Little Hagia Sophia rose in the same burst of imperial building as its towering namesake, and tradition has long read it as the rehearsal for that greater dome. Justinian and Theodora raised it in the 530s as the Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, folding an eight-sided core into an uneven rectangle. Delicate carved capitals still carry the monograms of the imperial couple, and a Greek verse runs the entablature, praising the emperor, his empress, and the soldier-saint Sergius by name.
You step in from a quiet lane and the space opens upward into a ribbed, melon-shaped dome resting on a ring of columns in green and red marble. Light slides down between the two tiers of the colonnade, and the old church breathes as a working mosque, which it became in the early 1500s, when a chief eunuch of the palace converted it. Outside lies a small garden; inside, the murmur of prayer fills a room that has held worship, in one faith or another, for fifteen centuries.