Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [12]
A shudder shot through me when I thought of another procession. Basil blinded the 15,000 prisoners, sparing one in a hundred to lead the macabre march home.
Samuel watched in horror the return of his once proud army, eye sockets vacant, shuffling, stumbling, clutching one another, each hundred led by a one-eyed soldier. The sight killed him. And his empire too—swallowed by Byzantium. Basil the Bulgar-slayer was one name Bulgarians would not forget.
Awesome magnificence and diplomatic cunning, military might, terror—more effective than these were Byzantium’s missionaries. The Orthodox faith forged unity out of a diversity of nations. It brought the Slavs into the Byzantine universe.
The “apostles of the Slavs,” ninth-century Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica, invented an alphabet in which the newly converted Slavs first learned to write. Their script, and the Greek-based Cyrillic that soon supplanted it, conveyed Byzantine liturgy and learning to the Balkans, then to Russia, molding their thoughts, giving them brotherhood in faith and a Slavonic literary language, the Latin of the East.
“Civilizing the Slavs was Byzantium’s most enduring gift to the world,” Harvard professor Ihor Ševčenko told me. Among the consequences, Kievan Russia emerged from pagan isolation to join the European political and cultural community. Byzantium was Russia’s gateway to Europe.
In Kiev, Professor Andrei Bielecki told me how Vladimir, prince in that Mother of Russian Cities, shopped about for a religion for his people. He sampled the Hebrew, Latin, and Islamic faiths. Fond of women, he favored the Muslim promise after death of fulfillment of carnal desires. But alas, no wine. “Drinking is the joy of the Rus,” a chronicle has him say.
So he sent emissaries to Constantinople. Inspired by the resplendent liturgy in Hagia Sophia, they “knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor.… We only know that God dwells there among men.” Whereupon Vladimir had his people, on pain of the sword, baptized in the Dnieper.
Out of the wreckage of the Mongol empire, princes of Muscovy climbed to power, golden domes and crosses gleaming above the red-brick walls of their Kremlin. Cossacks, fur traders, missionaries spread across Siberia.
At Sitka, on snow-peaked Baranof Island in Alaska, the icons, incense, and chanting in onion-domed St. Michael’s Cathedral serve as reminders that in the eighteenth century the faith of Byzantium came across the Bering Sea to its fourth continent: Russian America. Here I joined a Tlingit congregation worshiping with an Aleut priest—a ritual like that I had witnessed in Justinian’s monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai.
“We change very little,” Father Eugene Bourdukofsky said as he proudly showed me an icon, the Virgin of Sitka. “That is the essence of Orthodoxy, the true faith.”
To change or not to change. Here was a key to understanding the chasm that divides the thought world of Byzantium—and eastern Europe—from the West. The West transformed itself through the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, and the rise of science into a dynamic society enshrining the individual and progress through free inquiry and experiment. The East, until the eighteenth century, remained essentially static. Byzantine thought sees its world not in process; it has arrived, its eternal order God-ordained.
The Byzantine mind transformed the classical Greek word to innovate into to injure. In a monarch, a penchant for innovation is disastrous, Procopius insisted, for where there is innovation, there is no security. In a subject, deviation is not only heresy but also a crime against the state. So threatening was change that ritual reforms in seventeenth-century Russia split the church. Old Believers endured unspeakable tortures and martyred themselves in mass suicide rather than make the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of two.
Ritual details widened the