below), especially as they were hung right over the points where the building’s massive supporting pillars meet the even more massive dome structure, marring a critical aesthetic juncture of this miraculous piece of Roman engineering.
Dang…has it been 500 years already?
I know at least a couple of art historians who think they’re kind of “pastichy” and cool. That’s ridiculous. Would we like the Acropolis better if all the Byzantine and Ottoman clutter that had accrued there over the centuries had been left in place?
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Comment: nikobakos@gmail.com
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Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 
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