Hagia Irene Museum

Hagia Irene means "Divine Peace" in Greek, so it was a church dedicated to holly peace, not to a Saint Irene as it's wrongly pronounced today. It's beleived that the church was first built in the 4th century AD over the ruins of a pagan temple by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine I. The wooden construction was burned during the Nika Riot in 532 AD and it was renovated by Justinian I, rapresenting typical characteristics of early Byzantine architecture. During the following centuries the church was restored several times because of the earthquakes and some big fires.