From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium

PERA PALAS HOTEL, ISTANBUL, TURKEY, 10 JULY 1994

After the penitential piety of Mount Athos, arriving here is like stepping into a sensuous Orientalist fantasy by Delacroix, all mock-Iznik tiles and pseudo-Ottoman marble inlay. A hotel masquerading as a Turkish bath; you almost expect some voluptuous Turkish odalisque to appear and disrobe behind the reception desk.

I ate breakfast in a vast Viennese ballroom with a sprung wooden floor and dadoes dripping with recently reapplied gilt. The lift is a giant baroque birdcage, entered through a rainforest of potted palms. On the wall nearby, newly dusted, is a framed diploma from the 1932 Ideal Homes Exhibition, signed by the Mayor of East Ham.

The Pera Palas was bought by the Turkish government last year, and attempts to renovate the old structure seem to have started manically, then been abruptly given up. In the dining room the gilt is so bright you have to wear sunglasses to look at it; but upstairs the carpets are as bald as the head of an Ottoman eunuch.

The hotel has a policy of naming its bedrooms after distinguished guests, which has unconsciously acted as a graph of its dramatic post-war decline: from before the war you can choose to sleep in Ataturk, Mata Hari or King Zog of Albania; after it there is nothing more exciting on offer than Julio Iglesias.

At dawn the Sea of Marmara appears like a sheet of silver, with the stationary ships sitting as if welded to its surface. Now, at night, it becomes invisible but for the lights of passing ships and the distant lamps of Uskudar and Kadi Koy – Byzantine Chalcedon – shining across the Bosphorus.

From the old Byzantine Acropolis to the waters of the Golden Horn, the yellow glow of the sulphurous streetlights silhouettes the city’s skyline, with its minarets and rippling domes and cupolas. The perfect reflections of the great Ottoman mosques and palaces that form in the water below are intermittently shattered by skiffs and caiques crossing and recrossing the Hellespont. No other city on earth has so magnificent a position. With its remarkable configuration of hills and water, sitting astride the land and sea routes connecting Europe with Asia, the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, and commanding one of the greatest anchorages in the world, there could be no more perfect position for a great imperial city.

For over a thousand years Constantinople was the capital of Christendom, the richest metropolis in Europe and the most populous city west of the great Chinese Silk Route terminus of Ch’ang-an. To the Barbarian West Byzantium was an almost mythical beacon of higher civilisation, the repository of all that had been salvaged from the wreck of classical antiquity. In their sagas, the Vikings called it merely Micklegarth, the Great City. It had no rival.

From the Great Palace on the shores of the Sea of Marmara Justinian, probably the greatest of the Byzantine emperors, controlled an empire that ran from the walls of Genoa clockwise around the Mediterranean to the Pillars of Hercules at Ceuta, embracing Italy, the Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East and the North African littoral. From Constantinople armies were dispatched to build a line of border fortresses on the Tigris, to repair the walls of Rome and to reconquer North Africa from the Vandals. Architects were ordered to construct basilicas in the marshes of Ravenna, on Mount Zion and in the sands of the Sinai. When the Emperor ordered Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus to build the greatest church in the world and dedicate it to Haghia Sophia, the Divine Wisdom of Christ, stone was specially brought from as far afield as Libya, the Lebanon, the Atlantic coast of France, Mons Porphyrites in the distant deserts of Southern Egypt and the green marble quarries of Hellenic Sparta.

Half a century later, when John Moschos arrived in Constantinople, the city probably had a population of around three quarters of a million; it was said that seventy-two different tongues could be heard in its streets. Coptic monks rubbed shoulders with Jewish glassblowers, Persian silk traders and Gepid mercenaries who had walked to the city after padding across the ice of the frozen Danube. In the city’s great markets and bazaars, Aramaic-speaking Syrians would haggle with Latin-speaking North Africans, Armenian architects and Herule slave traders who knew only some debased dialect of Old German. Goldsmiths, silversmiths, jewellers, ivory carvers, workers in inlay and enamel, weavers of brocade, sculptors and mosaicists all found ready markets for their wares. Already, by the second quarter of the fifth century, the city boasted five imperial and nine princely palaces, eight public and 153 private bath houses; by the time of Justinian there were over three hundred monasteries within its walls.

Few who were brought up in this most cosmopolitan and sophisticated of cities could bear to leave it for long. ‘Oh, land of Byzantium, oh thrice-happy city, eye of the universe, ornament of the world, star shining afar, beacon of this lower world,’ wrote a twelfth-century Byzantine author forced to absent himself on a diplomatic mission, ‘would that I were within you, enjoying you to the full! Do not part me from your maternal bosom.’

After its fall to the Turks in 1453 the importance of the city was, if anything, increased. For the next two hundred years the Ottoman Empire was the most powerful force in all Eurasia, and Constantinople again became the Mediterranean’s greatest port. The sixteenth-century Grand Vizier Mehmed Sokollu Pasha simultaneously planned canals between the Don and the Volga, and the Red Sea and the Mediterranean; one day he might send armaments to Sumatra to thwart the Portuguese, the next choose a new King of Poland to thwart the Russians. He ordered pictures and clocks from Venice, decorated his capital with one of the most beautiful mosques ever built, and commissioned an eleven-arched bridge over the River Drina which was only recently destroyed by Croatian bombs.

The achievements of early Ottoman Constantinople were built on the foundation of religious and ethnic tolerance. The great majority of senior Ottoman officials were not ethnic Turks, but Christian or Jewish converts. At a time when every capital in Europe was ablaze with burning heretics, according to the exiled seventeenth-century Huguenot M. de la Motraye there was ‘no country on earth where the exercise of all Religions is more free and less subject to being troubled, than in Turkey’. It was the gradual erosion of that tradition of tolerance under the tidal wave of nineteenth-century nationalism that as much as anything finally brought down the Ottomans.

The end result of that sterile hardening of attitudes is that Istanbul, once home to an inspirational ferment of different ethnicities, is today a culturally barren and financially impoverished mono-ethnic megalopolis, 99 per cent Turkish. The Jews have gone to Israel, the Greeks to Athens, the Armenians to Armenia and the United States. The great European merchant houses have returned home, the embassies and the politicians moved to Ankara. For all its magnificent monuments, for the first time in two millennia, Istanbul now feels almost provincial.

It is ten years since my last visit to this city. Since then much has changed: many of the old wooden houses with their intricately latticed balconies have been swept away and replaced by grey apartment blocks. A smart new tram rattles around Sultanahmet, past new flotillas of Russians squatting on the pavements trying to sell their sad piles of Soviet junk: shapeless jeans, hideous shirts and sub-standard leather jackets. There is a blight of seedy news-stands filled with a surprising profusion of Turkish hard porn (there is even a glossy called Harem; one notices these things after a week in the celibate purity of Athos). The most striking change of all, however, is the rise of the Islamic right, which this sort of thing has helped to bring about. On every wall are election posters for the hardline Refah party, which recently won the municipal elections both here and in Ankara; there is now serious talk of them sweeping into power nationally at the next election. In the meantime many of the young men have taken to wearing thick, moustacheless Islamic beards, while their womenfolk are increasingly shrouded in veils.

In many ways, Turkey’s development since the Second World War seems to have followed exactly the opposite course to that of India. There Gandhi tried to wean the whole country onto dhotis, non-violence and spinning wheels; the result was crass materialism and the almost daily burning of brides in ‘kitchen accidents’ if they fail to deliver the new moped or colour television promised as dowry. In Turkey Ataturk tried the reverse approach: he banned the fez, outlawed the Arabic script and tried to drag the Turks kicking and screaming into Europe. The result: a resurgent Islamic movement, mullahs being cheered in the mosques whenever they announce that the earth is flat, and the sophisticated career women of Istanbul competing with each other to wear the most all-enveloping veil or medieval-looking burkha.

ISTANBUL, 17 JULY

This afternoon I walked along the Golden Horn to the Phanar, the oldest surviving institution in the city and the nearest thing the Greek Orthodox have to a Vatican. For in a series of humble buildings surrounded by a modest walled enclosure in Istanbul’s backstreets lives the successor of St John Chrysostom, the senior Patriarch to millions of Orthodox Christians around the world.

The Patriarch’s secretary, to whom Fr. Christophoros had given me an introduction, was out. So while I waited for him to return I drank tea in a small, dark chayhane nearby: sawdust on the floor, the acid stink of cheap Turkish cigarettes stinging the nostrils, the incessant thump of heavy hands on wooden card-tables; unshaven, unemployed men playing game after game of poker. Outside a man in a waistcoat, flat cap and dirty apron pushed a handcart of fruit along the cobbles. It could have been a Bill Brandt photograph of the London East End in the thirties.

I walked back to the Phanar an hour later. The Patriarch’s secretary had still not returned, but this time I did manage to speak to a member of his staff. Fr. Dimitrios was initially suspicious and evasive, but after reading Fr. Christophoros’s letter he took me up to his office overlooking the Patriarchal church. There we talked about the city’s dwindling Greek minority, the last descendants of the Byzantines left in what was once their capital city.

According to Fr. Dimitrios the population of Istanbul was still almost 50 per cent Christian at the end of the nineteenth century. The tumultuous events of the first quarter of the twentieth century – the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish victory in the 1922 Greco-Turkish War and the expulsion of all the Greeks in Anatolia in exchange for the Turkish population evicted from Northern Greece – did not alter this. By the terms of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, the 400,000 Greeks in the city and its suburbs were specifically allowed to remain in their homes with their rights and property intact.

All this changed in 1955 when Istanbul played host to the worst race riot in Europe since Kristallnacht. In a single night, with the police looking on, thousands of hired thugs descended on the city’s Hellenic ghettos. Almost every Greek shop in the city had its windows broken; cemeteries were desecrated; the Tombs of the Patriarchs were destroyed; seventy-three Orthodox churches were gutted.

‘I was still a baby,’ said Fr. Dimitrios. ‘The rioters came into our house, but my mother had wrapped me up in the Turkish flag so the rioters did not harm me; instead they just broke the windows and the furniture then moved on. Afterwards the government said it was just a few ignorant people, but that’s not true: the riots were very well organised, all over Istanbul.’

‘I don’t understand what the Turks would gain by organising such a pogrom,’ I said.

‘The Greeks still controlled the commerce of the city,’ replied Dimitrios. ‘They wanted to drive us out and take over our business. They succeeded. By 1965, when I was ten, the Greek population had sunk to around seventy-five thousand. Today there are only – what? – five thousand Greeks left. All my childhood friends, everyone I grew up with, they’ve all moved away.’

Dimitrios shrugged his shoulders.

‘I love this city, of course: it is my home. But frankly life is impossible here if you are not a Turk. The boys get abused on their military service; they are always sent to the most dangerous postings on the Kurdish front line. Then afterwards, when they come out, they can’t get government jobs. If you live here you have to spend your life pretending you are Turkish. Those Greeks who have stayed have started calling themselves Turkish names: if you’re called Dimitrios, you change your name to Demir; if your name is Fedon, you ask your friends to call you Feridun.’

Dimitrios said that the war in Bosnia – with Orthodox Serbs committing atrocities against Muslims – and the recent resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism in Turkey, had made everything much worse. The Phanar windows were broken by stones on an almost daily basis, while its perimeter walls were regularly covered with spray-painted threats such as ‘Patriarch, you will die!’ Moreover, there had been a renewed bout of grave desecration at the disused Greek cemetery at Yenikoy; blazing rags soaked in petrol had been thrown over the Phanar walls, starting a small fire; and three small firebombs had gone off a month previously in two nearby Greek girls’ schools and the Church of the Panaghia.

But the most serious problem, said Dimitrios, revolved around the Phanar gateway. In 1821 the Greeks sealed the main door of the Phanar after the Sultan had hanged the then Patriarch, Gregorios, from its lintel. The Turks always considered the sealing a snub, and recently the Refah party had revived the issue by threatening to break open the gate by force. Then last month, on the eve of the anniversary of the fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks, a huge bomb was found planted next to the gate inside the main courtyard. It was defused in time, but had it gone off not only the gate but the entire Phanar would have been reduced to a large crater.

‘They left a note near the bomb,’ said Dimitrios. ‘I’ve got a translation somewhere.’

He rummaged around in his drawers and drew out a file. From it he took a single sheet of foolscap. ‘Read this,’ he said.

FROM THE GENERAL HEADQUARTERS OF THE FIGHTERS OF LIGHT

Our administration has targeted the Patriarchate and its occupying leader, who behind what he considers insurmountable walls takes pleasure in the shedding of the blood of the Muslim people of the East, and to this end he is working on suspect and fiendish plans. We will fight until the Chief Devil and all the occupiers are chased off; until this place, which for years has contrived Byzantine intrigues against the Muslim peoples of the East, is exterminated. Occupiers disappear! These Lands are ours and will remain ours. We warn you one more time: there is no right to life for those who are occupiers.

Until the Greek Patriarchate and the Devil, the ridiculous Bartholomaios who wears the robes of the Patriarch, disappears from behind the thick walls where he plans his fiendish intrigues, our fight will continue. Patriarch you will perish!

Long live our Islamic Fight! Long live our Islamic Liberation War!

THE CENTRAL HEADQUARTERS OF LIGHT

‘After this,’ said Dimitrios, ‘our young have finally become convinced that there is no future for them here.’

‘I can see their point.’

‘Now it’s just the old who remain. Our priests here are sick and tired of funerals. A single baptism – or rarer still, a marriage – is the event of the year.’

I asked whether the Phanar was getting enough young priests coming up to keep the place going.

‘The Turks closed our only seminary in 1971,’ replied Dimitrios. ‘It’s cut the bloodline of our existence. A decade from now, when the older bishops have all died, there will be no clergy left. After 1,500 years, the Ecumenical Patriarch will have to leave Constantinople.’ Dimitrios sighed. ‘A century ago this was the centre of Greek Istanbul. Today there are no Greeks at all left around here. On a very good Sunday the Patriarch may still get a hundred people in this church. On a bad one he can’t even fill the first two rows of pews. Come down and see what it’s like at vespers.’

“Who will be there?’

‘I fear just you, me and the angels.’

Fr. Dimitrios’s apprehensions were justified. The service had already begun. One old bishop was standing at a lectern chanting hymns for the saint of the day. The other officiating priest, a bent-backed octogenarian, clanked a thurible from behind the iconostasis. There was no congregation in this, the senior church of Eastern Christendom, the Orthodox St Peter’s; not one person occupied the empty pews. After a few minutes the bishop gave the dismissal and both old men quickly left the church.

‘Look at your watch,’ said Fr. Dimitrios. ‘Exactly 4.15. It never takes a minute longer when it’s an empty church. Our priests don’t feel inspired. In fact they feel almost embarrassed.’

From the Phanar I walked through the old city to the Armenian Patriarchate in Kum Kapi, overlooking the Sea of Marmara. In London, Armenian friends had told me horror stories about the fate of the sixty thousand Armenians left in Istanbul: that Refah party activists had taken to slopping buckets of human urine into Armenian church services, as well as regularly vandalising the graveyards and churches. My friends had told me that the parish councils hushed these things up for fear that they would be accused of ‘making anti-Turkish propaganda’, but I hoped that the staff of the Patriarchate might at least be able to confirm or deny what I had heard.

The Patriarchate was a lovely wooden Ottoman building with a pediment and slatted louvres. After a short wait I was shown in to a plump Armenian priest, who called for tea and chatted happily about his trip to England twenty years previously. But when I turned the conversation to politics he just raised his palms and shrugged, indicating clearly – if wordlessly – that it would be undiplomatic for him to comment.

As I was leaving, I mentioned that I had just been to the Phanar: ‘Watch out, then,’ he whispered. ‘The Phanar is full of informers. Your phone will be tapped and they’ve probably followed you here. Don’t leave your notebooks – or anything valuable or incriminating – in your hotel room.’

The old Middle Eastern paranoia, one of the strongest legacies of the Ottomans, a shadow which falls uniformly from the Danube to the Nile. I smiled, but – as always happens after such a warning – did find myself looking behind me on my way back, to see if I was being followed.

Of course, there was nobody there.

ISTANBUL, 20 JULY

John Moschos did not like Constantinople, and he makes this dislike quite apparent in The Spiritual Meadow. One of his Constantinople stories concerns the astonishing sexual appetites of the Emperor Zeno; another is about a priest in the capital who ‘was indulging in murder and dabbling in witchcraft’; a third is an anti-Semitic rant against a Jewish glassblower who tries to burn his eldest son to death after the boy announces that he plans to convert to Christianity. There are several other such tales, all designed to show the Byzantine capital – ‘the city where the wicked rulers lived’ – in a very dim light.

In some ways, Moschos’s reaction is a little surprising. After all the monk admired the other two great Byzantine metropolises – Antioch and Alexandria – for their learning, and this was something in which the Imperial capital also excelled. Certainly Constantinople’s university could not compare with that of Alexandria, but ever since the Emperor Theodosius II endowed a number of chairs in subjects such as medicine, grammar, rhetoric, law and philosophy, it had grown in size and stature, its reputation augmented by the presence nearby of the city’s great public library.

Shortly before John Moschos arrived in the capital, his friend and mentor Stephen the Sophist had been lured to Constantinople from the School of Alexandria, where for many years he had lectured on medicine, philosophy, astronomy, astrology, horoscopy and ecclesiastical computus. Stephen should have been able to introduce Moschos to Constantinople’s leading luminaries, men like the great historian Theophylact Simocatta; yet there is no indication in Moschos’s writing that he met any particularly inspiring figures during his stay in the city.

There was another attraction which should have recommended Constantinople to Moschos: its extraordinary number of sacred relics. Moschos comments on the existence of such relics in almost every place he writes about; only in Constantinople does he omit to mention the number of holy objects on show in the churches, even though the capital’s collection was the finest in Christendom. In one shrine alone, that under the Porphyry Column in the Forum of Constantine, were secreted the holy nails used in the crucifixion, the axe with which Noah built the Ark, and the Dodekathronon, the twelve baskets in which had been collected the leftover loaves and fishes from the feeding of the five thousand, which had been miraculously rediscovered by the dowager Empress Helena near the Sea of Galilee. Elsewhere in the city could be found the Crown of Thorns, the head of John the Baptist (‘complete with hair and beard’, according to one source,) the bodies of most of the innocents murdered by King Herod, and great chunks of the True Cross.