Turkey’s Hagia Sophia mosque began charging tourists nearly $28 on Monday for entrance to the landmark site. The UNESCO World Heritage site, renowned for its blue-tiled interior, will no longer ...

The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is about to get a ... fires and earthquakes in the 10th and 14th centuries.” Interior scaffolding will allow tourists and worshippers to continue visiting the mosque as ...

The Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque is a Muslim place of worship — but that is not the reason it attracts so much attention. The European side of Istanbul, Turkey, is seen above.

Interior of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey. Photo: Shutterstock. Some of these subterranean spaces are as ancient as the mosque itself, having been constructed between 523 and 537 C.E.

Beneath the magnificent structure of Hagia Sophia, an architectural masterpiece, a vigorous excavation and restoration effort ...

Hagia Sophia has survived fire, riots, earthquakes, bombardment and looting by both Christian and Muslim armies in its long life. Its interior decoration has been hacked away by iconoclastic ...

One of these, Hagia Sophia, is the city’s star attraction. It began life as a Christian church, was converted into a mosque in 1453, to a museum in 1935 and then again to a mosque in 2020.

Hagia Sophia saw 7.7 million visitors stream through its spacious interior last year. Visitors take photographs of Byzantine mosaics in the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque in Istanbul on April 14, 2025 ...