‘I want to keep it like my home’. Hagia Sophia and the politics of exhaustion and care of an urban landmark

This article examines how embodied experiences shape the creation and transformation of urban landmarks, focusing on their relationship with the city beyond mere symbolism. While geographical studies often interpret landmarks as static representations of institutional power or branding, this article adopts an ethnographic approach informed by scholarship on the politics of difference and care. It investigates the lives and labours of cleaners and mosque guides who maintain Istanbul's Hagia Sophia during its contested 2020 conversion from museum to mosque. By foregrounding these workers, the article reveals how embodied differences are negotiated by gendered and labouring bodies, caught between the politics of exhaustion and practices of care for Hagia Sophia's endangered materialities. It also demonstrates how the landmark is not only a symbol but a porous and vulnerable structure whose authority and meaning are constantly reshaped through the sensory and emotional interactions of those who inhabit it. Hagia Sophia crystallises shifting forms of belonging and othering between the building and the city. Focusing on the affective and corporeal resonance of landmarks through the perspectives of cleaners and mosque guides invites us to consider them as relational places where structures of power are mediated through bodies and their everyday practices, exposing the permeability of even the most monumental forms to their city's frictions and challenges.