Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

There are some twenty-five other buildings in Stamboul that were originally Byzantine churches. That is, of course, but a small proportion of the multitude that astonished Villehardouin and his men. Covering as they do a period of ten centuries, however, they exhibit most interestingly the gradual development of ecclesiastical architecture from the Roman basilica to the high-domed trefoil church of the fourteenth century. This development is not always easy to follow, as in some cases the churches have been much altered to suit Turkish needs. The orientation of a mosque, for instance, differs from that of a church, since the mihrab must face Mecca, and actual changes of structure have occasionally resulted. Then, of course, all interior decoration too visibly representing Christian symbols or the human form has been destroyed or covered up. And a good deal of exterior brickwork has disappeared under plaster and whitewash. Consequently the prowler in Stamboul is on the look-out, if he have the least tinge of archæology in him, for anything that may hint at a pre-Turkish origin. Not that very much can remain above ground to discover. After so much careful searching it will only be a small built-in structure or fragment that will come to light. But several of the attributions of churches are disputed. Their true names were lost with their original worshippers, and it is a comparatively short time since Christians have been free to circulate at will in the Turkish quarters of Stamboul. And there is reason to hope that under many a piece of baroque stencilling an old mosaic waits to be laid bare.

The art of mosaic existed, of course, long before Constantine. But glass mosaics containing a film of gold were the invention of the later empire, and the Byzantine architects made vast use of them. What a museum of this splendid art Constantinople must once have been we can only guess. Ravenna, however, early became important for the study of mosaics, for in the capital of Justinian many of his masterpieces were destroyed during the iconoclastic controversy. And to-day Salonica, Venice, Sicily, and a few widely scattered monasteries contain the chief remaining specimens. In Constantinople, where palaces, churches, public monuments and private houses without number were tapestried with mosaic, there are in 1914 only four buildings where anything is visible of this lost art. The attendants of St. Sophia used to make quite an income by selling mosaics which they picked out of the walls of the galleries. This infamous commerce has now been checked, but there is no telling what ravages were committed while it flourished. The earthquake of 1894 was also disastrous for the decoration of the mosque, correspondingly enlarging the area of plaster in the nave. The vaulting of the aisles and galleries, however, the soffits of the arcades, and the inner narthex still contain a greater extent of mosaic, and presumably older, than exists elsewhere in the city. The church of St. Irene, long a Turkish armoury and now a military museum, also contains, in the narthex, a little mosaic which may be of Justinian’s time. That of the apse belongs to the restoration of the church during the iconoclastic period. And in a chapel of the eighth-century church of the All-blessed Virgin, now Fetieh Jami, where the figures of Christ and twelve prophets still look down from a golden dome, we have work of a much later period—probably the fourteenth century. But a far finer example of the work of that period is to be seen in Kahrieh Jami, once Our Saviour in the Fields.

Kahrieh Jami

Kahrieh Jami, popularly known as the mosaic mosque, is in every way one of the most interesting monuments of Constantinople. Like Imrahor Jamisi it was originally the church of a monastery, and its history goes back as far. Like the Studion, also, it suffered from the quarrels of iconoclasm, it gave hospitality at a historic moment—namely during the last siege—to the miraculous icon of the Shower of the Way, and it fell into Turkish hands during the reign of Baïezid II. Kahrieh Jami means the Mosque of Woe, from the scenes that were enacted there when the Turks stormed the walls. The church seems always to have had a particular connection with Syria. The abbot Theodore, an uncle of Justinian’s empress, came to it from Antioch in 530. Again in the ninth century, when the iconoclasts were finally beaten, the celebrated Syrian monk Michael was made abbot, while pilgrims from Syria always made the monastery their headquarters. The church we know was not the church built outside the walls of Constantine as early, it may be, as the fourth century. The original church was successively rebuilt in the sixth century—by Justinian—in the seventh, in the ninth, and in the eleventh or at the beginning of the twelfth. To this latter restoration by Mary Ducas, a princess with Bulgarian blood in her veins, the church owes its present lines and perhaps a part of its interior decoration.

Mosaic from Kahrieh Jami: Theodore Metochites offering his church to Christ

Photograph by Sébah and Joaillier, Constantinople

The last of the Byzantine restorers was a personage who recalls, as he anticipated, the humanists of the Renaissance. His name was Theodore Metochites, and you may see him in a great striped turban kneeling over the royal door of the inner narthex, offering a model of his church to the seated Christ. He was what we call nowadays, though his history has been repeated in every time and country, a self-made man; and like more than one of those who have risen from nothing to the height of power, he outlived his fortune. Born of poor parents in Nicæa, the city of the creed, and early left an orphan, he went as a young man to Constantinople, where he succeeded by his handsome presence and his talent as an orator in attracting the attention of the emperor Andronicus II. He was, however, more than an orator. He aspired to be a poet as well, and some of his not too intelligible verses have been translated into German. In history he took a particular interest. He became the chief astronomer of his time. His favourite pupil in the latter science was Nicephorus Gregoras, a monk of Our Saviour in the Fields, who, three hundred years before Gregory XIII, proposed to rectify the Julian calendar. If Greek priests realised this fact, and how nearly alike were the names of the two churchmen, they might be more willing to adopt a system which was christened after a Pope. It was characteristic of the time that Metochites took as much interest in astrology as he did in astronomy. Philology was another subject that engrossed him. He made six hundred years ago an attempt which is being made in Athens to-day to restore the Romaic Greek language to its Attic purity, for he was a devoted student of Aristotle and particularly of Plato. With all these scholarly tastes, however, he was a man of affairs. By his success as an ambassador and in other public posts, he rose from one responsibility to another till he became Grand Logothetes—or as we might say, prime minister. He was far-sighted enough to see, a hundred and fifty years before the final catastrophe, the imminence of the Turkish peril. Among his writings, too, are some curiously modern reflections on absolute monarchy. Nevertheless he became involved, through his fidelity to his imperial master, in the long quarrel between Andronicus II and his grandson Andronicus III. When the latter usurped the throne in 1328 Metochites was stripped of his honours and his wealth, his palace—near that of Blacherne—was razed to the ground, and he was sent into exile. Allowed to return after two years, he retired to his own monastery, where he lived only two years more.

If this great man was unhappy in his death, he was happier than perhaps he knew in the monument that has kept alive the memory of his humanism and of his loyalty. The grace of its proportions, the beauty of its marbles, the delicacy of its sculpture, everything about it sets the church apart as a little masterpiece. Kahrieh Jami is also notable for the faded frescoes in its side chapel, where a portrait of Andronicus II looks ghostlike out of a niche, for in no other Constantinople church does there remain any visible trace of painting—or any such tomb as the one, in the same chapel, of the Grand Constable Michael Tornikes, with a long Greek epitaph. What completes, however, this picture of the last days of Byzantium, what gives Kahrieh Jami its unique interest, are its mosaics. In the nave they are still hidden, waiting as if for the day of release from a strange enchantment. But in the narthexes Mohammedan sensibilities have for once spared two long series of scenes from the life of Christ and the legend of Mary. And they make one ask oneself again why so noble an art is practically lost. For richness of effect no other form of surface ornament can equal it. The modern art of painting is, of course, far more expressive; for that very reason it is less suited to mural decoration. Mosaic can carry farther, and for great spaces or distances it is equally expressive—witness the tragic Christ of Cefalù. Moreover, it has decorative effects of its own which painting never can rival, while its greater brilliancy is better suited to most architectural settings. And it is infinitely more durable. Of the great frescoes of the Renaissance some are already gone, while others crack and darken year by year. The art of Michelangelo and Leonardo will one day be as mythic as that of Zeuxis and Apelles, except for the shadow of it saved by our modern processes of reproduction. But the mosaics of Venice, Ravenna, and Sicily, of Salonica and Constantinople, will last as long as the buildings that contain them.