c. 1880–1900Constantinople
Hagia Sophia from the south
Period photograph. Abdullah Frères and others issued exterior views of Ayasofya in these decades. Photographer of this specific scan is not fixed on the file.
Street photograph
c. 1880–1900·Constantinople
Hagia Sophia from the south
Period photograph. Abdullah Frères and others issued exterior views of Ayasofya in these decades. Photographer of this specific scan is not fixed on the file.
Street photograph · Altered
What this plate shows
Hagia Sophia photographed from the south: the dome, half-domes, Ottoman minarets, a street of timber houses. A camera in late-nineteenth-century Constantinople. This is the building in Istanbul, not a Gothic church misfiled under the same name. Present status: altered.
- Image type
- Street photograph
- Structure
- Hagia Sophia (Ayasofya)
- Region
- Middle East
- Documented completion
- 537.
- Architect
- Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus.
- Present status
- Altered — The building still stands. Minarets are Ottoman additions. Function has changed more than once. Status is altered — documented history, not a verdict this photograph was asked to prove.
- Source
- Wikimedia Commons scan of a late-nineteenth-century photograph of Hagia Sophia.
- License
- Public domain (nineteenth-century photograph).
Collections where this plate appears
- 02Old World photographyStreet scenes, demolition, construction, rooftops, a dome, a completed boulevard. The camera on the ground or on a known high point — not a lithograph pretending to be a lens.
- 05Monumental architecturePeriod photographs of named structures. Documented identification first. Present status is a later fact recorded beside the plate — surviving, altered, burned, demolished, reconstructed, replaced — not a verdict the image is asked to prove.