Description of Hagia Sophia
A long Greek poem by an official of Justinian’s court, recited when Hagia Sophia was reopened after the rebuilding of its dome. It describes the dome, the marbles, the lamps and the furnishings of the church as they then were.
Read the text at sourcebooks.fordham.edu ↗Fuller translation and summary in Lethaby and Swainson, The Church of Sancta Sophia (1894), chapters 3–4 ↗
Paul was a silentiarius, an official of the palace, and a poet. His description, in Homeric hexameters, was composed for the celebrations at which the church was dedicated again after an earthquake had brought down the eastern part of the first dome. The poem speaks of that collapse and of the emperor’s rebuilding before it turns to the building itself.
It is a court poem and praises the emperor throughout. It is also the work of someone who had walked through the church and looked closely, and it records details that Procopius omits: the kinds of marble and where they were quarried, the pulpit or ambo, and the many lamps hung on chains. The Fordham page gives short extracts; the book of Lethaby and Swainson translates or summarises the whole.
Cited in
- 27 December AD 537, firm date