Aya Sofya

After coming from Sofia Bulgaria, here is Aja standing in the Aya Sofya in Istanbul one of the world’s greatest buildings with a massive dome soaring 53 meters over the old city. This building is one of the first of the several amazing buildings you see as you enter the old quarter of the city, where we were staying in Istanbul. The Aya Sofya, originally built as a Christian church in AD 527, was such a masterpiece of architecture and so impressed the conquering Muslims, in the 1400s, that, instead of destroying it, simply tossed out a few statues and chipped away and plastered over the religious icons thereby converting into a Muslim Mosque. It became a museum in 1935.