Read Online From The Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple - Free Book Online
Authors: William Dalrymple
Tags: Travel, Non-Fiction
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the destruction of much of its mosaic, the stripping of its altars, nor even a city fire which caused molten lead from the dome to run down the gutters in a flood of boiling metal. As you stand in the narthex you can see even the gossiping tour groups falling silent as they enter the dome chamber; if anyone talks they do so in a hushed whisper. The sacred breaks in on the mundane; and one immediately understands what a Byzantine monk must have felt when he touched a relic or gazed at a sacred icon: for a moment the gates of perception open and one catches a momentary glimpse of the Divine. Here, as nowhere else, one is transported back to the mental world of the Byzantium of John Moschos.
Yet the miraculous preservation of this one building - judged by the Byzantines themselves as their most perfect creation - can easily blind one to the amount that has been lost. Geography apart, John Moschos would not recognise much in this city if he came back today. Of the five hundred churches and monasteries which once decorated the land rising up from the Golden Horn, the remains of less than thirty survive, most of them rebuilt and converted into mosques.
This morning I visited the site of St Polyeuctes, once the greatest church in the whole Christian Empire; Justinian was said to have built Haghia Sophia in an attempt to match it. It would have been a familiar monument to John Moschos; indeed it was probably in a monastery attached to some great church like this that he lodged when he came to the city to finish The Spiritual Meadow.
The church fell into disrepair, and after the Turkish conquest of 1453 it collapsed and was forgotten. In 1960 it was accidentally rediscovered. Briefly it became famous again, and art historians and archaeologists triumphantly announced that many of the innovations of Justinian's reign were pre-empted by the work at St Polyeuctes.
Thirty years later the various archaeological reports are gathering dust, and St Polyeuctes seems to be returning to the earth. The ruins are an open latrine, and stink too badly to be examined at any length; only the most desperate Turkish tramps linger in its portals. Meanwhile the famous capitals - supposedly the first of the characteristic Byzantine basketwork impost-capitals that were to reach their fullest glory in Ravenna - are scattered around a nearby playground, where they provide seats for courting Turks. This means that anyone who wishes to study this crucial phase of early Byzantine sculpture is forced to spend an afternoon peering like a pervert beneath the legs of entwined couples.
Secular Byzantine architecture has fared even worse. The great Theodosian land walls, in their day the most sophisticated defensive military architecture the world had ever seen, are still there; there is also the great fourth-century aqueduct of Valens and a pair of superb arcaded cisterns dating from the time of Justinian. Yet not one single house from Byzantine Constantinople still stands. Even the two largest Imperial palace complexes, the Great Palace and the Palace of Blachernae, have disappeared but for a few arches, a line of windows, some buried foundations and a few splendid floor mosaics.
I spent much of the afternoon in the Mosaic Museum, admiring what has survived. All the work there dates from the late sixth century - just after the reign of Justinian - and is from the Great Palace, which once occupied the slope behind the Blue Mosque. These then are the very floors that the Emperor Heraclius must have paced as he heard of the Persian capture of Jerusalem or the fall of Alexandria.
The initial impression is of the unexpectedly persistent Hellenism. The style of most of the mosaics is pastoral and bucolic, and their warm naturalism seems at first to have more in common with the delicate frescoes of Pompeii than with the stiff, hieratic inhabitants of later Byzantine icons or the unsmiling Pantocrators which overwhelm the domes of so many medieval Byzantine churches.
Yet the miraculous preservation of this one building - judged by the Byzantines themselves as their most perfect creation - can easily blind one to the amount that has been lost. Geography apart, John Moschos would not recognise much in this city if he came back today. Of the five hundred churches and monasteries which once decorated the land rising up from the Golden Horn, the remains of less than thirty survive, most of them rebuilt and converted into mosques.
This morning I visited the site of St Polyeuctes, once the greatest church in the whole Christian Empire; Justinian was said to have built Haghia Sophia in an attempt to match it. It would have been a familiar monument to John Moschos; indeed it was probably in a monastery attached to some great church like this that he lodged when he came to the city to finish The Spiritual Meadow.
The church fell into disrepair, and after the Turkish conquest of 1453 it collapsed and was forgotten. In 1960 it was accidentally rediscovered. Briefly it became famous again, and art historians and archaeologists triumphantly announced that many of the innovations of Justinian's reign were pre-empted by the work at St Polyeuctes.
Thirty years later the various archaeological reports are gathering dust, and St Polyeuctes seems to be returning to the earth. The ruins are an open latrine, and stink too badly to be examined at any length; only the most desperate Turkish tramps linger in its portals. Meanwhile the famous capitals - supposedly the first of the characteristic Byzantine basketwork impost-capitals that were to reach their fullest glory in Ravenna - are scattered around a nearby playground, where they provide seats for courting Turks. This means that anyone who wishes to study this crucial phase of early Byzantine sculpture is forced to spend an afternoon peering like a pervert beneath the legs of entwined couples.
Secular Byzantine architecture has fared even worse. The great Theodosian land walls, in their day the most sophisticated defensive military architecture the world had ever seen, are still there; there is also the great fourth-century aqueduct of Valens and a pair of superb arcaded cisterns dating from the time of Justinian. Yet not one single house from Byzantine Constantinople still stands. Even the two largest Imperial palace complexes, the Great Palace and the Palace of Blachernae, have disappeared but for a few arches, a line of windows, some buried foundations and a few splendid floor mosaics.
I spent much of the afternoon in the Mosaic Museum, admiring what has survived. All the work there dates from the late sixth century - just after the reign of Justinian - and is from the Great Palace, which once occupied the slope behind the Blue Mosque. These then are the very floors that the Emperor Heraclius must have paced as he heard of the Persian capture of Jerusalem or the fall of Alexandria.
The initial impression is of the unexpectedly persistent Hellenism. The style of most of the mosaics is pastoral and bucolic, and their warm naturalism seems at first to have more in common with the delicate frescoes of Pompeii than with the stiff, hieratic inhabitants of later Byzantine icons or the unsmiling Pantocrators which overwhelm the domes of so many medieval Byzantine churches.
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