by Giles Milton
The library was deep in the bowels of the monastery, reached along winding corridors, through darkened passages, and down endless flights of stairs. It hadn't been used for years. The bare concrete floor echoed the
The Riddle and the Knight
chill of the room, and only a few light bulbs worked. Yet the librarian's desk was piled high with new books waiting to be catalogued. I looked at the stamps on the brown paper parcels. They had come from Greece, the United States, and France and were all works of theology^ Isaias told me that as chief librarian it was his job to shelve them. As the sole user of the library, he was the only person who would ever read them.
He strolled through the library's central aisle, calling out the subjects as he passed them: European history, topography theology, Byzantine studies. Here he paused for a moment and drew down a worn, leather-bound volume by Nikephoros Gregoras, chronicler of fourteenth-century Constantinople. Its title, picked out in gilt, was in Latin: Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae, and it had been published in Bonn in 1829. Isaias opened it with care and scanned the Greek text: "You never know, you might just pick up some clues about Sir John's jousting anecdote in here," he said. "This chap knew just about everything there was to know about the city in those days."
He flicked through the pages for a moment, then stopped. "Here ...," he said with a note of excitement in his voice. "Here ... listen to this ...," and he began to read from the book:
" 'After the birth of his son John, he . . .'—that's the Emperor An-dronicus—'... organised two games which had been used by the Latins for a long time in order to train the body in times of peace. They have the appearance of a duel and are called jousting by the Latins . . . both sides equip themselves with weapons and cover themselves with armour. Then each takes a lance which has three spikes and they rush at each other, meeting each other with great strength.' "
Father Isaias gave a brief smile and looked at me. "So your knight really could have seen jousting in Constantinople," he said. "Who knows, perhaps he was in the city for this very tournament?"
Jousting was indeed new to the Byzantine court, for it had been introduced at the time of Andronicus's wedding to his second wife. She came from Savoy, and her Italian entourage brought the martial sport to the city. Andronicus was instantly hooked and caused a great scandal among Constantinople's upper classes by breaking lances with the foreign knights.
"It's not so surprising that Sir John writes about jousting," said Father Isaias. "When people travel abroad, they tend to notice things that
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are either extremely alien to them, or extremely familiar. Sir John must have been surprised, after travelling all that way from home, to see a sport he was more used to watching in England."
"So you think he really did come?" I asked.
'i wouldn't like to guess whether he came or not," he added, "but if he didn't, he certainly knew how to do his research . . ."
We were interrupted by the chatter of voices, followed by the sight of five priests emerging from the gloom. "Hello," said Isaias with not a hint of surprise. "What brings you lot here?"
"The conference," they said in unison. But already their faces had detected that something was wrong.
"The conference," repeated Isaias with uncertainty. "The conference . . . yes, of course, the conference. But that's tomorrow, isn't it?"
Five faces fell at once. There were five sighs. Five of them muttered "Not again" under their breath. They had been told by the Patriarchate that the conference was today. Isaias thought it was tomorrow. I was surprised there was a conference at all, for I was under the impression that the place had been closed down years ago, but when I asked my question it was brushed aside.
The American pastor was not at all amused. "Well, if you think I'm going to come all this way again tomorrow, you'd . . ." He stopped when he realized he was about to be rude. The German priest was also annoyed. He looked at his watch and huffed loudly. Others were more gracious. The Italian Franciscan chuckled with good humour, and the Armenian priest—a distinguished man sporting a felt trilby—allowed himself an ironic smile. The Anglican vicar, instantly spotting I was English, turned to me and murmured: "The Orthodox are unable to organize anything. This happens every time."
Only Isaias remained unperturbed, for he knew that his monastery could take everything in its stride. I'd arrived out of the blue, yet coffee had already been prepared. The bedrooms were cleaned every day, just in case. Now five priests had turned up unannounced, but it was no cause for alarm. Somewhere in the heart of the monastery, someone would already be preparing for their stay.
"Oh well," said Isaias with a shrug, "I'm sure lunch is being prepared as we speak. I hope you will stay for something to eat, now you've come all the way here."
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The dining room was in the basement. We sat around a carefully laid table, and Isaias said grace while a middle-aged Greek wheeled in lunch on a trolley. The mystery of who had cooked it increased. There were now eight of us sitting down to dine, for Germanios had also appeared, yet the kitchen staff had had less than ten minutes to prepare the endless courses. We began with clear soup, steaming hot and smelling of fresh herbs. This was followed by roast rabbit, rice cooked with pine nuts and saffron, and two different salads. When we had finished these, a second trolley piled high with cakes and fresh fruit was wheeled in.
The conversation was strained, for the American pastor was still cross at having been dragged all the way here for nothing, and at some point Father Isaias—perhaps hoping to lighten the atmosphere—decided to tell a joke. It was a strange little anecdote about Moses and Elijah, and I was lost almost as soon as he began. I looked around the table at a row of blank faces, all politely facing Isaias, and realized that the others were lost too. It was quite clear that no one was going to understand the punchline.
Isaias paused for a moment, and the American, thinking it was the end of the joke, had the misfortune to burst out laughing. Not only that, he clapped his hands loudly as he rocked on his chair. Father Isaias coughed, glanced at him, and continued. After several more minutes, he fell silent and then began to chuckle to himself. This was our cue: from all around the table the six of us all began to roar with laughter. Only Germanios sat there blank-faced, for he hadn't heard a word. But then, seeing us laughing, he laughed as well; a peal of giggles that this time had us all genuinely laughing.
"It makes a change to hear a joke," whispered the Reverend Ian as the laughter died down. "The Greek Orthodox are usually so serious. They're not the sort of people you can have a laugh with."
The Orthodox in Istanbul don't have much to laugh about, for these last remaining descendants of the Byzantine Empire have been brought close to extinction in recent years by the heavy-handed attitude of the Turkish government.
Yet life wasn't always so gloomy: when the Ottoman commander, Mehmet the Conqueror, captured Constantinople in 1453, he found
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himself ruling over such a diverse collection of nationalities that the only way he could control his empire was by giving each of them a large degree of autonomy. The city's huge Greek Orthodox community was no exception, and the Patriarch—the highest Christian authority in the city—was made accountable to the Sultan for the affairs of his people.
Although these Orthodox held their church services in Greek, they still referred to themselves as Romioi —the direct descendants of the Roman founders of Constantinople. Even today, centuries after the Roman Empire was consigned to the history books, the Orthodox consider themselves as Romioi and their Patriarch is known as the Rum Patriarch, or Patriarch of the Romans. As one young Orthodox said to me: "We wouldn't be doing ourselves any favours by calling ourselves Greeks. It's not very politically correct."
But it was their overt support of Greece at the end of the First World War that spelled their downfall. When the Allied fleet entered the Bosporus in 1918, the Romioi were ecstatic. T
he Greek flag was raised in triumph from the Patriarchate, there were mass meetings in support of Greece, and virtually all the Orthodox churches in the city swore an oath of allegiance to Greece. When the supreme commander of the Allied forces arrived in Istanbul, he rode into the city upon a splendid white horse—mimicking the Ottoman conqueror's entry into Constantinople four centuries earlier. The idea behind such a symbolic act came from a Romioi. So did the horse.
The Orthodox were over the moon. For a brief moment it seemed that the holy city of Constantinople had been wrenched back from the infidel, and the Ottoman Sultan had scarcely signed the armistice before Greek troops began flooding into Turkey, determined to create a Greater Greece out of huge chunks of Turkey. Their army captured a string of coastal towns, then pressed on into Anatolia, but here they met their match. A Turkish general—who later found fame as Kemal Ataturk—stopped their advance and, in 1922, routed the Greek army.
The fate of the Orthodox living in rural Turkey was decided by the Treaty of Lausanne: one and a half million were transported to Greece while half a million Muslims in Greece were moved to Turkey. But the problem remained of what to do with the half a million Orthodox Christians living in Constantinople. Although many Turks demanded
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they be expelled without further ado, the Orthodox protested that they had lived in the city for centuries, and after much wrangling, it was agreed that they must be allowed to stay. But life could never be the same for the Romioi. There was too much bad feeling, and many soon joined the exodus and left the city forever. By the end of 1923, the dream of Constantinople becoming once again the "imperial" capital of a Greater Greece was over—and the city that Sir John claims to have visited entered the final stage of its decline.
One afternoon I walked across the new Galata bridge towards the Sul-tanahmet district of Istanbul. When I had first come to the city eleven years earlier, this bridge was a floating iron hulk lined with bars and fish shops, and my schoolfriend Justin and I spent days here drinking Efes Pilsen as we prepared ourselves for the hardships of Kurdistan. It was just as well we did: when we finally arrived in eastern Turkey, we discovered it was Ramadan, there was little to eat, and we returned to Istanbul twenty-eight pounds lighter than when we had left.
Much has changed in the intervening years: Kurdistan is no longer safe to visit, and the bridge itself has gone. Dismantled some years ago and replaced by a modern concrete structure, it now lies in great rusting chunks at the farthest end of the Golden Horn. As I passed these segments, I wondered which had once been home to our favourite bar of all—nameless, dirty, but serving fresh sardines with every pint.
Sadder still were the changes that had overcome the Pudding Shop. This cafe-restaurant—diagonally opposite the Blue Mosque and a stone's throw from Haghia Sophia—was itself a place of pilgrimage in the sixties, attracting an assortment of dropouts, wastrels, and self-proclaimed philosophers, all on the overland trail to India. By the time Justin and I came in 1984, these heady days were over and the Pudding Shop was already in slow decline. But even in its twilight years it was still putting on a brave face—always crowded with those, like us, who grew their hair and wore ethnic beads. There was Bernie, the groovster from New Jersey, and Ragnar, a mathematician from Iceland. And who could forget Andrew, the cheery Dubliner who left a one-line message for us pinned to the wall: "Got the runs. Gone to Kos."
Those were still the grand old days of the Pudding Shop. Now
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plates of chicken and chips are illustrated on plastic boards backed by neon lights, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young have been replaced by the saccharine love songs of Elton John. There is even a shiny new sign billing the restaurant as the "World Famous Pudding Shop." Perhaps fame has been its downfall. Ever since being featured in Midnight Express, it has simply been too well known.
As soon as I had finished my plate of imam bayaldi, I left the restaurant and strolled down the road to the church of Haghia Sophia. Although the coaches had left the car park and the tourists returned to their hotels, a cluster of men still stood outside the gates selling postcards and cans of drink. I was offered a Coke, a shoe shine, and an ice cream before being told by a man selling guides that his brother lived in Manchester United and that his sister liked chips. His guidebooks were little better than his English: none did justice to the church that stood, for more than a millennium, at the spiritual heart of the Byzantine Empire.
I had scarcely entered the cavernous interior of Haghia Sophia before two Turkish lads approached me and led me to a column at the side of the church. It was punctured by a deep hole at about head height and wrapped in a sheet of brass. Sir John had also written about this column, for in his day it was famous for exuding droplets of moisture, and thousands of pilgrims flocked here to rub the miracle-working water into their wounds. But the stone's magical properties have changed in the intervening centuries, as these two Turks wished to demonstrate.
"Stick your thumb in the hole," they said. I pushed my thumb into the column. It was clammy inside and felt damp.
"Now concentrate . . . really think hard ..." I concentrated and suddenly one of them jumped. "There, did you feel it?"
"Feel what?" I said.
"The building ... it moved. I swear, the building moved."
I told him I felt nothing and the other Turk agreed. "Don't listen to him," he said pointing at his friend. "He's stupid. Dim-witted. He really believes you can move the church by twisting your finger in the hole."
"It did move," protested the other. "When he turned his thumb, the whole building shuddered."
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I didn't like to disappoint him, so I agreed that, yes, perhaps the building moved just a fraction. It was all nonsense, of course. The church hadn't moved because he hadn't told me to twist my finger.
Sir John describes Haghia Sophia as the richest and most beautiful church in the world, and he, like other early writers, was left struggling for words. "The church presents a most glorious spectacle," wrote Pro-copius in the sixth century, "extraordinary to those who behold it and altogether incredible to those who are told of it. In height, it rises to the heavens . . . and is distinguished by indescribable beauty . . . The dome does not appear to rest upon a solid foundation, but to cover the place beneath as though it were suspended from heaven by the fabled golden chain."
Even the Emperor Justinian, who commissioned the building, was taken aback by its beauty when he first saw it. Falling to his knees, he uttered the words, "O Solomon, I have surpassed thee."
Today much of the magic has been lost, and even from the outside Haghia Sophia has been swamped by the buildings that surround it. From my hotel I could see the steel grey minarets of Sultanahmet mosque and the domes of Yeni Cami clearly, but the peeling orangey-pink facade of Haghia Sophia was submerged beneath the city's Ottoman monuments. Inside, it is the same. Huge plaques celebrating Allah in Arabic hang in the church, as if in mockery of its glorious Byzantine past.
For days I had been struggling to picture the city in Sir John's time and imagine what sort of people the Byzantines were. Now I had the chance to find out, for the upper gallery of Haghia Sophia preserves a mosaic of the Empress Zoe and her husband Constantine. Although crafted some three centuries before Sir John arrived in the city, I hoped that by gazing into their faces and examining their expressions I might glimpse something of their thoughts as well.
Both the emperor and empress were dressed in richly decorated imperial gowns, and their posture and solemn faces radiated authority. But their eyes stared back at me blankly—iconographic expressions which betrayed no hint of their personalities. What were they thinking? What made them happy? These portraits only told me what I already knew: that the Byzantines loved the solemn unchanging beauty
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that was expressed to such perfection in their icons. Yet to the citizens of Constantinople these finely mosaicked faces were repr
esentations of real people. Zoe had the mosaic made while still married to her first husband. When he died, his portrait was removed to make way for husband number two. When number two also died, Zoe married for a third time, and it is his portrait that has survived.
Despite the church's shabby condition, the monumental dome is still a breathtaking sight, for it hangs above a void in apparent defiance of gravity. Here, beneath its once-gilded cupola, occurred many of the defining events in the history of the Byzantine Empire. The crowning of emperors. The excommunication of the Orthodox Church by the Pope. The desperate prayers held on the night the city fell to the Turks. And it was a service in Haghia Sophia that converted Russia to Christianity. When Vladimir, the pagan Prince of Kiev, wished to seek the true faith, he sent emissaries to all the world's religions. They travelled among Muslims but ruled out Islam because it prohibited alcohol. They went to Rome but found no beauty in the worship. At last they came to Constantinople, where they attended a service of the Divine Liturgy in Haghia Sophia. And here they discovered a religion worthy to take back to their country. "We knew not," they later told Vladimir, "whether we were in heaven or on earth, for surely there is no such splendour or beauty anywhere upon earth. We cannot describe it to you; only this we know, that God dwells there among men, and that their service surpasses the worship of all other places."
One part of me wanted Sir John to have been everywhere he claimed to have travelled, if only to confound the stuffy ranks of English professors who dismissed him as a fraud. But the idea of Sir John inventing his entire book also appealed to me, and I could imagine him sitting in his medieval manor and chuckling to himself as he concocted the most outrageous stories about his supposed voyage.
