Reminder Of The House Of Holy Wisdom

On the subject of Istanbul today remember that what is almost certainly the most important building in the world, from the perspective of the history that has taken place there, is the centerpiece of Istanbul.

The name of the Hagia Sophia means "The House of Holy Wisdom". It was built as a church, in the Fourth Century, by the Byzantine Empire. It was the largest church in the world for a thousand years and the architectural influence alone that it has had is incalculable.

What we could call the "Nestorian Split" took place in the Hagia Sophia. This resulted in the " Church of the East" breaking away from the western Christians over differences in christology. The Church of the East is not well-known today but it has had a great historical role.

The world has never been the same since the Great Schism of the year 1054, which took place in the Hagia Sophia. The Eastern Orthodox Church split away from the Catholic Church, primarily over disagreement over the authority of the pope. The Eastern Orthodox Church is not the same thing as the "Church of the East". The split between east and west, Napoleon's invasion of Russia, the eastern fronts in both world wars, the Cold War and the present war in Ukraine are all rooted in this momentous split that happened in the Hagia Sophia.

I was interested in science, starting with space, since childhood. I read about the brilliant supernova, in the year 1054, visible even in the daytime and for about two years, that resulted in what we see today as the Crab Nebula. When I later became a Christian, and began studying the history of Christianity, the year 1054 sounded familiar. It turns out that the supernova became visible from earth at the very exact time, July 4, that this split was going on. I could not see that this had ever been pointed out. A supernova is a massive nuclear explosion, could it have been a warning from God?

There were many scholars, and a vast number of handwritten manuscripts, in the community around the Hagia Sophia. In 1453 the Ottomans conquered Constantinople, and renamed it as Istanbul. The Christian scholars loaded important manuscripts onto pack animals and moved westward, ending up in places like Florence. This brought about the Renaissance, which was certainly the beginning of the modern world as we know it.

After the Ottoman conquest the focal point of the Eastern Orthodox Church moved to Kyiv. But the city had been so devastated by an earlier attack by the Mongols that it wouldn't fully recover until the Nineteenth Century. The Eastern Orthodox Church ended up being based in Moscow, which is what made it an important city, and is also the root of the present conflict in Ukraine.

It all began in the Hagia Sophia, the House of Holy Wisdom. Here is a link to the book-length compound posting about it:

www.markmeeksideas.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-house-of-wisdom-where-modern-world.html?m=0