309. Plan of Church at Ezra. Scale 100 ft. to 1 in.
310. Section of Church at Ezra. Scale 50 ft. to 1 in.
Constantinople.
As before mentioned, all the churches of the capital which were erected before the age of Justinian, have perished, with the one exception of that of St. John Studius mentioned above (page [421]). This may in part be owing to the hurried manner in which they were constructed, and the great quantity of wood consequently employed, which might have risked their destruction anywhere. It is, however, a curious, but architecturally an important, fact that Byzantium possessed every conceivable title to be chosen as the capital of the Empire, except the possession of a good building-stone, or even apparently any suitable material for making good bricks. Wood seems in all times to have been the material most readily obtained and most extensively used for building purposes, and hence the continual recurrence of fires, from before the time of Justinian down to the present day. That monarch was the first who fairly met the difficulty; the two churches erected during his reign, which now exist, are constructed wholly without wood or combustible materials of any sort—and hence their preservation.
The earliest of these two, popularly known as the “Kutchuk Agia Sophia,” or lesser Sta. Sophia, was originally a double church, or more properly speaking two churches placed side by side, precisely in the same manner as the two at Kalat Sema’n (Woodcut No. [298]). The basilica was dedicated to the Apostles Peter and Paul; the domical church, appropriately, to the Martyrs Sergius and Bacchus. The former has entirely disappeared, from which I would infer that it was constructed with pillars and a wooden roof.[[226]] The latter remains very nearly intact. The frescoes and mosaics have, indeed, disappeared from the body of the church, hidden, it is to be hoped, under the mass of whitewash which covers its walls—in the narthex they can still be distinguished.
311. Church of SS. Sergius and Bacchus.
312. Section of Church of SS. Sergius and Bacchus. Scale 50 ft. to 1 in.