Her father kept bears for a chariot team. She ended up empress, named in a law as the emperor's partner. Nearly everything about her youth comes from one hostile writer.
Born between about 485 and 512, nobody is sure, to Acacius, bear keeper for the Greens at the Hippodrome, and a mother who danced and acted.
Then the famous part: stage, scandals, brothel. All of it comes from Procopius's Secret History, hostile and posthumous. John of Ephesus partly backs it; scholars argue how far to trust it.
What's documented is law. In 524 Justin I let senators marry former actresses. In 527 Justinian became emperor; she was crowned Augusta.
In 532, during the Nika riot, Procopius gives her a speech telling a wavering court to stay. Reported, maybe literary. In 535 Justinian wrote her into a law as his "partner in my deliberations". His words, not a historian's.
Now the stone. Justinian built a church to Saints Sergius and Bacchus, today the Little Hagia Sophia mosque. Inside, a twelve-line Greek verse runs along the colonnade, naming Justinian, Theodora and Sergius. It asks Sergius to strengthen her rule and praises her charity to the poor. One fragment: "may God expand the power of Theodora, crowned by God".
Between 1506 and 1513 Hüseyin Ağa, chief Black Eunuch under Bayezid II, made it a mosque. The Greek stayed. Her name is still up there.
She died on 28 June 548, buried at the Holy Apostles.
It's a mosque: go outside prayer times, dressed modestly, shoes off. Look above the lower columns for the band of Greek letters, then at the capitals for monograms. Hagia Sophia has the crowds; here a few visitors have the colonnade to themselves. No hours or prayer pauses are published that we found; read what's posted.
