Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

VI.—THE PONTIFF OF THE EAST

The incidents of the Balkan War monopolised so much interest that another incident of those days in Constantinople attracted less attention. It is, perhaps, natural that those not on the ground should have small understanding of the part the Ecumenical Patriarchate has played in the politics of Turkey. In the Levant, however, the death of His All-Holiness Joachim III, Patriarch of Constantinople and ranking prelate of the Greek Orthodox Church, was an event no less important than in the West would be the death of the Pope. And for those of his spiritual flock, as for many outside it, the disappearance, at such a moment, of that remarkable personality, together with the circumstances of his funeral, were a part of the larger aspects of the war.

The organisation of the Eastern church is far less centralised than that of the Western, and the political relations of the countries in which it holds sway have tended to keep it so. There are three other Patriarchs within the Turkish empire—in Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem—while the churches of Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, Roumania, Russia, and Servia, as well as of the Orthodox populations of Austria-Hungary, are independent of Constantinople. One of these churches, the Bulgarian, has been excommunicated by the Patriarchate. Over two others only, those of Greece and Servia, does the Phanar maintain so much authority as to provide them with the oils for the sacrament of the Holy Chrism. But the Patriarch of Constantinople enjoys dignities accorded to no other primate of his faith, and as spiritual chief of the Greeks of Turkey he exercises much of the temporal power claimed by the Pope. The autocephalous sister churches, moreover, acknowledge his spiritual supremacy, and have usually been careful to avoid the name of patriarch in their own hierarchies. And to his throne attaches all the prestige of its ancient history. That history, reaching back without a break to the time of Constantine, has not yet found its Von Ranke. The schism of East and West and the political as well as the religious relation of Western Christianity to Rome has caused Constantinople to be neglected by Western scholars. But if the Patriarchate can boast no such brilliant period as that of the papacy during the Renaissance, its closer association with the establishment and early development of the church, and with the lands where Christianity originated, gives it an interest which the papacy can never claim.

Joachim III, Patriarch of Constantinople

Photograph by Andriomenos, Constantinople

When the Roman Empire came to an end and every Greek Orthodox country except Russia was overrun by the Turks, the Patriarchate did not cease to play a great rôle. As a matter of fact, it began to play a greater one than for many centuries before. It would be a study worth undertaking to determine the part the Patriarchs have acted in the gradual release from Islam of Orthodox Christendom. The weapon for this release was given them by the Conqueror himself. On the 1st of June, 1453, three days after Mehmed II stormed the city, he ordered the clergy left in Constantinople to elect a successor to the late Patriarch and to consecrate him according to the historic procedure. The candidate chosen was the learned monk Gennadius, otherwise known as George Scholarius, of the monastery of the Pantocrator. This was where the Venetians had their headquarters during the Latin occupation, and the palace of the Balio which the Genoese pulled down in 1261 seems to have been a part of the monastery. Its great triple church, now known as Zeïrek Kil’seh Jami, was where the Venetians put the icon of the Shower of the Way when they stole it from St. Sophia. Other relics of the church are now in the treasury of St. Mark’s. I do not know whether the portrait of Gennadius is to be seen in the Riccardi Chapel at Florence, where Benozzo Gozzoli painted his delightful fresco of the Three Kings and put so many faces of noted men of his time. One of the Three Kings is none other than John VII Palæologus, whom Gennadius accompanied in 1438 to the Council of Ferrara in an attempt to bring about the reunion of the churches. In 1452, however, Gennadius defeated the last effort to reconcile the two rites, and he became the first Patriarch under the régime which, as the catchword of the day had it, preferred the turban of the Turk to the tiara of the Pope. In the ceremony of his investiture the Sultan played the part formerly enacted by the Greek emperor, with the sole exception of receiving the communion from the hands of the new pontiff. The Conqueror then invited Gennadius to a private audience, at which he received him with every distinction. When the Patriarch took leave the young Sultan presented him with a jewelled staff of office, and said: “Be Patriarch, and may Heaven guide you. Do not hesitate to rely on my friendship. Enjoy all the rights and privileges which your predecessors have enjoyed.” He then accompanied his guest to the outer gate, ordering the highest dignitaries of his own suite to accompany His All-Holiness to the Patriarchate. Which was done, the Patriarch riding one of the Sultan’s finest horses. The Conqueror afterward confirmed his words in writing, making inviolable the person of the Patriarch, and confirming the Greeks in the possession of their churches and their cult. Thus the Greek Patriarch is one of the greater dignitaries of the Ottoman Empire. He ranks immediately after the members of the cabinet, taking precedence of every Mohammedan cleric except a Sheï’h ül Islam in office.

The south pulpit of the Pantocrator

We have already seen how the Sultan made similar concessions in favour of the Latins of Galata. These two acts, purely voluntary, created the precedent for the status of non-Moslems in the Ottoman Empire. This status is one of the most peculiar features of Turkish polity. The Armenians, the Greeks, the Jews, the Levantine Catholics, and various other fractions of races and religions form each what is called in Turkish a millet—a nation. Each has its own spiritual head, who also exercises jurisdiction in all temporal matters of his flock that concern marriage, the family, and education. Similarly, those who are not Ottoman subjects enjoy rights and privileges which no Western country would tolerate for one moment. This is in virtue of the capitulations granted by early sultans, partly out of magnanimity, partly out of disdain. The Conqueror has been praised for his generosity and statesmanship in granting these concessions. From the Christian point of view he may deserve praise. But if I were a Turk I would be more inclined to denounce his youth and lack of foresight for creating conditions that entailed the ruin of the empire. He did not, it is true, altogether create those conditions. The Byzantine emperors, who ruled an empire more diverse than his own, set the example which Mehmed II followed. But if he had shown less mercy as a conqueror or less deference as a newcomer among old institutions, if he had cleared the Christians out or forced them to accept all the consequences of the conquest, he would have spared his successors many a painful problem. He might even have assimilated a hopelessly heterogeneous population, and his flag might fly to-day on the shore of the Adriatic.

Portrait of John VII Palæologus as one of the Three Wise Men, by Benozzo Gozzoli. Riccardi Chapel, Florence

Photograph by Alinari brothers, Florence

Be that as it may, the Turks lived to regret the policy of the Conqueror. The whole history of the Patriarchate during the Turkish period has been one of constant encroachment on its privileges and constant attempts to preserve them. During this long struggle not even the person of the Patriarch has always been safe. At least four have met violent deaths at the hands of the Turks. The last was Gregory V, who, in revenge for the part played by the Phanariotes in the Greek revolution, was hanged on Easter morning of 1822 in the gateway of his own palace. This gate, at the top of a re-entering flight of steps, has never since been opened. The Conqueror himself, having already seized the glorious cathedral of Eastern Christianity, so far went back on his word as to take possession of the Church of the Holy Apostles. This structure, built by Constantine and magnified by Justinian, had been an imperial Pantheon. After the loss of St. Sophia it became the seat of the Patriarchate. It is true that the Latins had sacked it in 1204, and that Gennadius had voluntarily moved his throne to the church of the All-blessed Virgin. Nevertheless, it was not precisely in accord with the Conqueror’s promises when he razed to the ground the magnificent church that had been the model for St. Mark’s of Venice, and built on its site the first of the mosques bearing a sultan’s name. This example was so faithfully followed by his successors, that of the twenty-five or thirty Byzantine churches still in existence only one is now in Greek hands. It is only fair to add, however, that a few modern churches in Stamboul occupy ancient sites, and that the decrease of the Greek population caused others to be abandoned by their original worshippers.

The one exception I have noted is a small church in the Phanar quarter called St. Mary the Mongolian. This curious name was that of the founder, a natural daughter of Michael Palæologus. After driving out the Latins in 1261 the emperor thought to consolidate his position by offering the hand of the Princess Mary to Holagou, that redoubtable descendant of Tamerlane who destroyed the caliphate of Bagdad. Holagou died, however, while his bride was on her way to him. But the Palæologina continued her journey and married the son of her elderly fiancé. After he in turn had gone the way of his father, the princess returned to Constantinople and built her church and the monastery of which it formed a part. The Lady of the Mongols, as the Greeks called her, was the first member of her house whom the founder of the house of Osman had seen, and she treated him so contemptuously that he paid her back by capturing the city of Nicæa as a base for his future operations against the empire of her fathers. When, less than two hundred years later, the descendant of Osman took the capital of the Palæologi and built there his great mosque, he made a present of St. Mary the Mongolian to his Greek architect. So it is that the Greeks have always been able to retain possession of the church.

Joachim III, two hundred and fifty-fourth in the long line of Ecumenical Patriarchs of Constantinople, played a memorable part in the struggle between the two powers. Like his cousin of the Vatican, he was of humble family. His father was a fisherman in the village of Boyaji-kyöi, on the Bosphorus. The boy was given to the church when he was no more than twelve years old, going in 1846 with his village priest to a monastery of Mount Athos. After the death of his priest, three years later, he found a more powerful protector in the person of the Metropolitan of Cyzicus, who sent him to Bucharest in charge of the Metropolitan of that city. For in those days Bucharest was merely the capital of Wallachia, a Turkish province governed by Phanariote Greeks. In Bucharest the young ecclesiastic definitely took orders and was ordained as a deacon at the age of eighteen. Before his eventual return to Constantinople he found occasion to see something more of the world, spending not less than four years in Vienna. These wanderjahren made up to him in considerable measure his lack of any systematic education. In 1860 his protector became Patriarch, and the young priest was called to make part of his court. Three years later the Patriarch fell from power. But in 1864 Joachim was elected Metropolitan of Varna. The fisherman’s son had already become, that is, and without the favour of his protector, a prince of the church; for the Metropolitans of the Patriarchate form a body corresponding to the College of Cardinals. Eight years later he became a member of the Holy Synod, which is the executive council of the Patriarchate, composed of twelve Metropolitans. In 1874 he was transferred to the important see of Salonica. It is rather curious that the three cities of his longest ecclesiastical residence outside of Constantinople should have passed out of Turkish hands during his lifetime, and in the order of his residence in them. He remained but four years in Salonica. In 1878, at the age of forty-four, he was elected to the throne of St. John Chrysostom.

Sultan Abd ül Hamid II had but recently come to the throne of Osman. As he took account of his empire, shaken by a disastrous war, and gathered the reins of government into his own hands, he discovered that the Orthodox Church had a stanch defender at its head. In 1884, however, Joachim III was compelled to retire. The Sultan, who was no less stanch a defender of the rights of his people as he saw them, had decreed that in all questions at law the Greek priests should no longer be subject to the Patriarchate, but should be tried like Turkish priests by the Moslem religious courts. This the Patriarch stoutly objected to; but he finally expressed his willingness to agree that in criminal cases his priests should be given up to the Turkish courts. The concession was to him a verbal one only, since it is not often that a priest becomes entangled in criminal procedure. As it involved the whole question of the rights of the Patriarchate, however, the Holy Synod refused to countenance even a verbal concession, and Joachim resigned. He then spent sixteen years in “repose,” visiting the different Patriarchates of the empire and finally establishing himself on Mount Athos. He occupied there for several years the picturesque residence of Milopotamo, a dependency of the monastery of the Great Lavra. But in 1901 he was elected a second time to the Patriarchal throne, which he thereafter occupied to the day of his death.

His second reign of eleven years coincided with one of the most crucial periods in Turkish history. The early days of it were marred by such bitterness between Greeks and Bulgarians in Macedonia that Joachim III must have been surprised himself, during the last days of his life, to see soldiers of the two races fighting together against a common enemy. He had grown up in a church that acknowledged no rival and that had formed the habit of detecting and opposing encroachments on its privileges. Not only did he live, however, to see the boundaries of the Patriarchate draw nearer and nearer Constantinople, but to hear members of its diminished flock request the right to use languages other than the Greek of the Gospels, to be served by clergy from among themselves. He had been a bishop in Bulgaria when the Turks, past masters in the art of dividing to rule, listened to the after all not unreasonable plea of the Bulgars to control their own religious affairs and still further narrowed the powers of the Patriarchate by creating a new Bulgarian millet with a primate of its own called the Exarch. A hundred years previously, as a matter of fact, the Bulgarians had had a Patriarch of their own at Ochrida, in Macedonia. But this brought down, in 1870, the ban of excommunication. There followed a merciless feud between the two churches and their followers which reached its height during the second reign of Joachim III. And the odium theologicum was imbittered by an old racial jealousy reaching far back into Byzantine history; for each church was the headquarters in Turkey of a nationalist propaganda in favour of brothers across the border.

In the meantime the revolution of 1908 created new difficulties for the Patriarchate. The Young Turks avowed more openly than the old Turks had done their desire to be rid of capitulations, conventions, special privileges, and all the old tissue of precedent that made the empire a mass of imperia in imperio. Joachim III, however, had profited by the lesson of his first reign. During his retirement the Patriarchate, refusing to yield to Abd ül Hamid, had answered him by closing the churches. To us this seems a childish enough protest, but it is a measure of rigour immensely disliked by the Turks on account of the discontent it arouses among the large Greek population. After holding out six years, the Sultan finally gave in to the Patriarchate, and in 1891 a species of concordat was drawn up between the two parties. Joachim III, accordingly, met the Young Turks more vigorously than he had met Abd ül Hamid. So vigorously did he meet them that Mahmoud Shefket Pasha, in the heat of a controversy over the military service of non-Moslems, burst out one day at the Patriarch: “I will smash the heads of all the Greeks!” The question of schools also became acute, the government demanding a supervision of Greek institutions which the Patriarchate refused to admit. And a policy of pin-pricks was instituted against all the heads of the non-Moslem communities, in a belated attempt to retake the positions lost by Mehmed II and to limit the Patriarchs to their spiritual jurisdiction. It was only after the outbreak of the Italian War and the consequent fall of the Committee of Union and Progress that normal relations with the Porte were restored.

An outsider is free to acknowledge that it was natural enough for the Turks to regret the mistakes of a mediæval policy and to wish to do what they could to unify their very disparate empire. They made the greater mistake, however, of not seeing that it was too late; that, if they were not strong enough to tear up agreements when it suited them, the only course left was to devise some frank and just federation between the different elements of the empire. On the other hand, an outsider is also free to acknowledge that the Patriarchate was, perhaps, too prone to fancy itself attacked, too ready to credit the Turks with stupidity or ill will, too obsessed by the memory of its own historic greatness. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Joachim III was a remarkable prelate. If there was anything personal in his ambition to unite the churches of the East under the ægis of the Phanar, he proved that his views had broadened since the days of the Bulgarian schism and that he held no mean conception of his rôle as the shepherd of a disinherited people. Imposing in his presence, a natural diplomat, more of a scholar than his youthful opportunities had promised, and for those who knew him a saint, he faced the cunning Abd ül Hamid like an equal monarch, never allowing himself to be cozened out of his vigilance. He did more than protect his people. He gave them weapons. He wished his clergy and his laymen to be educated, to be better educated than the masters of the land. He therefore built great schools for them, and created a press. He was not only a statesman, however. It was a matter of concern with him that his church should be alive. Many interesting questions of reform arose during his incumbency—of what would be called, in the Roman Church, Americanism. Indeed, he was sometimes taxed with being too progressive, almost too protestant. He and the Archbishop of Canterbury made overtures to each other, from their two ends of Europe, in the interest of a closer union of Christendom. I know not what there may have been of politics in this ecclesiastical flirtation.

At the outbreak of the Balkan War Joachim III was seventy-eight years old. He was none the less able to conduct the affairs of his church. No one can have taken a greater interest than he in the earlier events of that remarkable campaign. He was still alive when the Bulgarian cannon drew so near that their thunder was audible even at the Phanar. What feelings did the sound rouse in that old enemy of the Exarchate? He must, at all events, have hoped that to him would be given the incomparable honour of reconsecrating St. Sophia. That consummation, which for a moment seemed within the possibilities, was not granted him. He died while the negotiations for an armistice were going on at Chatalja. His funeral took place on the 1st of December, 1912.

The Patriarch Gennadius, as we have seen, first took up his residence in the church of the Holy Apostles and afterward in that of the Pammakaristos—the All-blessed Virgin. There sixteen of his successors reigned in turn till 1591, when Sultan Mourad III turned that interesting eighth-century church into Fetieh Jami—the Mosque of Conquest—in honour of his victories in Persia and Georgia. Then the Patriarchate moved three times more, finally settling in 1601 in the church of St. George at the Phanar. This has been the Vatican of Constantinople for the past three hundred years. The Patriarchs have never made, at the Phanar, any attempt at magnificence. Exiled from St. Sophia, and hoping, waiting, to return thither, they have preferred to live simply, to camp out as it were in expectation, thinking their means best devoted to schools and charitable institutions. The wooden palace of the Patriarchate is a far from imposing building, while the adjoining church is small and plain. It contains little of interest save an old episcopal throne and a few relics and icons, which are supposed to have been saved from St. Sophia. Nevertheless the funeral of Joachim III was a dignified, an imposing, even a splendid ceremony. To this result the Turkish authorities contributed not a little, by maintaining a service of order more perfect than I have seen at any other state pageant in Constantinople. No one who had not a card of admission was allowed even in the street through which the procession was to pass. Along this street black masts were set at intervals, from which hung black gonfalons with white crosses in the centre, while black and white wreaths or garlands decorated all the houses. On either side of the rising curve from the main street to the gate of the Patriarchate, students from the theological college at Halki made a wonderfully picturesque guard of honour in their flowing black robes and brimless black hats, each supporting the staff of a tall church lantern shrouded in black. Within the church even stricter precautions had been taken to prevent the dignity of the ceremony from being marred. The number of tickets issued was sternly limited to the capacity of the narrow nave, and none were granted to ladies—a severity which brought down a violent protest from the better half of Byzantium.

Church of the All-blessed Virgin (Fetieh Jami)

A Greek church sometimes impresses a Westerner as containing too many glittering things within too small a space. On this occasion the natural twilight of the interior and the black gauze in which lamps and icons were veiled toned down any possible effect of tawdriness, while the tall carved and gilded ikonostasion made the right background for the splendour of the ceremony. One hardly realised that it was a funeral. There was no coffin, no flowers, no mortuary candles. The dead Patriarch, arrayed in his pontifical cloth of gold and crowned with his domed gold mitre, sat in his accustomed place at the right of the chancel, on a throne of purple velvet. I was prepared to find it ghastly; but in the half light I found rather a certain Byzantine solemnity. On the purple dais at the right of the Patriarch stood his handsome Grand Vicar, in the flowing black of the church. At the left another priest stood, one of the twelve archimandrites attached to the Patriarchate, holding the episcopal staff which the Conqueror is supposed to have given Gennadius, tipped like Hermes’ caduceus with two serpents’ heads of gold. In front of the dais burned an immense yellow candle, symbolic of the Light of the World, which an acolyte called the Great Candle-bearer always carries before the Patriarch.

The lantern-bearers

The officiating clergy, consisting of the members of the Holy Synod and a number of visiting bishops, stood in front of the ikonostasion, some in simple black, others in magnificent vestments of white satin embroidered with gold. The rest of the church was given up to invited guests. In stalls at the dead Patriarch’s left sat the heads of the other non-Moslem communities of the empire, headed by the Armenian Patriarch and including the Grand Rabbi of Turkey, and even a representative of the Bulgarian Exarch. At the right were grouped the representatives of the Sultan, of the cabinet, and of different departments of government, all in gala uniform and decorations. On the opposite side of the chancel was ranged the diplomatic corps, headed by the Russian ambassador with all his staff and the Roumanian minister. Their Bulgarian, Greek, Montenegrin, and Servian colleagues, being absent, seemed at that historic moment to be only the more present. The other foreign missions, as less concerned with the Orthodox Church, were represented by two secretaries apiece. The overflow of the diplomatic corps, the officers of the international squadron then in the Bosphorus, and a number of Greek secular notabilities filled the body of the nave, in chairs which had been provided for them contrary to all precedents of the Greek Church. The spectacle was extremely brilliant, nor less so for the twilight of the church—and a strange one when one realised that it was all in honour of the old man in the purple chair, his head bowed and his eyes closed, sitting so still and white in his golden robes. But strangest of all was something unuttered in the air, that reminded me a little of when Abd ül Hamid opened his second parliament—a feeling of all that was impersonated there by robe and uniform and star, a sense of forces interwoven past extricating, a stirring of old Byzantine ghosts in this hour of death, which was also in some not quite acknowledged way an hour of victory. Joachim III would scarcely have had a more dramatic funeral if it had taken place in St. Sophia.

The ceremony was not very long. It consisted chiefly of chanting—of humming one might almost say, so low was the tone in which the priests sang the prayers for the dead. No instrumental music is permitted in the Greek rite. At one point of the office two priests in magnificent chasubles, one of whom carried two candles tied together and the other three, went in front of the Patriarch, bowed low, and swung silver censers. Then the secretary of the Holy Synod mounted a high pulpit and delivered a panegyric of Joachim III. And at last he was lifted as he was, sitting on his throne, and carried in solemn procession to his grave in the monastery of Balîklî.

The dead Patriarch

I did not see the procession in any ordered picture but only as a current surging down the steps, from a door at right angles to the one where Gregory V was hanged a hundred years ago, and away between the motionless black figures with their tall lanterns—a crowded current of robes, of uniforms, of priests swinging censers, of other priests carrying jewelled decorations on cushions, and one who bore a silver pitcher of wine to be poured into the grave in the fashion of the older Greeks. Turkish soldiers made a guard of honour before the steps, at this pause of another Greek war. They looked up with a sort of wondering proud passivity at the figure of the dead pontiff, and the two-headed Byzantine eagle emblazoned in gold on the back of his purple throne. I did not see either the last embarking of Joachim III on the yacht lent by the government—did not Mehmed II lend Gennadius his horse?—or his triumphal progress, surrounded by the prelates of his court, through the opened bridges of the harbour, to the Marmora side of the city. We drove, instead, to the monastery of Our Lady of the Fishes, outside the walls, where the priests showed us the church darkened with crape and the grave that was not quite ready. It was an underground room rather, with tiled floor and cemented walls, and beside it lay iron girders for roofing over the top. For the Patriarchs are buried as they come to the grave, sitting, according to the ancient custom of their church.

Presently a false alarm called us to the open, where another crowd was waiting. There was still a long time, however, before the procession came into sight. We spent it in the cypress lane which leads, between Turkish cemeteries, to the monastery. Among the graves a camp of refugees from Thrace was quarantined. Twenty or thirty new mounds were near them, scattered with chloride of lime. Ragged peasants leaned over the wall, grateful, no doubt, for something to break the monotony of their imprisonment. The names of Kîrk Kil’seh and Lüleh Bourgass recurred in their talk. At last an advance guard of cavalry spattered down the muddy lane. After them came policemen, mounted and on foot, followed by choir-boys carrying two tall silver crosses and six of the six-winged silver ornaments symbolising the cherubim of the Revelation. Then all the Greeks about us began to exclaim: “There he is!” and we saw the gold-clad figure coming toward us between the cypresses on his purple throne. Until then there had seemed to me nothing ghastly or barbaric about it. I had looked upon it as a historic survival worthy of all respect. But the dignity was gone as the tired bearers stumbled through the mud carrying the heavy dais. And the old man who had been so handsome and imperious in life looked now, in the clear afternoon sunlight, weary and shrunken and pitiful. I was sorry I had come to stare at him once more. And long afterward an imagination of him haunted me, and I wondered if he were in his little tiled room at last, sitting at peace in his purple chair.