Mosaic from Kahrieh Jami: the Marriage at Cana
Photograph by Sébah and Joaillier, Constantinople
I do not know whether any one, in discussing this matter, has drawn attention to so small a detail as a certain checkered border of disconcerting similarity in the two series. Therefore I, who am nothing of an expert in these questions, will pass it by. But I cannot pass Kahrieh Jami by without pointing out, from the depth of my inexpertness, how unlikely it was that Theodore Metochites, the lover of all things Greek, should send, at the end of the thirteenth century, for one of those hated Latins who had just been driven out of Constantinople, to decorate the church they had left a ruin. Even if it should be proved that the designer of these mosaics was an Italian, however, or that he had watched Giotto in the house of the Scrovegni, it would not alter the fact that the trend of influence was all the other way. Constantinople had for the young Italian cities, down to 1453, an immense artistic prestige. Indeed, the church of the Salute, recalling as it does the lines of a mosque, seems to suggest that in Venice, at least, this influence did not cease with the coming of the Turks. Greek masters of mosaic were invited time and again to decorate Italian interiors. The primitive Italian painters drew Byzantine madonnas on gold backgrounds exactly like mosaicists working in a new—and possibly a cheaper—medium. Giotto himself, like his master Cimabue, made pictures with little cubes of coloured glass. I will not say that the Italians, in turn, never influenced the Greeks; the very name of Constantinople is proof to the contrary. Least of all will I say that Italy had only one source of inspiration. But I will say that there is room to revise our ideas of the Renaissance. Most that has been written about the Renaissance has been written without any first-hand knowledge of Byzantine art, and in the romantic view that the Renaissance was a miraculous reflowering of the classic spirit after a sleep of centuries. Need it dim the glamour of the Renaissance to look upon it as something less of an immaculate conception? If the Renaissance was a reflowering, it was of a plant that had silently grown in another soil. And Kahrieh Jami is the last flower of that plant in its own Byzantine ground.
From Kahrieh Jami to the walls is but a step—in more ways than one. They are the part of old Constantinople that is most visible. They still form an almost complete circuit, of some thirteen miles, around Stamboul. Where the circuit is most broken is along the Golden Horn, though even there large sections of the wall remain. On the land side only one breach has been made, for the railway that leads to Bulgaria and the west. Whether other breaches will follow remains to be seen. For the walls lie under sentence of death. In 1909 a bill passed Parliament and was signed by the Sultan, providing that the walls be pulled down and their materials sold for the public profit. In spite of the disdain under which Constantinople generally lies, I am happy to say that so loud a protest immediately rose to heaven as to dissuade the astonished Young Turks from carrying out their law. I can quite understand that that old rampart of Christendom represents to them merely so much brick and stone in a very bad state of preservation, which they began to demolish five hundred years ago and since have left to encumber the earth. Moreover, they have been to Vienna, they have been to Paris, they have been to all sorts of places. They have seen fine boulevards laid out on the site of ancient fortifications, and they ask themselves: If the Europeans do it, why do they make such a fuss when we propose to? I would rather like to tell them, for Turkey is not the only place where Young Turks grow. However, as none of them will ever read this obscure page I will content myself with saying that I shall never object to the sea-walls being pulled down—provided the railway be made to subside into a tunnel, and the gateways along the Golden Horn be preserved like those of Florence to ornament the city. As for the land walls, they are too great an asset ever to be disposed of except under direst stress of over-population, which now seems remote enough. Only in that case, dear Young Turks, you will also have to cut down your cemetery cypresses outside the walls. And then will double stars be scratched out of many travellers’ handbooks!
Constantinople has long been famous for her walls. About the rocky headland of Seraglio Point, which was the acropolis of the first settlers from Megara, may still lie some blocks of the fortifications built by Pausanias after the battle of Platæa, when he drove the Persians out of Byzantium and made it one of the strongest cities of the ancient world. This wall lasted until it was destroyed in 196 by the emperor Septimius Severus, in revenge upon the Byzantines for having taken the part of his rival Pescennius Niger. He also changed the name of the city to Antonina and made it subject to Perinthos, now a sleepy hamlet of the Marmora called Eregli. But he later refortified the town, on the advice of his son Caracalla. The Byzantium thus enlarged extended into the Golden Horn not quite so far as Yeni Jami, and into the Marmora no farther than the lighthouse of Seraglio Point. When in 328 Constantine the Great decided to turn Byzantium into New Rome, he carried the walls to the vicinity of the Oun Kapan-Azap Kapou bridge on one side, and on the other to the gate of Daoud Pasha, in the Psamatia quarter. He set the forum bearing his name, marked to-day by the so-called Burnt Column, at the place where the city gate of Septimius Severus opened on to the Via Egnatia. His own city gate opened on to that road at the point now called Issa Kapoussou—the Gate of Jesus. The charming little mosque of Ramazan Effendi stands on the street which follows the line of the wall for a short distance to the north. Of the wall itself nothing that can be identified as such remains visible. It was the emperor Theodosius II, he who first brought to Constantinople those much-travelled bronze horses long since naturalised in Venice, who gave the walls their present extension. The inner of the two lines of land walls he built in 413, the outer wall and the moat being added while Attila was ravaging the Balkan peninsula in 447. Two inscriptions, one in Latin and one in Greek, still record this achievement over the gate now called after the Yeni Mevlevi Haneh. Later emperors did no more than repair the work of Theodosius, except at that northwestern corner of the city where the growing importance of the Blacherne quarter necessitated fresh enlargements or defences. Since the Turkish conquest more or less extensive repairs have been carried out by Mehmed II, Mourad IV (1635), and Ahmed III (1721).
The Golden Gate
An infinite variety of interest attaches to these walls—from the gates that pierce them, the towers that flank them at intervals of some sixty feet, the devices, monograms, and inscriptions of every period they contain, the associations they have had so much time to accumulate. Two points, however, have a special interest for expert and layman alike. I have already spoken of Tekfour Seraï, where the Theodosian wall merges into later additions, and of the imperial quarter of Blacherne. I have yet to speak, even more cursorily, of the Golden Gate. This great triple portal and the marble towers flanking it existed before the walls themselves, having been built as a triumphal arch over the Egnatian Way by Theodosius the Great, after his defeat of Maximus in 388. The statue of the emperor and the other sculptures that adorned it once are gone, but you can still see over the central arch the rivet holes of the original inscription:
HAEC LOCA THEVDOSIVS DECORAT POST FATA TYRANNI
AVREA SÆCLO GERIT QVI PORTAM CONSTRVIT AVRO