Compléter Agia SophiaVersion en ligne Agia Sophia par Lina Salvanou 1 remarkable brick features seeing marble riots piers massive shallow foundations design pillars accustomed arches awe inspirin wide The " Church of Holy Wisdom " , also called Agia Sophia , is in Constantinople ? now Istanbul . It was built by the emperor Justinian after the of AD 532 . Anthemios and Isidoros were two of the Greek architects who designed it . It took six years to build and about ten thousand men worked on it . The first stone of the was laid by the emperor himself . The building had walls , linings inside , amazing mosaics made up of tiny cubes of coloured glass , marble or gold and marble . Of all its fascinating though , perhaps the most is its huge , dome , supported on made of limestone . There are also smaller half - domes around the largest , supported by - a typical feature of Byzantine for big buildings . Agia Sophia is well over 45m high and over 60m long and . Today we are to buildings as large as this , sometimes even larger . But in Justinian's time , Agia Sophia must have been truly -