A Palatine Hill which might reveal more dominates the opposite end of the city. This ridge above the Golden Horn is the site of the palace whose name of Blacherne—or Vlaherni as I should be tempted to write it if I were not afraid of my friends the Byzantinists—seems to have been derived from that of some barbarian settler. Was he haply a Wallachian? He settled, at all events, on this hilltop in pre-Constantinian days, and outside the line of the Constantinian, or even of the Theodosian, walls. It was only in the seventh century that the emperor Heraclius threw a wall outside the quarter. Which emperor first built a palace there is not known, but Anastasius I enlarged one as early as the fifth century. In 457 the pious Pulcheria, the virgin empress of Marcian, founded the celebrated shrine of the Madonna of Blacherne. Restored and enlarged in different reigns, it was the object of several of those annual imperial pilgrimages which played so large a part in the life of the ancient city. There was even a day in the year when the emperors bathed in the Holy Well of the church. This áyazma may still be seen in the waterside quarter of Balat. The name Balat is a Turkish corruption of the Greek word for palace, and Aïvan Seraï, as the adjoining quarter is called, means the Palace of the Balcony. These names are another reminder of the palace that figures so often in the chronicles of the crusades. Of the palace itself more remains than of the Great Palace, though it still waits for a Labarte or an Ebersolt. Bits of masonry crop out of the ground or stand visibly among the houses all the way up the hill. Indeed, I suspect that a good deal of the hill itself is artificial. Such, at least, is the case of the high terrace bordering the city wall where the mosque of Aïvas Effendi faces two ivy-mantled towers. An innocent-looking hole in the courtyard of the mosque winds down into a black subterranean maze of passages, stairways, cells, and tiers of arches climbing above bottomless pits. So much earth and rubbish have sifted into this extraordinary labyrinth that its true extent can only be guessed at until it is systematically excavated. In the meantime, archæology has been very busy discussing which of the two contiguous towers that form a part of it was the tower of Anemas, and whether either of them was the tower of the emperor Isaac Angelus. The Anemas in question was a Byzantinised Arab, descendant of the Emir who surrendered Crete to Nicephorus Phocas, and he had the honour of being the first of many prisoners of state to be shut up in his tower. Whichever it may have been, however, the most unarchæological visitor is capable of enjoying a dip into that romantic darkness and the view, from the terrace, of a cypressed country beside the Golden Horn.
The Palace of the Porphyrogenitus
On top of the hill stands the well-preserved ruin known in Turkish as Tekfour Seraï, the Palace of the Crown-Wearer. As to its real name, there has been the most fanciful variety of opinions. The palace is now generally supposed, however, to have been built in the tenth century by Constantine Porphyrogenitus. It seems to have been separate from the Palace of Blacherne, though on the analogy of the Great Palace it may have belonged to the same group. Architects as well as archæologists take a particular interest in Tekfour Seraï, because it is the only authentic piece of domestic building left of Byzantine Constantinople. The main façade is divided into three tiers of arched windows and ornamented by a mosaic of dark and light stone that recalls the brickwork of later Byzantine churches. What the general effect does not recall is the Venetian version of Byzantine civil architecture. We should not take that version too literally, of course, any more than the Venetian Gothic; but St. Mark’s is so true a transcription of a Byzantine church—without the crockets—that one has the more faith in the palaces. The difference may be chiefly one of periods. It is noticeable that the spacing of the arches of Tekfour Seraï is not like that of the Fondaco dei Turchi, to whose designed irregularity Ruskin drew attention. Neither has the checker-work of the façade anything in common with the plaques of porphyry and serpentine reflected in the Grand Canal. It suggests, rather, the checker-work of the Ducal Palace. The first tier of arches, too, looks like the same kind of ground arcade. Is it possible that any influence interacted between the two palaces? If so the presumption would be that it worked in Venice, under a Gothic cloak; for the Ducal Palace, or the lagoon front of it, belongs to the century after the Latin occupation of Constantinople. In the light of my question this latter detail is interesting, since the features I have noted decorate only the sea façade of Tekfour Seraï. The question lies so near the fantastic, however, and so far from any track of sober archæology where I have happened to browse, that I merely ask it and hurry on, leaving for some happy expert, with means to excavate and knowledge to compare, to state the true affiliations of the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus.
The richest remains of old Constantinople are its churches. Little as they are generally known, almost every one knows something about the greatest of them. There seems to me a peculiar fitness in the name of Justinian’s cathedral, which is not exactly rendered by its current vocable. It was not dedicated to any saint, but to the Divine Wisdom; and the Turks still call it Aya Sofya. The cross no longer surmounts that old cathedral, it is true, nor are Christian forms of worship permitted within its walls. In the divine wisdom, however, there is room for more than one form of worship. And St. Sophia, whose marbles, borrowed from half the temples of antiquity, have beautified the rites not only of Mohammed and of Christ, but of Apollo, of Pallas, of Asiatic Cybele, of Egyptian Isis and Osiris and how many older divinities of the pagan world, seems to me more than any other temple to express what is universal in religion, stripped of all pettinesses of creed. I shall make no attempt to analyse the elements of so supreme an expression. One is silenced, too, in the face of so many human associations. A thousand years before St. Peter’s that great dome swung in the Byzantine air, and under it one is bewildered by a cloud of ghosts. Yet impressions detach themselves—of space, of light, of an immense distinction. All the little Turkish rearrangements are swallowed up in it, as must have been the glitter of the Greek ritual. Decoration has no part in the nobility of that effect. There is nothing to hide. Each of those leaping arches and soaring domes does something—and in a way! But there is also a perfection of detail, rich, coloured, as if suffused by a glamour of dusky gold that is between the white morning clarity of paganism and the Gothic twilight.
The churches of Constantinople neither begin nor end with St. Sophia, however. The oldest of them is St. John the Baptist of the Studion, so called from the Roman senator Studius who about 463 founded a monastery near the Golden Gate. The monks by whom this monastery was first peopled belonged to the order known as the Sleepless Ones, because by a system of relays they kept up an unending series of offices. Nevertheless, they found time to gain renown as copyists and illuminators of manuscripts, and some of the hymns they wrote are still sung. The monks took the unpopular side against the iconoclastic emperors, but after the triumph of the iconodules, in the ninth century, the Studion became the most important monastery in the city. Its abbot took precedence of all other abbots. The emperors visited it annually in state. Two of them even exchanged their crowns for its habit. In 1054 several meetings took place there between Constantine X and the legates who had come from Rome to settle the differences between the Pope and the Patriarch. Cardinal Humbert finally settled those differences by laying on the altar of St. Sophia a bull of excommunication against the Patriarch Cerularius and all his followers. That was the first definite schism between the churches. When Michael Palæologus drove the Latin emperors from Constantinople in 1261, he made the first part of his triumphal entry on foot from the Golden Gate to the Studion. In front of him went in a chariot the famous icon of the ὀδηγητρία, the Shower of the Way, which he left in the church. This sacred painting, ascribed to the prolific brush of St. Luke, was acquired with other relics in Jerusalem by Eudoxia, empress of Theodosius II. She gave it to her sister-in-law Pulcheria, who built a special church for it on Seraglio Point. The relic gradually took the place of the Palladium which Constantine brought from Rome. It was prayed to in battles, shown from the walls in sieges, carried in triumphs, and annually borne in procession to the Great Palace for the ceremonies of Easter. The Studion possessed other precious relics of its own, such as the head of John the Baptist and the Sacred Lance. Several persons of importance were buried in the precincts of the monastery. Among them was a Turkish prince, son of Baïezid the Thunderbolt, who died there of the plague in 1417. Brought up as a hostage at the court of Manuel Palæologus, he became a Christian, but for fear of incurring his father’s displeasure the monks would not baptise him till his last illness. It was under Baïezid II that the monastery passed into Turkish hands. By way of compensation the Sultan sent to the Pope of the day, who happened to be Alexander Borgia, the Sacred Lance and other relics. An order of dervishes followed the monks of the Studion, and the church of St. John is now called Emir Ahor or Imrahor Jamisi, the mosque of the Chief of the Stables.
Interior of the Studion
Of the monastery very little remains save a fine cistern and a few fragments of wall. Little more will soon be left of the church unless something be done to save it. A heavy fall of snow crushed in the roof a few years ago, and the powers that be have not yet found means or inclination to preserve that monument of a past in which they had no part. The church is interesting not only because it is the oldest in Constantinople and associated with so much history, but because it is the one pure basilica extant in the city. The best-preserved parts of it are the walls of the narthex, where are still visible the remnants of colonnades with a fine entablature of an early transition period from Corinthian to Byzantine. After the disuse of the basilica as a mosque, the Russian Archæological Institute obtained permission to investigate it and made some interesting discoveries. The north wall of the mosque yard was scraped of its plaster and was found to contain ancient bricks disposed in the form of a cross, proving that the Turkish court takes the place of an early Christian atrium. In the south aisle of the interior three graves were found corresponding perfectly to the description of the last resting-place of the great abbot Theodore of the ninth century. An underground passage was also opened, leading from the bema to the adjoining cistern, and the foundations contained evidence of a more ancient sub-structure. But the most interesting discovery was that of a beautiful marble pavement beneath the Turkish floor, in which figures of men and animals were framed in marble between squares, disks, and geometrical curves of porphyry and serpentine. Unfortunately, some disagreement arose between the Russians and the Ministry of Pious Foundations, and the work was stopped. Nothing was done, however, to protect the ruined basilica, and the last time I saw it the pavement was lost in weeds.