"Once the world's largest church, now a museum, Hagia Sophia was dedicated 1,446 years ago by Justinian, who built it on the foundation of an earlier church that had been destroyed, along with much of Constantinople, during riots that nearly deposed him. Muslim minarets rose after the city fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453."
—From "The Byzantine Empire: Rome of the East," December 1983, National Geographic magazine
