Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [19]
Greece, entering that holocaust with the prospect of Turkish territory, at war’s end occupied ancient Smyrna (today palm-shaded Izmir ringing its spacious Aegean harbor). Then, with defeated Turkey in revolt and the sultanate toppling, the Greeks saw their big chance. But their invasion deep into Asia Minor, hurled back, perished in the carnage of Smyrna and the mass exodus that ensued.
In Istanbul’s Rum Patrikhanesi, a garden of peace amid the city’s clamor and squalor, stands the eighteenth-century terracotta basilica of St. George and the modest residence and offices of the spiritual leader of the Orthodox faithful throughout the world. His All Holiness, Dimitrios, “by the Grace of God, Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome, and Ecumenical Patriarch,” rose from his desk and took my hand warmly in both of his.
The patriarch told me he sees as his role the promotion of understanding and harmony among “sister” Orthodox Churches. Many separated from Constantinople’s fold when their nations broke free of the Turks.
More than 70 percent of the baptized Orthodox today dwell in Communist countries. Churches in exile abound. The national churches of Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Russia are auto-cephalous (self-headed), with their own patriarchs. But the Ecumenical Patriarch is primus inter pares—first among equals—and his spiritual sway extends far beyond the confines of his church in Istanbul, which he heads as a Turkish citizen.
With a dwindling flock, stripped of the last vestige of civil authority, even forbidden to proselytize in his few Turkish parishes, why does he remain in a Muslim city? The Archbishop of Constantinople became head of the Byzantine Church because of his special position at the capital of the empire, he said. He is bound to this historic see.
On my way out I paused by the patriarchate’s central gate, painted black and welded shut. Here a patriarch was hanged for treason when the War of Greek Independence broke out in 1821. As I stepped into the teeming streets where a priest is forbidden to wear his clerical garb, I thought back on the fallen glories of Byzantium’s great church, still claiming universal dominion, still clinging in the City of Constantine.
God had punished the Greeks, Russians piously observed in 1453 when the Turks took Constantinople. For betraying their faith by submitting to Rome, He withdrew His protection, and their empire fell. Now Moscow moved from the periphery to the center of the Orthodox world, shining in the purity of her faith. “Two Romes have fallen. A third stands fast. A fourth there cannot be,” ran the monkly prophecy.
Rising from medieval isolation in Russia’s forested northern plains, Muscovy shook off the Mongol yoke that had crushed Kiev, overcame Novgorod and other fur-trading rivals, and pushed back Catholic Lithuanians and Poles. Ringed by enemies of her faith, xenophobic Moscow raised onion-domed churches and monasteries in forest clearings all the way to the inhospitable shores of the White Sea and fiercely clung to traditional rites.
Ivan the Great married Sophia Paleologos, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, and adopted the Byzantine double-headed eagle and the title of tsar, derived from Caesar. Holy Russia became one great religious house, ever purging herself. Military campaigns