Ghost Empire

by Richard Fidler

  The cistern had the capacity to store up to 100 million litres of water for the Great Palace. The rows of pillars – 336 in total – were scavenged, on orders from Justinian, from nearby pagan temples. When the imperial residence shifted to the Blachernae Palace at the other end of the city, the cistern was closed and forgotten.

  Gilles returned to the surface and advised the authorities of his discovery, but the Ottoman rulers were indifferent. For centuries afterwards it was used as a dumping area.

  Medusa head from Basilica Cistern.

  Creative Commons/Matthias Süßen

  TODAY THE CISTERN, known as Yeribati, ‘the Sunken Palace’, is one of Istanbul’s major tourist attractions. Evocative lighting and music intensify the drama of the space. Sean Connery filmed a scene here as 007 in From Russia with Love.

  In a corner of the cistern, at the base of two columns, Joe and I see two stone blocks bearing the face of Medusa, the snake-haired Gorgon of Greek mythology. One of the head-blocks is placed on its side, the other is upside-down. The reason for this strange placement isn’t clear; perhaps it was intended to rob the pagan stones of their demonic power, or maybe the stones were just rotated to fit the columns they support. Still, the sight of the Gorgon’s head, with her half-submerged, baleful gaze, is troubling. She looks like a demon suffering the torments of hell. If the Hagia Sophia is the heaven of this ghost empire, Justinian’s cistern is its abandoned underworld.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Persian Nightmares

  The empire in 610, at the accession of Heraclius.

  Salep and Kaymak

  THE BLUE MOSQUE confronts the Hagia Sophia across the expanse of Sultanahmet Park like an ambitious younger sibling.* Justinian’s great church set an example that no sultan or architect could ignore, and so, despite a gap in age of eleven centuries, the Blue Mosque bears a strong resemblance to its older sister across the way.

  Joe and I enter the mosque through the door reserved for non-Muslims. We remove our shoes and pad comfortably across the carpeted space. This is the first time I’ve been inside a mosque since I was a schoolkid and I’m surprised by the effect that shoelessness has on me. In a church, I’m accustomed to feeling footsore and uncomfortable sitting on those hard wooden pews, but here, the open sprawl of carpet feels comfortable and generous, like the living room of someone’s home. And some home it is: almost every part of the mosque is decorated with intricate tile mosaics of cerulean blue, like the inside of a gigantic aquarium. There are no images of God, Muhammad or Muslim saints: Islam forbids the creation of such images. The visual allusions to Allah are purely abstract; tiles form swirling lines of Qur’anic text and complex geometric patterns, displaying the Islamic tradition of finding the sublime within calligraphy and mathematical perfection.

  Richard Fidler

  Outside the mosque, Joe is intrigued by a cart selling something called salep. I order two cups and we are presented with a creamy hot drink. I hand a paper cup to Joe, who takes a long, slow sip. He closes his eyes and smiles, like he’s just found something he was looking for.

  ‘Right,’ he says emphatically, ‘we’re having salep every day while we’re here.’

  Salep is a gooey mixture of milk, rice flour, sugar and rosewater, but the crucial ingredient is derived from the tubers of wild orchids, which are washed, boiled, dried and ground. The milky concoction is poured into a cup and garnished with cinnamon or crushed pistachios. Turkish people claim that salep is a medicinal drink, effective against all kinds of complaints including bronchitis and heart disease, but Joe and I are happy to drink it for the sweet contentment it brings on a cold morning.

  That night we tell Yasin, the desk clerk at the hotel, how much we love salep.

  ‘Salep is no big deal,’ he says. ‘The really great thing to have in Istanbul is kaymak.’

  Yasin scrawls a name on a post-it note: Pando Kaymak.

  ‘The best kaymak is here,’ he says quietly.

  The next day Joe and I walk down to Eminonu to catch a ferry to the crowded inner-city suburb of Beşiktaş (pronounced like ‘Beshiktash’) on the European shore of the Bosphorus.* Beşiktaş is a gentrified shopping precinct with kebab shops, mobile-phone outlets and burger joints. Joe and I find our way to the cobalt-blue shopfront. This modest café is an institution in Istanbul, like Pellegrini’s in Melbourne or Veselka in New York City; rundown but spick and span, informal but charismatic. The clientele is a mix of old-timers and young Turkish hipsters.

  Joe and I take a seat at a marble-top table as an ancient man shuffles past, tentatively carrying a plate of eggs. This is the proprietor Pando, a man in his nineties with close-cropped hair and white whiskers. Pando and his wife Döne are some of the few remaining Greek Christians in Istanbul. Clustered on the walls are framed photos of Pando’s proud ancestors: moustachioed men with burgundy fezzes perched on their heads.

  Pando Kaymak

  Ismet Ersoy, Culinistanbul.com

  Pando’s café and cream shop was founded in 1895; he was born and raised in this cramped two-storey building. As a boy in the 1920s, he met Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, who came by and shook his hand.

  The café serves a delicious breakfast of fried eggs and sausages, washed down with tea or Turkish coffee. But people mostly come here for the kaymak, which I discover is a kind of clotted cream formed from buffalo milk. It’s a traditional Turkish food, originating from Central Asia.

  Döne comes to our table. She wears an apron over her black cardigan and her grey hair is pulled back into a bun. She bows her head with a degree of old-world formality and smiles at us, ready to take our order.

  I have no Turkish so I grin apologetically, point at the items on the menu and say querulously, ‘Kaymak? Turkish coffee?’

  Döne smiles. ‘Avec du sucre?’ she enquires.

  A little taken aback, I reply, ‘Ah yes, I mean, oui.’

  She’s speaking beautiful French to me, this lovely Greek grandmother in Istanbul.

  ‘Vous êtes Americain?’ she enquires politely.

  ‘Non, madame,’ I stutter, summoning my schoolboy French.

  ‘Nous venons de l’Australie.’

  ‘Ah! Mon mari a un cousin à Melbourne.’

  ‘Je suis né à Melbourne.’

  She jots down our order, ‘Alors, deux plats de kaymak, et cafe turc avec du sucre.’

  ‘Merci, madame.’

  She smiles and withdraws. Joe is agog.

  ‘We’ve been here all this time,’ he gasps, ‘and you speak fluent Turkish?’

  I arch an eyebrow enigmatically. It’s hard to impress a teenage son.

  THE KAYMAK ARRIVES in creamy white dollops on metal platters, with a basket of fresh bread and a pot of honey. After watching what everyone else is doing, I slather some kaymak onto a chunk of bread, drizzle a spoonful of honey across it and take a bite. The spongy bread pushes the kaymak onto the roof of my mouth. The creaminess is very light and delicate, not oily at all, dissolving instantly into a milky sweetness. Then the taste of the honey comes in from the sides – syrupy, aromatic, not too sweet, with a clean finish. The difference between this and regular honey is like the difference between Champagne and Fanta. To eat this every day for breakfast would probably kill me in five years, but it might be worth it.

  Kaymak.

  Ismet Ersoy, Culinistanbul.com

  Kaymak is made like this: fresh buffalo milk is slowly simmered for hours until a thick layer of rich cream forms on the surface. The kaymak is left to cool and then rolled into delicate cylinders. It has a shelf life of barely a day. Pando used to get his milk from a herd of buffalo his family kept in a pasture outside the city. Eventually it became impossible to maintain the herd, and now he buys it in.

  Pando and Döne are among the last of their kind. A hundred years ago there were as many as 130,000 Byzantine Greeks living in the city. Today there are just three thousand. The pre-World War I Ottoman empire was comfortably multi-ethnic, but the modern nation state of Turkey
has witnessed the steady departure of the Greeks into other lands.

  The year 1953 marked the quincentenary of the Ottoman conquest of the city, and the Turkish government of the time thought it best to commemorate things in a low-key manner. But two years later, the same government, struggling for public support, chose to inflame nationalistic and religious fervour against minorities. Rioting broke out in the city; Greek and Armenian shops and homes were vandalised. A mob burst into Pando’s shop and shattered one of his marble counters.

  After the riots, many younger Greeks and Armenians concluded there was no future for them in Turkey. More Greek Christians left Istanbul after 1955 than in the fifty years after the conquest of 1453. Pando and Döne chose to stay, but kept their fractured counter in place, as a mark of shame against the rioters, and as a reminder to themselves that a mob might one day reappear on their doorstep.

  On the day of our visit, Pando’s café was busy, prosperous and evidently much loved. Its future seemed secure, as long as Pando was still living, at least.

  Six months after we left, Pando received an eviction notice. His landlord had plans to renovate the two-storey building and convert it into a bufe, a fast-food outlet. Several Turkish journalists and lawyers took up the cause to keep the cream shop alive. There were passionate articles in the local press, and a Twitter-hashtag campaign briefly flared into life. Nothing, it seems, could be done. Pando Kaymak closed its blue doors for the last time in August 2014, and another tiny fragment of Byzantium died with it.

  King of Kings

  JUSTINIAN’S EXHAUSTED, overstretched empire was passed into the care of his nephew Justin II, who tried to get on top of the empire’s financial troubles by cutting back on the round of indemnities Justinian had been handing out every year to well-armed neighbours. Justin cancelled the annual payments to the Avars, nomadic warriors from Pannonia, who in turn put pressure on the Lombards, who invaded northern Italy, wiping out most of the territorial gains achieved through decades of war and sacrifice by Belisarius and Narses. The Lombards put down roots in the area and married into Italian families, strengthening their hold on the territory.* At the same time the Visigoths began to push the Romans out of their newly reconquered lands in Spain. The empire created by Justinian was so complex and fragile, it seems only Justinian could run it.

  Justin accepted the losses in the west because he thought he saw opportunities in the east. He cancelled the annual indemnity to Khusrau and sent his armies to attack Persia. The ageing Shahanshah retaliated by overrunning the Roman lands in Syria and taking the fortress of Dara, which Belisarius had defended so brilliantly forty-three years earlier. Justin was so troubled by these defeats, he seems to have suffered a breakdown, and he had to be restrained from jumping out the window of the Great Palace. As his mind further unravelled, his attendants found they could only calm him by dragging him around the imperial apartments in a little wagon.

  Justin’s wife, Empress Sophia, stepped in to pick up the reins of government. Sophia, who had already been supervising the finances of the empire, paid off the Persians with an extortionate amount of gold in return for a year’s peace. In the meantime she recalled a capable general named Tiberius to Constantinople to act as co-regent.

  When Justin died in 578, Tiberius became sole Augustus of the Roman empire. The war with the Persians resumed, and Tiberius was forced to agree to another round of protection payments to the marauding Avars to keep them on the far side of the Danube.

  Tiberius ruled for eight difficult years and passed the throne to another competent general named Maurice, to whom he delivered his last words: ‘Make your reign my finest epitaph.’

  MAURICE PROVED to be a capable administrator who brought some stability to the empire and, for a while, even extended its borders. When the great Khusrau I died in 579, Maurice deftly exploited the crisis of succession in the Persian court. Khusrau’s grandson, Khusrau II, was forced to flee Ctesiphon and seek asylum with the Romans. The Persian prince offered to give up Dara, Persian Armenia and the frontier outposts of Mesopotamia if Maurice would help install him as Shahanshah. Khusrau, supported by a Roman expeditionary force, returned to Persia and won back his throne. He kept his bargain with Maurice and surrendered the fortresses. Peace was won, the eastern border was secured, and Constantinople was no longer on the hook for the crippling annual payment to the Persians.

  Maurice could now happily shift his attention and resources to his European borders to settle the problem of the Avars. But he was undone by his own parsimony: he cut the rations of the soldiers on the Danube and cancelled their winter leave, which left his men facing the prospect of spending several frozen months on the front, shivering in their tents. When Maurice economised further by cutting their pay, the army on the Danube mutinied and raised a centurion named Phocas onto their shields. Phocas and his rebels abandoned their posts and marched towards Constantinople.

  Alerted to the danger, Maurice begged the Blues and the Greens to defend the capital against the mutineers, but food shortages had left the population sullen and restive. A riot broke out in the capital, and Maurice and his family escaped in a boat to Chalcedon.

  Phocas entered the city in 602, flinging handfuls of gold to the cheering crowds in the streets. He assumed the throne and sent his soldiers to track down his predecessor. Maurice was captured and forced to watch as his children were beheaded. Then it was his turn. The headless bodies were thrown into the sea. A large crowd came down to watch the corpses bobbing around on the water.

  HISTORIAN EDWARD GIBBON thought Phocas’s appearance spoke of his degenerate character, writing of ‘his diminutive and deformed person, the closeness of his shaggy eyebrows, his red hair, his beardless chin, and his cheek disfigured and discoloured by a formidable scar’. Phocas was aware his authority was tenuous. He could hardly claim, as Constantine and Justinian did, to be the favoured son of heaven when everyone knew he was a crude opportunist who had murdered his predecessor. Phocas tried to crush disquiet among the people and the aristocracy with a reign of terror, punishing his enemies, real or otherwise, through slow torture and execution.

  The turmoil in Constantinople encouraged ambitious warlords and kings on the empire’s fringes to prod its borders. The Avars began to eat away at the rich imperial lands in Thrace, sending raiding parties right up to the Theodosian Walls. Phocas, distracted by internal dissent, agreed to pay more gold to the Avar leaders to make them go away.

  Khusrau II.

  Creative Commons/World Imaging

  But a far greater danger was brewing in Persia. Khusrau’s deal had been with Maurice, the emperor who had come to his aid and rescued his throne. The Shahanshah simply refused to recognise the man responsible for his murder, and when Phocas sent an ambassador to make formal contact, Khusrau had the man arrested. The interminable war between the Romans and the Persians was about to move into a dangerous new phase, and its ultimate beneficiary would be a power that no one in either empire saw coming.

  KHUSRAU II, KING OF KINGS of the Sassanid Persians, was in his early twenties when he was raised to the throne by his two uncles, who had led the palace coup that blinded and killed his father Hormazd.

  Khusrau grew his beard into ringlets and wore gowns of heavy embroidered silk. Visitors to his palace in Ctesiphon entered through the Great Arch of Khusrau, the biggest unsupported arch in the world,* passing into an immense ceremonial hall with a 90-metre carpet made of silk, embroidered with gold and pearls. The basement of the palace contained a vast inner sanctum that was said to house a harem of three thousand concubines. The Shahanshah also kept a summer palace in the cooler highlands of the Persian plateau maintained with hunting grounds and a private zoo of exotic animals.

  Khusrau’s enjoyment of his kingly pleasures was tempered by the shakiness of his position in Ctesiphon. The Zoroastrian priesthood resented his toleration of Christianity – his queen and his finance minister were both Christians – and there was broad discontent among the people over the de
al he had struck with a Roman emperor to win back his throne. Maurice’s murder offered Khusrau a chance to shore up his failing authority. When a foreigner showed up in Ctesiphon claiming to be Maurice’s only surviving son, Khusrau declared war on Phocas, in the name of this spurious pretender.

  Khusrau’s armies crossed the Euphrates and overran the Roman outposts in Mesopotamia with astonishing ease. Encouraged by his easy victories, the Shahanshah ordered his forces to keep marching west.

  A year later the Persians took the fortified city of Edessa. Then, in a series of cascading defeats for the Romans, Khusrau’s soldiers crossed the Taurus Mountains and swept into Anatolia. The Persians now picked up a deadly momentum that carried them right across Asia Minor to Chalcedon. Suddenly, shockingly, Khusrau was at the doorstep of Constantinople itself. Persian campfires across the strait were visible from the windows of the Great Palace.

  A tremor of fear coursed through the streets of Constantinople. Phocas, for all the terror he could inflict upon his own people, was evidently powerless to stop Khusrau’s outrageous incursions into their lands. The Romans believed that God made winners of the righteous, and Phocas, clearly, was cast as a loser. Phocas heard the rumblings of dissent and cracked down hard, lashing out at his enemies in the city. To deflect blame, Phocas launched a persecution of Jews across the empire. The Jews of Antioch retaliated with a massacre of the local Christians. Within Constantinople, Greens partisans rioted and burnt down several buildings.

  News of the chaos in Constantinople travelled across the Mediterranean to North Africa, where the Roman governor commanded a sizeable army and a fleet of ships. In the summer of 610, the governor sent his fleet to Constantinople, led by his thirty-five-year-old son, Heraclius.