Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

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.