Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

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.

VII.—REFUGEES

They say they do not like Christians to live in the sacred suburb of Eyoub. But they are used by this time to seeing us. Too many of us go there, alas, to climb the hill and look at the view and feel as sentimental as we can over Aziyadé. And certainly the good people of Eyoub made no objection to Lady Lowther when she established in their midst a committee for distributing food and clothing and fuel to the families of poor soldiers and to the refugees. The hordes of Asia had not stopped pouring through the city on their way to the west before another horde began pouring the other way, out of Europe. Within a month there could hardly have been a Turk left between the Bulgarian border and the Chatalja lines. It was partly, no doubt, due to the narrowness of the field of operations, lying as it did between two converging seas, which enabled the conquering army to drive the whole country in a battue before it. But I cannot imagine any Western people trekking with such unanimity. They would have been more firmly rooted to the soil. The Turk, however, is still half a tent-man, and he has never felt perfectly at home in Europe. So village after village harnessed its black water-buffalo or its little grey oxen to its carts of clumsy wheels, piled thereon its few effects, covered them with matting spread over bent saplings, and came into Constantinople.