Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [118]
The church is now a museum, well off the beaten tourist track, far from the seething crowds of the bazaar and the splendors of the mosque of Süleiman the Magnificent. It is in old Istanbul, thoroughly Turkish, with steep, narrow, twisting streets, dilapidated old houses, and hordes of friendly, inquisitive children.
Professor David Talbot Rice, doyen of Byzantine art historians, says that the Savior in Chora “is one of the most, if not the most precious example of later Byzantine art that has come down to us.” It contains an unrivaled series of mosaics, dating from the early fourteenth century, restored by Thomas Whittemore, founder of the Byzantine Institute, and Paul Underwood, working with a team of Turkish and American experts under the aegis of the institute. Hagia Sophia is far bigger, far more magnificent, and also much older. They make an interesting pair, proof that the Byzantines could handle the very large and the small equally well, and that Byzantine art maintained the same general framework of aesthetics, and shone with equal splendor, from the reign of Justinian to that of Andronicus II Palaeologus, seven centuries apart.
The Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453. The Savior in Chora was turned into a mosque some years later, and for four centuries its mosaics were preserved by a succession of Turkish officials. The Turks added a minaret, and they rebuilt the central dome after it collapsed during an earthquake in the eighteenth century, which destroyed the mosaics that must have covered it. The building was secularized at the same time as Hagia Sophia, after Kemal Atatürk set up the secular Turkish Republic, in 1923.
The facade of the church, about ninety feet wide, looks over a little square lovingly restored by Gülersoy, with a pretty Ottoman fountain on one side. There is a big central dome, now topped with a crescent, and subsidiary domes over the surrounding chapels. The monastery that once adjoined the church has long since disappeared. The church is built of alternating bands of red brick and white stone, four courses of each in every band.
Byzantine churches usually have a narthex, a vestibule running the width of the building, with the main church behind it. The Savior in Chora is square under its dome, with a big apse to the east. It is unusual in having two narthexes; one behind the other at its west end, and it also has a side chapel running the full length of the building on the south. The upper walls and ceilings of the narthexes are covered with mosaics, and those of the funerary side chapel with frescoes.
The second narthex, the side chapel, and their decoration were added in a major rebuilding of the church undertaken early in the fourteenth century. We owe its splendors to the generosity and piety of Theodore Metochites, who was grand logothete (chancellor) to the emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus and between about 1303 and 1320 bestowed the fruits of his office and the wealth of the empire on his favorite church. He appears in one of the mosaic panels, kneeling before the seated figure of Christ, offering him a model of the church. Theodore is wearing his best robes and an enormous striped turban. He has a square-cut brown beard and pointed mustaches. He was a man of letters, an astronomer, and a mathematician as well as a statesman and a patron of the arts. His career ended abruptly when he made the mistake of supporting the losing side in a dynastic war. He was allowed to end his days as a monk in the Savior in Chora, sweeping the floor of the church he had beautified so lavishly and where he was subsequently buried.
The mosaics of the Church of the Savior served the same purpose that the stained glass of Western churches did in the Middle Ages. They illustrate passages from the gospels for the edification of the faithful, and they do