Constantinople

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 1, 4 January 1923, Page 13

Constantinople

(By J. Ramsay Macdonald, in the Nation and the / ■••• ; s Athenaeum.)

Constantinople always returns to my mind as .1; first - saw it, enveloped in a black pall of morning mist. In the distance, the palaces on the Bosphorus stood out yellow and clear , in the fresh light, a faint glitter was on ■ the nearer waters of the , Golden Horn, thin pinnacles rose above the mass of black which held the city in its bosom, motor boats barked and darted.out of the obscurity, trailing great flags. A strange, expectant mystery brooded over the scene. The air, the spirit, the staging were of the East, and I waited for something to happen. It happened with magic suddenness. The mist thinned and rolled away. The minarets, the domes, the cypresses of Staraboul, the piled houses of Pera, the myriad masts on the Golden Horn low down between, came out like a wizard’s trick. / There are places—sometimes great cities like Rome, sometimes only buildings like the Tower of London or the j castles of Edinburgh and Stirling—into which time and event have breathed the breath of life and they have become as jiving souls. We think of them as brooding over their past and looking upon‘the generation around them with the detachment of one whose thoughts are fixed elsewhere, or with the pity of one who endures in the midst of a world that is fussing, fuming, and passing into a shadow. They are too dignified to speak; they only muso and remember. Such is Constantinople. The bazaars and the streets are filled with an ever-flowing stream which finds a leisurely backwater in the cafes where men toy with cigarettes, gossip, gamble, and let the hours run smoothly through their fingers, but Constantinople itself the new Rome on its Seven Hills, the creation and glory of Emperors, that blazed in their triumphs and shuddered at their foul deeds, that proclaimed their pride and was ravaged by their fallis remotely apart, inflexibly loyal in its heart and demeanor to the sovereign wills that honored, it so long ago. It is nearly twenty-six centuries since, in obedience to the Delphic oracle, the Greek adventurers who had come to found a colony in Thrace decided to be guided by the crow that flew away with .a piece of their sacrificial offering and dropped it at the point of the peninsula where the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, and the Sea of Marmora meet. So there they founded their city. For sixteen of these centuries it has been a seat of Empire and a capital /of- Faith. No city of the world is like to it. The history of Imperial Rome is but a short span compared to the rule of Constantinople. The invasions, the sieges, the distresses of the one are but minor dramas compared to those, of the other.! Moreover, what scene in the long play of history rises higher in sheer dramatic power and completeness of technique than that of the Fall of Constantinople? What act is so weirdly lit up by conflagration, made so barbaric by the struggles of men who fought with hate and lust and fear, so horrible with the cries and confusion of massacre,, so tragically brought to a climax as that enacted on the night of May 29, 1453- Where else were such protagonists such issues, such settings, brought together on such a stage? The darkness, the horror, the fire-gleams and sword flashes that night, the voice of the conqueror confessing his creed whilst he sat on his horse pawing the dead badies v heaped on the floor of St. Sofia, and leaving a bloody handmark on the pillar upon-which he leaned, still haunt the ' imagination of Christendom, admonish us . in our political policies, and throw upon the sky of our faith a lurid glow that our hearts ibid us believe is the promise of redemption and not only the sinking flare of a sacked city. There are two spots in Constantinople, that appeal / with overpowering force to' every. one with a historical mindthe walls and St. Sofia. x The land walls cross the peninsula where it is about five miles . in width. They have been called “the most ' colossal and pathetic relics of the ancient world that remain in Europe, and are worthy ‘of tire description. Woe- . ful are they, battered by assulkand earthquake; arid time, | left : to decay, after that last attack in 1543, and yet not decaying. The heaps of weed-grown debris at their foot . only , serve - to keep a. sense .of their stoutness. By the gate .which is called Top Kapu, but is best known as St. Ro-

manus, one can stand in the very breach made by the Turkish , artillery where the . Moslems rushed .in over the body of , tho last of the unhappy Byzantine emperors. Gypsies and beggars importune, dance, and whine and crave for alms, but you are hardly conscious of their presence. With the walls, you slumber. in tho past. Outside are wastes, orchards, cypresses, places of burial, an odd building or two; inside, the mud and rubbish of the shrunk city. Dull and sorrowful they seem, outcast and neglected, ; because their work is done. For fifteen centuries they have stood, and like old warriors with children at their knees, they tell through every tower, every gate, almost every stone, of battle, of pomp, of cruelty. From tho top you see the blue Balkan mountains, the sea, the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, the city, dipping down and rising up, the gathering-point for the commerce and the peoples of East and West, and your day and generation sink to but a heart-beat in the life of mankind. St. Sofia dominates all. Near by is the space where the Hippodrome was wiped out for its iniquities- round it are the ruins of the grandeur of the ancient city; beneath it are the foundations of Byzantium with all their undisclosed treasures. Its gates are guarded against the proscribed infidel,; and he who passes through is carefully scrutinised in its courts -lounge soldiers, gamesters, loafers, sightseers. Outwardly, it is dishevelled, confused, not a little disappointing. Tho careless world comes up to its doors—comes lip, but does not pass , within. Beyond, its. doors and curtains is an unjarred peace. The world holds no Holy Place like it. St. Peter’s is never free from bustle and traffic, and is a disturbing mixture... of elevation and vulgarity. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is dark, filthy, stifling. The Pantheon is sadly aged and bereaved, 1 and is dead to \ the soul. In St. Sofia dwells the Holy Wisdom, silent', unembodied, but 'there in the vast space. Its secret is its free spaciousness. The church was founded on superstition, and, in the shadows of its pillars and the corners of its niches, superstition lurks waiting f.»r the credulous to bring it forth, but it does not walk abroad in the great spaces.' In them is nothing that binds you to the earth or to yourself. Truth docs not even whisper to you there it just is. St. Sofia is not an offering of the glad heart revelling in details; it is a dwelling-place of pure being. Let the creed which the devotees murmur there be what it may, tho temple is the abode of the Eternal, the Unconditioned, the Unknowable. ; When you venture to look at its wonders of marble, precious stones, and color, you see, like a hovering shadow through the wash and the inscriptions put on by hands doing homage to* Allah and Mohammed benignant Lee and the symbols of Christ put there first of all by hands doing homage to God and His Son. This is indeed St. Sofia. It is a temple of the universal worship, neither church nor mosque, but something embracing botli, and more spiritual than both. In Palestine, one has to escape from church and shrine and get out upon the hills of Judea, the road to Jericho, the waysides of Samaria, to feel the Presence. It dwells in St. Sofia. Away across the Galata Bridge the tunnel tramway leads up to the European quarter where the West, infected ,by the sensuous luxuriousness of the East,Ms iridescent with putrefaction, where \ the; bookshops are piled with carnal filth, and where troops of colored men in khaki can be seen in open daylight marching with officers at their head to where the brothels are. 1 Thence one I may well look across the inlet to the minarets of St. Sofia with pain and humiliation at heart. The gap between the best and worst thoughts and deeds of' man is infinite in breadth and height, and a . contest for the custodianship of holy places had better hot be fought out too openly or at too close quarters. ; > One is reminded by the strange turnings of the wheel of fortune in these days of how often Constantinople has / appeared to be tottering to its fall and to be ending its long existence as a seat of government, Russian, Bulbar and Greek have coveted possession of its church for* a thousand years. Diplomats and captains have time and' time again assigned 'it as spoil to oho or the other; butthough much chastised by Fate and though ,once captured by an alien race and creed, it, has never fallen from its high estate. Nor apparently, is it to do so' now. It has taken on the image of its conqueror and disavowed the'

people from whom it came. Its hack is turned to Europe and the West,valid ; its face to /Asia and the East. The lights of rejoicing beam from the crescent-tipped minarets of St., Sofia to-day, and we of the West may feel, disappointed that it is so. Yet those who love Constantinople and who put its shrine amongst the highest which Christian hands have ever made need not/ be disturbed. St. Sofia, with its indwelling spirit of spacious calm and freedom, belongs to the universal, \and the city, holding in its keeping the richest and most awful memories of the grandeur and weakness .of erring man, stands for a common human will, baffled in its triumphs and beautiful in its failures. Who is to possess them seems a trivial matter beside the desire that they may be reverently kept by a people who love them. \