Sancta Sophia is the most interesting building on the world's surface. Like Karnak in Egypt, or the Athenian Parthenon, it is one of the four great pinnacles of architecture, but unlike them this is no ruin, nor does it belong to a past world of constructive ideas although it precedes by seven hundred years the fourth culmination of the building art in Chartres, Amiens or Bourges, and thus must ever stand as the supreme monument of the Christian cycle. Far from being a ruin the church is one of the best preserved of so ancient monuments, and in regard to its treatment by the Turks we can only...