Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque

This guide to Istanbul's Hagia Sophia begins on May 29th, 1453, as Ottoman cannons fall silent and thousands crowd inside the church on an old belief that the building would shelter them. It follows the twenty-one-year-old Mehmed the Second riding into the fallen city and deciding, within hours, the fate of a building the Emperor Justinian had dedicated nine centuries earlier. From there it traces the swing between faiths that followed, including gilded mosaics plastered over by later sultans and rediscovered in the 1930s.