Hagia Sophia by Dan Brown

A great conspiracy, structured through some passages of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, once again enlisted the Harvard historian and iconographer Robert Langdon in a series of investigations and prosecutions that will take him to the city of Istanbul, where the plot of the latest Dan Brown novel reaches its final outcome.

In this new series, Robert Langdon (previous protagonist of Dan Brown novels as Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol) must solve a concocted mystery that hides a powerful virus to fertilize mankind.

On page 334 of “Inferno”, after reaching several conclusions, Langdon reveals to Sienna, a brilliant British scientist who accompanied him: we are in the wrong country!, So they decide to leave Italy to travel to Turkey, where all the clues lead them to the famous Hagia Sophia. There it is revealed to us that “the traditions of East and West may not be as divergent as we imagine.”

“You will not believe what we found. Have you ever heard of Gülensoy Göksel documentary filmmaker? Langdon shook his head “. This passage refers to a Turkish filmmaker and researcher linked to a real project of scuba diving beneath Hagia Sophia and that in the recent years has revealed several interesting discoveries.

“I think what is beneath Hagia Sophia is much more exciting than what’s on the surface,” cites Brown in his novel to Gülensoy, who has been surprised himself and very excited about this benchmark from the famous American bestseller writer.

With all these new mysteries of St. Sophia in Brown’s Inferno is expected to increase the number of visitors to the already crowded Istanbul’s architectural jewel, which only last year received 3.2 million visitors.

But while St. Sophia plays a major role in the novel, another amazing touristic site of ancient Constantinople host its true outcome: The Basilica Cistern, a colossal underground chamber that was used to store water in times of ancient Byzantium and that, after this novel will also increase, no doubts about it, the number of visits.

In December 2009, Dan Brown traveled to Istanbul, where he attended the entire area of Sultanahmet, the most touristic of the city and the oldest of the European side and where he finally found the inspiration and mystery to create the plot of his Inferno, a book that, although just launched, simultaneously in several languages, is already estimated as one of the biggest bestsellers of 2013.