Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [7]
Much of our classical heritage was transmitted by Byzantium. Its art affected medieval and modern art. Byzantines taught us how to set a large dome over a quadrangular space, gave us patterns of diplomacy and ceremony—even introduced forks. (An eleventh-century Byzantine princess brought these in marriage to a doge of Venice, shocking guests, just as her cousin, wed to a German emperor, scandalized his court by taking baths and wearing silk.)
“City of the world’s desire,” hub of the medieval universe, Constantinople bestrode a superbly defensible peninsula and sheltered harbor, the Golden Horn, at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. Here in the legendary past Greek settlers named the place after their leader, Byzas. And Byzantium it also continued to be called, as well as the Eastern Roman Empire it ruled, until the Turks captured it in that fateful year, 1453, and later renamed it Istanbul.
To this day the city retains its fascination: the kaleidoscope of craft like water bugs on the Golden Horn, the cries of vendors in the labyrinthine covered bazaar, porters jackknifed under loads threading teeming alleys—the unpredictability of its life. Forget logic if you search a street address. Sit to sip tea by the seawall near Justinian’s palace, and don’t be surprised if a brown bear shags by with a gaggle of Gypsies.
Threading crowds of fervent Muslims boarding buses for the pilgrimage to Mecca, I entered Hagia Sophia, once the Church of the Holy Wisdom, Christendom’s crowning glory. Fragmentary mosaics hint at the golden sheen that illumined the shrine. Light shafting through a corona of windows seems to levitate the giant ribbed dome. Let imagination fill the vast nave with worshipers, chanting clergy robed in brocade, incense swirling through a constellation of oil lamps toward that gilded dome suspended as if from heaven, and you will share Justinian’s exultation. In 537 he beheld his masterwork complete: “Solomon, I have outdone thee!”
Constantine and Justinian—these two emperors, both born in Serbia, set Byzantium on the path to greatness. Constantine’s Christianization of the Roman Empire in the fourth century is one of history’s mightiest revolutions. He chose a persecuted minority sect—an illegal, subversive intruder into the Roman state—and made it the cornerstone of a world-shaking power: Christendom.
His sainted mother, Helena, in her old age made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There, with a rapidity and assurance that can only strike wonder in the modern archaeologist, legend has it she unearthed the True Cross, the lance, and the crown of thorns and identified, under a temple of Aphrodite, the tomb of Christ. Over it her thrilled son ordered buildings to “surpass the most magnificent monuments any city possesses”—a decadelong labor now incorporated in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Constantine himself presided over some 250 bishops assembled at Nicaea for the first of seven ecumenical, or universal, councils that forged the Orthodox faith. They formulated the familiar Nicene Creed (“I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth …”). Those opposing the council’s decrees were branded heretics.
Constantine gave Byzantium its spiritual focus. Justinian in the sixth century gave it its greatest temporal sway. Reconquering lands once Roman, he magnified his empire by founding or rebuilding cities, monasteries, and seven hundred fortifications. In the Balkans, the Levant, Italy, from the Euphrates to the Pillars of Hercules, I found impressive works. In Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya I strolled cities roofless to the North African sky. Triumphal arches, amphitheaters, baths, and grids of stone-paved streets lined with shops and town houses bespoke Roman origins. Justinian’s fortresses and churches placed them in the Byzantine world. Some stand alone in an empty countryside.
In the Algerian-Tunisian