# Hagia Sophia audio guide, five stops, free.

A church dedicated in 537, under a dome that now rises 55.6 metres above the floor. All five stops stream in this tab, and Chiaro narrates the other fifteen centuries from a photo.

Made by Chiaro. Not affiliated with Ayasofya-i Kebir Cami-i Şerifi. Page: https://chiaro.ai/landmarks/hagia-sophia/

This self-guided Hagia Sophia audio guide has five stops: one out on Ayasofya Square that needs no ticket, and four on the upper floor, the only level of the building open to visitors. The square stop is where the great walls, the buttresses and all four minarets can be taken in at a single glance. Then in through the visitors' entrance on the south side, where a ramp takes you up; to the rail above the prayer hall for the dome and the eight great roundels; along to the Marble Door, where the west side meets the south side; through it to the Deësis; and on to the far east end of the same south side for the imperial mosaics of Zoe and the Komnenos family, before the way out down the north-east ramp. About ten minutes of listening in all.

Every fact on this page was checked on 23 September 2026 against the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's own announcement of the visitors' route and against a second source, and each visit fact is filed with the sentence it came from, so we hear about it when something changes. Hagia Sophia is a working mosque: the visitor route is open outside prayer times, so check at the entrance on the day. Where a sign at the building or the ministry says otherwise, follow them rather than us, and tell us so we can correct this page.

## The stops

### 1. The approach: domes, buttresses and four minarets

Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus for the Emperor Justinian I; minarets added under Mehmed II and Bayezid II and by Mimar Sinan under Selim II; buttresses Byzantine and Ottoman · 532–537, dome rebuilt 558–562; minarets fifteenth and sixteenth centuries · Brick and mortar with stone; 100 m from the apse to the outer narthex and 69.5 m wide; the two western minarets 60 m tall · Ayasofya Square, on the open ground between Hagia Sophia and Sultanahmet Park, outside the building and before any ticket

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/landmarks/hagia-sophia/en/approach-from-the-square.mp3?v=1064167 (133 s)

Look for:
- The two thick stone minarets at the west end, identical and 60 metres tall, both by Mimar Sinan. Then find the red-brick one at the south-east corner, from the reign of Mehmed II or Bayezid II.
- The buttresses, the heavy sloping masses leaning on the walls. There are 24 of them, Byzantine and Ottoman, added over the centuries because the dome kept pushing the walls outwards.
- The four minarets together: none is Byzantine, and all were added after 1453, from the red brick at the south-east to Sinan's heavy stone pair at the west.
- The colour. The pink and ochre plaster is nineteenth-century work by the Fossati brothers; Justinian's church was clad in white marble.

Stand far enough back to see the whole thing at once, because close up it turns into walls. What you are looking at is three buildings argued into one.

The first is the great arched walls and the bulk they carry up to the dome. That is Justinian's church. He began it on the twenty-third of February 532, a few weeks after rioters had burned the church that stood here before, and he gave it to two men who were not really builders at all: Anthemius of Tralles, a mathematician, and Isidore of Miletus, a geometer and engineer. More than ten thousand people worked on it. It was dedicated on the twenty-seventh of December 537, five years and ten months after work began, and the emperor is supposed to have walked in and said: Solomon, I have surpassed thee. It is the third church on this spot, and for more than five hundred years it was the largest church in the world.

Now look at the colour. Pink and ochre plaster over brick. That is nineteenth-century tinting from the Fossati brothers' restoration. Justinian's church wore white marble veneer on the outside, gilded in places, and from the sea it would have shone.

The second building is the one holding the first one up. Those heavy, sloping masses leaning against the walls are buttresses, twenty-four of them, some Byzantine, some Ottoman, some both. The dome has been pushing the walls outwards since the sixth century, and every age that owned this building has had to lean something against it. The Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan added heavy buttress walls of his own.

The third building is the minarets. None of them is Byzantine. Find the red-brick one at the south-east corner: it dates from the reign of Mehmed the Second or his successor Bayezid. The slender white one at the north-east corner is Bayezid's. The two thick, identical stone towers at the western end are Sinan's, sixty metres tall, built under Selim the Second. Mehmed's very first minaret, put up in wood over one of the half-domes right after the conquest, is long gone.

That conquest came on the twenty-ninth of May 1453. Mehmed ordered the church turned into a mosque at once and attended Friday prayers inside on the first of June. The story goes that he caught a soldier trying to prise up one of the marble paving slabs and struck him with his sword. He meant to keep this building, not strip it.

It was a museum from 1935 and became a mosque again in July 2020. Before you go in, walk your eye along the walls from one buttress to the next. Every one of those sloping masses is there because the dome, which never stopped pushing, needed something to push against.

### 2. The dome and the great roundels, from the gallery rail

Isidore the Younger, who rebuilt the dome after 558; the roundels written by the calligrapher Kazasker Mustafa İzzet Efendi in the restoration of 1847–1849 · Dome 558–562, with later Byzantine repairs; roundels 1847–1849 · Brick dome on forty windows, 55.6 m above the floor and slightly elliptical, about 31 m across; eight roundels each 7.5 m in diameter · Upper gallery, at the balustrade overlooking the prayer hall

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/landmarks/hagia-sophia/en/nave-from-the-gallery.mp3?v=1135847 (142 s)

Look for:
- The eight discs of gilt lettering on green, each 7.5 metres across, hung on the main walls. They name God, the Prophet Muhammad, the first four caliphs and Muhammad's grandsons Hasan and Husayn.
- The six-winged angels in the four corners where the walls curve up towards the dome. The two on the east side are Byzantine mosaic; the two on the west were painted by the Fossatis in the 1840s because nothing of the originals survived.
- The gallery itself: the arcades running round three sides of the hall, and across from you the marble balustrade of the opposite side.

Put your hands on the balustrade and find the great discs first. There are eight of them hanging on the main walls, gilt letters on green, each seven and a half metres across, written by the calligrapher Kazasker Mustafa İzzet Efendi during the repairs of 1847 to 1849. They carry the names of God, the Prophet Muhammad, the first four caliphs and Muhammad's grandsons Hasan and Husayn, and they are described as the largest calligraphic panels in the Islamic world. The same restoration was carried out by eight hundred men under the Swiss-Italian brothers Gaspare and Giuseppe Fossati.

Now look higher, into the four corners where the walls curve up towards the dome. Those curved triangles are pendentives, and in each one is a six-winged angel. The two on the east side are Byzantine mosaic. The two on the west are paint, done by the Fossatis in the 1840s, because nothing of the originals survived. Under the Ottomans the angels' faces were covered with star-shaped metal lids, and in 2009 one face was uncovered again.

Those four pendentives carry the dome, and this was one of the first times anyone used them on this scale. The dome is 55.6 metres above the floor below you and about thirty-one metres across, and it is not quite round: fourteen centuries of repairs have pulled it slightly out of true. It stayed the largest pendentive dome in the world until Saint Peter's in Rome.

It is not even the first dome. Justinian's original was flatter, and earthquakes in 553 and 557 cracked it; in 558 part of it came down. Isidore the Younger rebuilt the vault about six metres higher and finished in 562. Even that dome has partly fallen and been rebuilt since, so of its forty ribs only the north and south sections, fourteen ribs between them, still date from 562. It stands on a ring of forty windows, and for fourteen centuries the light coming in under it has made it seem to hover with nothing holding it up.

Look down now, at the floor you cannot walk on. It has been under a carpet since July 2020, but beneath it is a marble floor that writers compared to the sea for a thousand years. Mehmed the Second is said to have climbed up to these galleries to look at it, and the Ottoman chronicler Tursun Beg called it a sea in a storm.

Then look along the gallery you are standing in: the arcades opposite, the columns, the marble balustrades. This upper floor runs round three sides of the hall. At the far eastern end, if a white curtain hangs in the half-dome over the apse, the Virgin and Child are behind it. That mosaic has been curtained since the building became a mosque again.

In the tenth century envoys from the ruler of Kievan Rus stood somewhere in here, and reported home that they did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth.

### 3. The Marble Door in the south gallery

Byzantine marble carvers of the imperial church, unnamed · Byzantine; in use by 1166, when a synod met in the room beyond it · Carved marble screen with two blind door leaves, across the upper gallery, which holds 64 of the building's 104 columns · Upper gallery, where the west gallery meets the south gallery, at the marble screen the ministry calls the heaven-and-hell door

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/landmarks/hagia-sophia/en/marble-door.mp3?v=776193 (97 s)

Look for:
- The two carved leaves: panels, frames and mouldings of a wooden door, all cut in stone.
- The small reliefs of plants, fruit and fish on the panels.
- Halvdan's runes, scratched into the top of the marble parapet around the middle of the south gallery, beyond the door: probably the work of a Norse mercenary in Byzantine service.

This is the one door on your route that was never meant to swing open.

From the west side of the upper floor, the marble screen ahead looks like two big panelled doors with a narrow way through between them. Look closer and the panels, the frames and the mouldings are all carved in stone: a wooden door imitated in marble. On the panels are small reliefs of plants, fruit and fish.

The ministry that runs your route calls it the heaven-and-hell door, and that is the old story: one side stands for paradise and the other for hell. The carving does not say which is which.

What is certain is what it was for. This upper floor runs round the building on three sides like a horseshoe, and it was traditionally the space of the empress and her court. The south part, beyond this door, was where officials of the patriarchate held their solemn meetings, and because this was the emperor's own church, decisions about the religious affairs of the state were taken there too. A synod under the Emperor Manuel Komnenos met beyond this door in 1166, and its resolutions were cut on marble plaques and hung on the wall of the outer porch downstairs.

Sixty-four of the building's hundred and four columns stand up here on this upper floor. Before visitors were let back up here, restorers cleaned the marble facings and the wooden balustrades under the eye of the ministry's scientific board. Look up at the triangles between the arches of the arcade over the hall: they are inlaid, thin white marble cut into flowers and birds and set into black.

Now go through and walk along the south gallery, and look at the top of the marble parapet near the middle. Some time in the ninth century a man scratched runes into it. They are read as Halvdan was here. He was probably a Norse mercenary in Byzantine service, a long way from home.

More than a thousand years later you can still read the name of one soldier among thousands, cut into the emperor's marble.

### 4. The Deësis mosaic

Byzantine mosaicists in Constantinople, probably after the city was retaken from the Latins in 1261 · Probably 1261 · Glass and gold mosaic, the lower part lost; the full-scale copy made in the late 1930s measures 395 by 601.7 cm · South gallery, in the section beyond the Marble Door

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/landmarks/hagia-sophia/en/deesis.mp3?v=1074198 (134 s)

Look for:
- The faces. Christ looks straight out; the Virgin and John the Baptist turn towards him, and the soft modelling of their cheeks is why the panel gets compared with Duccio.
- The line where the mosaic stops. Everything below the figures' chests is lost to bare plaster.
- The Greek letters on the gold ground beside each head, which name the three figures.

Stand back far enough to take in the whole panel, then let your eye drop to where it stops.

The top half is some of the finest mosaic anywhere: Christ in the centre, looking straight out, with the Virgin Mary on the left and John the Baptist on the right, both turned towards him. The bottom half is gone. Below their chests there is only bare plaster. What survives is the upper part of a panel about four metres high and six wide; the only full-scale copy, painted in the late 1930s and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, measures 395 by 601.7 centimetres.

The subject is called a Deësis, which is Greek for entreaty. Mary and John are pleading with Christ for mercy on humanity at the Last Judgment. Look at their faces, because that is what people come up here for. The modelling is soft, the expressions are human, the tones pass into one another without hard lines. It has been compared with Italian painting of the late thirteenth century, with Duccio, and it is often called the beginning of a renaissance in Byzantine art.

The date matters. It was probably made in 1261, and it was a statement. In 1204 the army of the Fourth Crusade, Latin Christians from the west, sacked Constantinople. They stripped this church, vandalised its golden mosaics and shipped much of the loot to Venice. On the sixteenth of May 1204 Baldwin of Flanders was crowned emperor in this building, and for fifty-seven years it was a Latin Catholic cathedral. When the Byzantines took the city back, this panel was most likely made to mark the end of Latin rule and the return of the Orthodox faith.

The man who organised that invasion was buried in this building. Enrico Dandolo, the Doge of Venice, died in 1205, and his grave was probably up here, towards the eastern end of the gallery. The Ottomans destroyed his tomb. The marker with his name on it was set near the probable spot by an Italian restoration team in the nineteenth century, and it is regularly mistaken for medieval.

After the conquest of 1453 most of the mosaics in this building were plastered over, a process that took a long time and was never quite complete. Many came back into view in the 1930s, when the Byzantine Institute of America under Thomas Whittemore uncovered every major mosaic it found.

One more look before you move on. Of the three figures, only Christ faces you. The other two face him, which is the whole point of the picture: you are standing where the people they are praying for would stand.

### 5. The Empress Zoe and Komnenos mosaics

Byzantine court mosaicists for Constantine IX Monomachos and the Empress Zoe, and for John II Komnenos and the Empress Irene · Zoe panel eleventh century; Komnenos panel 1122 · Glass and gold mosaic, two panels side by side on the east wall of the south gallery, the Komnenos panel continued on the adjoining pier · South gallery, east wall, at the far end of the mosaic section

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/landmarks/hagia-sophia/en/zoe-and-komnenos.mp3?v=1002518 (125 s)

Look for:
- The purse in each emperor's hands and the scroll in each empress's. Both panels are records of gifts to the church.
- The three heads of the Zoe panel, all of them replacements for heads that were scraped off.
- Irene's plaited blond hair and rosy cheeks, and then the young Alexios on the pier beside the Komnenos panel.

You are at the east end of the south gallery, facing east, the way the whole building is oriented, and on the wall in front of you are two receipts.

Find the panel with Christ enthroned in the middle. He sits in a dark blue robe on a gold ground, blessing with one hand and holding the Gospels in the other, with the letters IC and XC either side of his head. On one side of him stands the Emperor Constantine the Ninth Monomachos, holding a purse; on the other the Empress Zoe, holding a scroll. The purse and the scroll are the point. This is a record of gifts to the church, set in gold on its own wall.

Now look hard at the three faces. All three heads were scraped off and replaced. The panel is eleventh century, and one explanation is that the emperor beside Zoe was first one of her earlier husbands, Romanos the Third or Michael the Fourth, and was given a new face when the next one came along; another theory is that the whole panel was made for an earlier couple and every head was changed. Either way you are looking at an edit, and the inscription over the emperor names the latest man: Constantine Monomachos, faithful emperor of the Romans in Christ. Over her it says: Zoe, the most pious Augusta.

The second panel is dated 1122. The Virgin stands in the centre in dark blue, holding the Christ Child. On one side is the Emperor John the Second Komnenos in a robe set with precious stones, holding a purse; on the other his wife, the Empress Irene, holding a scroll. The same gesture a century later, and a different kind of picture. Irene was the daughter of King Ladislaus of Hungary, and the mosaicist gave her plaited blond hair, rosy cheeks and grey eyes. Where the Zoe panel idealises, this one comes much closer to portraits.

Then look at the pier beside the panel. That is their eldest son, Alexios, a beardless young man, probably shown as he looked when he was crowned co-emperor. The inscription round his father calls John porphyrogennetos, born in the purple, meaning born while his own father reigned, and the son was meant to carry that line on. He never did: he died of a sudden illness in 1142, a year before his father. His face in the mosaic is drawn and pale, which has been read as a sign of that illness.

Two emperors, two empresses and a son, and between them two purses and two scrolls, still on the wall where they were put to be counted.

## Before you go

Ayasofya Square, in the Fatih district of Istanbul. Visitors do not use the worshippers' door: the ticket booth for the visitors' route stands opposite the Fountain of Ahmed III, the way in is a tunnel and ramp on the south side of the building, and the way out is the ramp on the north-east side. The first stop on this page is out on the square, before any of that.

Tram line T1 has stops called Sultanahmet and Gülhane. The first stop on this page is on Ayasofya Square itself.

- Hagia Sophia is a working mosque, and the visitor areas are open outside prayer times, so the route can close for a while around each prayer. Check at the entrance on the day.
- Foreign visitors pay to go up to the upper floor; worshippers enter the prayer hall free by a separate door. When the visitors' route opened in January 2024 the ministry set the fee at 25 euros. Buy at the booth opposite the Fountain of Ahmed III and check the current fee there.
- Women need a headscarf to go in. Bring one.
- A restoration begun in 2025 is strengthening the main dome against earthquakes, with extensive scaffolding and protective measures in the building, so some views may be partly screened.

Official tickets: https://basin.ktb.gov.tr/TR-364045/ayasofya-i-kebir-camiinde-yeni-duzenleme-15-ocakta-basliyor.html

The ministry's own guide is built into the visitors' route: scan a QR code and listen on your phone in any of 23 languages, through your own earphones or single-use ones sold at the entrance. The ministry names no charge for it beyond the entry ticket. The route is meant to be walked in silence so that worshippers below are not disturbed, which is why everything is heard on earphones — bring yours for this page too. What sets this page apart is that it needs no code on the wall: open it from the square onwards, and if you would rather read than listen, every word of the narration is written out beneath its player.

Official site: https://ayasofyacamii.gov.tr/en

## Questions

**Is there a free Hagia Sophia audio guide?**

Yes. This page is free and begins before any ticket, out on Ayasofya Square: five stops, and you can read along with each one, since its text sits right below the player. Inside, the ministry has its own narration in 23 languages, started from a QR code on your phone, and it names no charge for that beyond the entry ticket. Whatever neither of them mentions, photograph it and ask the Chiaro app what you are seeing.

**Do I need a ticket to listen?**

Not for the first stop, which is out on Ayasofya Square. The other four are on the upper floor, the only part of the building open to visitors, and foreign visitors pay to go up; tickets are sold at the booth opposite the Fountain of Ahmed III. The ministry set the fee at 25 euros when the route opened in January 2024, so check the current fee at the booth.

**How much is the official Hagia Sophia audio guide?**

The ministry names no charge for it beyond the entry ticket. It is a narration in 23 languages that you start with a QR code and hear on your own phone through earphones, and single-use earphones are sold at the entrance for anyone without.

**Can visitors go down to the main floor?**

No. Since January 2024 the ground floor has been for worship, and foreign visitors are taken up by a ramp to the upper floor, which reopened to visitors that year. The second stop on this page describes the dome, the roundels and the floor from the rail above the prayer hall.

**Is Hagia Sophia closed during prayers?**

The visitor areas are open outside prayer times, so the route can close for a while around each prayer; it is a working mosque. The exact times change through the year, so check at the entrance on the day. Women need a headscarf to enter.

## Continue in the app

Point Chiaro at anything at Hagia Sophia.

Fifteen centuries went into this building, and a five-stop walk only samples it. Up here alone stand sixty-four columns and eight roundels, a Viking's scratched name sits on one parapet, and there are mosaics in corners this walk never reaches. Aim your phone at a carving, an inscription, a patch of gold on a far wall, and Chiaro names it and says whose work it was; ask it the next question, and the one after, without moving from the spot.

Download Chiaro: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6745618830?pt=127817940&ct=hagia-sophia-md&mt=8