Asked by
Birds of the sky (2 Golds)
Sunday, 30 Aug 2020, 10:55 PM
at (News
Editorial)
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Answer(s):
Hagia {Aya} Sophia (Short Note) ============================= Completed in 537, Hagia Sophia (Turkish Ayasofya ) is the culminating architectural achievement of late antiquity and the first Byzantine masterpiece. Most remarkable is the huge dome at the heart of the building.It delineates a substantive Byzantine structure in Istanbul and becomes one of the world’s majestic monuments.For this conspicuous reason, it seems not to be founded on solid masonry, but to be suspended from heaven. When Constantinople fell to Ottoman forces in 1453, Mehmed II the Conqueror converted it to a mosque, the Great Mosque of Ayasofya, and with time the Byzantine mosaics were covered over or destroyed and four great minarets were raised around the structure. It remained a mosque until 1934, when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the secular, modern republic of Turkey, transformed the Hagia Sophia into a museum.It became the most-visited museum in Turkey, attracting about 3.7 million visitors in 2019. It is designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, identified as a landmark of exceptional cultural significance to all humanity, worthy of conservation.The stones, pillars and mosaics of Hagia Sophia embody the complexity of Turkish and European history, of the Christian and Islamic traditions. Presently, The Hagia Sophia remains a World Heritage Site in the most profound sense of the designation, a structure of surpassing beauty with a deep overlay of the histories of East and West, Christianity and Islam. ============================= Qassem Soleimani (Short Note) °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°° Qassem Soleimani, Iranian major general and commander of the Quds Force , is a wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) responsible for the corps’ foreign operations. Qassem Suleimani started his working life as a skinny, impoverished child construction labourer, and ended it as the most influential military commander in the Middle East. Through intellect, ruthlessness, courage and a dose of luck, he rose to become Iran’s second-most powerful man - official commander of Iran’s elite Quds forces and unofficial commander of a proliferation of proxy militias and allied politicians across the region. He was killed by US drone strikes in Baghdad on Jan 3, 2020, in the country that had been shaped as much by him as perhaps any other single individual since the fall of Saddam Hussein. He formed governments, directed policy, and for years attacked and undermined the US military. Suleimani moved from the shadowy world of security forces to become a well-known public figure, bolstered by government projection of him as a pious patriot and national champion. He enjoyed genuine popularity at home, despite genuine ambivalence about the security forces among many Iranians. ============================= ============================= |