I owe my vocation as a historian to Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, which I first visited as a boy during my first trip abroad. Built as a Byzantine cathedral, later converted into an Ottoman mosque, then into a secular museum, Hagia Sophia seemed as if it had been plucked from the pages of a great medieval epic. On that day I remember facing the tangled histories of Islam and Orthodox Christianity for the first time. This was a monument that called out for understanding, and I was hooked. It still captivates me today.

Source: Wall Street Journal July 18, 2020 10:52 UTC