by Charles King
In 1910, Whittemore visited, perhaps with Prichard, the Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst, a Munich exhibition of more than three thousand masterpieces of Islamic art that still counts as the largest single gathering of Islamic miniatures, calligraphy, and decorative arts ever staged. The exhibition was a first. Never before had Europeans displayed items from Muslim lands as autonomous products of the human imagination, not stage props adorning an Orientalist fantasy of a harem or a Bedouin tent. More than a hundred thousand people walked through dozens of halls displaying Islamic objects one piece at a time.
As with many artists, collectors, and critics who saw it, the Munich exhibition transformed Whittemore’s understanding of the possibilities and richness of the Near East—its Islamic present as well as its Christian past. Over the next decade, he made a long detour away from art and into the field of refugee relief, but his interest in the region’s many-layered heritage never wavered. His mind, he once confided to a friend, was always in Istanbul. On long walks from the Pera Palace, he came to see that his true calling lay almost literally before him—not in the long lines of Russian refugees queueing up in the hotel lobby but rather in the paving stones and plastered walls of the city itself, in the remnants of old Byzantium.
As Whittemore knew, something called the Byzantine Empire was largely a construct of modern historians. The first appearance of the word Byzantine in English dates only from 1794, and that in a source relating to botany, not history or culture. The people we now call the Byzantines never used that label, nor did they conceive of their world as politically separate from that of their Roman forebears.
True, they had traded pagan rituals for Christian piety, the coarse Latin of the dying western empire for refined Greek, and the silted and flood-prone Tiber River for the free-flowing, world-connecting Bosphorus. Yet they nevertheless called themselves Romans, or Romaioi in Greek, and imagined their civilization as the logical and unbroken continuation of that of Augustus and Marcus Aurelius. The lands under their control expanded and contracted over the centuries, but the Byzantines consistently called anyone living outside their capital city “hoi ex Roms,” foreigners from beyond New Rome, that is, Istanbul. They usually referred to their metropolis as simply “the city,” much as New Yorkers speak of Manhattan. That habit probably gave us the modern name, since the Greek eis tn polin—“to the city”—is tantalizingly similar to “Istanbul.” To this day, ethnic Greeks native to Istanbul are referred to in Turkish as something akin to “Romans,” or Rumlar, an echo of the name Byzantines gave themselves.
The Byzantine heritage had an obvious richness and resilience, an ability to imagine continuity while adapting to the shifting circumstances of what had become, by the early Middle Ages, a borderland state wedged between rival Christian powers in the Balkans, marauding Crusaders pouring in from the west, and multiple waves of invading Muslims from the south and east. Its influence lived on not only in the civilization of the Ottomans themselves—who actually embraced a fair amount of Byzantine culture, except for the Christian theology—but also in the art, music, spirituality, and architecture of Eastern Christendom, from Greece to Russia to Ethiopia.
But despite these living links, Byzantium was long seen by Western scholars and art collectors as the poor cousin of the material culture of ancient Greece and Rome. At worst, writers echoed the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon, who limped toward the conclusion of his magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789) with a sense of exasperation at the foibles and fractiousness of the Byzantines. “I have reached at length the last reign of the princes of Constantinople,” he wrote, “who so feebly sustained the name and majesty of the Caesars.” Byzantine art was similarly thought of as essentially in-between: naïve and hemmed in by convention, not so much antirepresentational as indifferent to representation, less interesting than the hyperrealism of Greek and Roman sculpture that preceded it and less imaginative than the Renaissance tapestries and paintings that followed—an art purpose-built for a world that was dark and God-bound, smelling of incense and candle wax. The adjective Byzantine eventually became a synonym for anything overbureaucratized, recondite, opaque, and ridiculous.
For a small cadre of art historians, however, the Byzantine tradition was a long-forgotten bridge tying together the Greek-speaking Mediterranean, the political legacy of ancient Rome, and the many Eastern influences that would eventually find their highest expression in the architecture of Ottoman Istanbul. The first journal of Byzantine studies emerged in the 1890s, the first international congress (with just thirty participants) was held in the 1920s, and the first international exhibition of Byzantine art was organized in the 1930s. In the interwar years, the entire field of Byzantine studies was given a major boost by the energetic collecting of a single visionary couple, Robert and Mildred Woods Bliss, who stuffed their stately mansion in Washington, DC—Dumbarton Oaks—with artifacts that would prove vital to scholars seeking to understand the lost world of Byzantine emperors, chroniclers, and artisans.
Thomas Whittemore was part of this vanguard of the devoted. He had no degree in art history, and his only real experience with archaeology had been as an assistant on a dig in Egypt before the First World War. What he did have was supreme confidence in his ability to raise enough money to pick up where Gaspare and Giuseppe Fossati had left off—restoring the Hagia Sophia to its former glory and opening its doors to the wider world.
Whittemore had a preternatural ability to sidle up to the great and powerful. During the First World War, he had delivered biscuits and nibbles from the queen of England to her sister, the dowager empress of Russia. His work with Russian refugees had put him in contact with some of the greatest historians and conservators in Europe. The Russian Archaeological Institute, just up the Grande Rue from the Pera Palace, had been the chief institution in Istanbul charged with unearthing the remnants of Byzantium, and with its shuttering after the Bolshevik Revolution, many of its leading lights sought Whittemore’s aid. His family connections in Boston gave him access to American philanthropists, while his misspent youth among artists’ circles and Parisian salons had sharpened his ability to convert his vague enthusiasms into vital projects. “[H]e had a gift for making himself appear to be a charlatan,” recalled Sir Steven Runciman, the distinguished Byzantinist, but “[h]is persuasive powers enabled him also to raise funds . . . from rich American ladies, whom he handled with superb artifice.”
In 1930, Whittemore established the Byzantine Institute, with makeshift offices in Paris, Boston, and Istanbul, as a vehicle for fundraising and a letterhead with which he could approach the Turkish government for a concession to work on the Hagia Sophia. Whittemore’s version of events was that he simply made an entreaty to Mustafa Kemal, who was so taken with the proposal that he slapped a “Closed for Repairs” sign on the mosque the next day, written in his own hand. But that was a fundraiser’s tall tale. Whittemore in fact put to good use the skills he had developed in raising money for Russian refugees: interceding with leading Turkish officials, garnering support from amateur collectors and monied families in the United States, chatting up diplomats in Istanbul and Ankara, and finally approaching a key official named Halil Bey, the former director of the Turkish National Museum and a parliamentarian in the Grand National Assembly. The Harem of Topkapı Palace—the household areas once reserved for women and children—had already been opened to visitors in the spring of 1930. Treating the entire historic area of the old city’s promontory as a single zone of historic significance, from the palace to the Sultanahmet mosque, was part of Henri Prost’s design for a monumental park in the neighborhood. Things were shaping up in Whittemore’s favor.
Politics also played a useful role. Mustafa Kemal’s government was still in the midst of realizing two principal goals: unwinding the long tradition that had fused Islam and state power in the Ottoman Empire and transferring wealth out of the hands of ethnic minorities and toward Muslim Turks. The caliphate had been abolished
, minorities had been pressed to renounce their collective rights, and Islam had been disestablished as the state religion. Making a museum out of the building that was at once the greatest Greek monument beyond the Parthenon and Istanbul’s most important mosque was a brilliant vehicle for realizing the government’s core aims. A rapprochement between Turkey and Greece—occasioned by the coming to power of a more conciliatory government in Athens, even though it was headed by the old firebrand Venizelos—also expanded the scope for reassessing the Greek legacy in Istanbul. In October 1930, the two countries signed a treaty of neutrality and cooperation that, against all expectations, would prove to be one of the most longstanding diplomatic agreements in interwar Europe. Two years later, Mustafa Kemal sent Keriman Halis, still wearing her Miss Universe crown, to meet Venizelos as a symbolic recognition that times had changed between the rival nations. The Hagia Sophia was a similar exercise in cultural détente. Ironically, restoring the greatest material expression of Greek Christianity became one of the most powerful levers wielded by the Kemalists in their drive to make the country more Turkish, more secular, and more secure with its neighbors.
In the summer of 1931, the Turkish Council of Ministers authorized Whittemore’s Byzantine Institute to lead the expedition to revitalize the church and, in particular, to uncover the old mosaics. By December, wood-and-metal scaffolding rose inside the cavernous interior, giving access to spaces above the doorways and to the elevated galleries on the second story overlooking the nave. Week by week, Whittemore’s workmen gently chipped away at the paint and plaster to reveal the glass tesserae, or mosaic pieces, that lay underneath. Tiny bits of surface plaster would cling to the glass, threatening to dislodge the delicate tesserae from their beds, so workmen were instructed to use dental tools to scrape away the vestiges of the Fossatis’ work.
Once they were exposed, the tesserae were gently washed with a chamois and a weak ammonia-and-water solution, rubbed with a soft bristle brush, and then buffed with another chamois. The work was achingly slow, and even though Whittemore had never overseen such a project, he managed to hire talented technicians and supervisors. Venetian mosaicists, Russian workmen, French antiquarians, and American architectural historians were all drawn to what was quickly becoming one of the world’s most intriguing archaeological feats.
The restoration promised a new way of thinking about the city’s Greek heritage. With the old church returned to something of its former glory, the artistic and cultural legacies of the city—the multiple pasts of which the Turks could see themselves as the legitimate and magnanimous custodians—would be revealed as well. If the Acropolis in Athens was one version of what it meant to be Greek—sun-bleached, austere, and pagan—the version being revealed bit by bit in the Hagia Sophia was its natural rival: color-filled, majestic, and a hybrid of East and West in exactly the way that Mustafa Kemal’s republic was imagining itself.
But this was also why Whittemore’s work courted such controversy at the time. The Turkish president may have given his personal blessing to the project, but newspapers were filled with articles decrying the Americans as destroyers of the city’s greatest mosque. Whittemore was denounced as a proselytizer in the guise of an archaeologist, seeking to spread Christianity one chisel cut at a time. Islam prohibited human images, others claimed, and Whittemore was offending religious belief by exposing the mosque’s infidel beginnings.
Secular Turks rallied in response. Halil Bey, the parliamentarian and museum curator, rose to Whittemore’s defense and stressed the scholarly and artistic nature of the enterprise. Yunus Nadi likewise hailed Whittemore’s work as the victory of science over religion. The original decision to plaster over the mosaics under Sultan Abdülmecid I, he wrote in Cumhuriyet, had been an expression of brutal religious conservatism. Now, at last, the artistic glories of the city were being freed from their religious veils and revealed to their secular custodians.
In the summer of 1932, Whittemore traveled to Ankara to report directly to Mustafa Kemal. The president dispatched one of his adopted daughters, Zehra, to receive him at the train station and drive him to the presidential farm outside the capital. There, Whittemore and the Turkish leader walked in the gardens and discussed the ongoing restoration, with Zehra serving as translator. When he was shown early photographs of some newly uncovered mosaics, Mustafa Kemal expressed deep interest in the project and satisfaction with the Byzantine Institute’s labors. On the crowded train back to Istanbul, Whittemore gleefully noted that the president had made sure to arrange a special sleeping berth for him, while the Japanese chargé d’affaires was left to fend for himself.
Whittemore’s earlier digs in Egypt had involved sifting through desert sand or loose rocks, with odds against finding anything but a collapsed wall or a cast-off potsherd. Now, he almost always knew what he was looking for, since the Fossatis had left some record of what they had found nearly a century earlier. Inch by inch, his team retraced the Fossatis’ footsteps, discovering the work the Swiss brothers had done to stabilize many of the mosaics and ensure that they remained firmly attached to the interior walls. Whittemore staged films of his team hard at work, his assistants in white lab coats and overalls and he in a dark suit and ever-present trilby.
In early 1933, one of the teams began chipping away at a blank wall in the south gallery, the second-story promenade that looks down into the building’s main space. The careful chiseling soon revealed a mosaic covering much of a large, east-facing wall. Its outlines seemed to soar toward the ceiling, dwarfing anything in that portion of the structure. The next season, Whittemore’s team turned its full attention to revealing the mosaic tessera by tessera. With each chisel strike or scrape of a dental pick, more and more of a new mosaic revealed itself. Much of it had been lost at some point in the church’s history, perhaps destroyed in an earthquake or hacked away in the desperate hours after Ottoman infantry first stormed into the crowd of Christian worshippers in the fifteenth century. Still, within weeks the full dimensions and content of the image had become clear: a huge version of a religious scene that art historians knew as the Deesis, from the Greek word for prayer or supplication. It turned out to be one of the great treasures of Byzantine art.
A Deesis image typically shows a majestic Jesus Christ flanked on his right by the Virgin Mary and on his left by John the Baptist. Mary and John bow their heads toward the savior, their bodies turned partially toward him, while Jesus looks almost squarely at the observer, his head turned slightly to the right and his right hand raised in blessing. The iconic form exemplifies the very thing that worshippers in an Orthodox church are expected to do themselves: adore the savior, approach him in prayer and humility, and seek his forgiveness literally eye to eye. Unlike the iconography of Western churches, Orthodox images are not simply illustrative—telling a story from the Bible, say—or allegorical—revealing an essential truth in the form of a parable or set of meaning-laced symbols. They are meant to do something: to serve as a portal, an urgent and direct route to the divine. You don’t just admire an Orthodox image; you certainly don’t worship it. You interact with it.
The Deesis was a standard form in Byzantine art, but Whittemore’s specialists knew that this particular example had managed to exceed the bounds of its form. The entire background was composed of gilded tesserae, which made the huge portraits of Jesus, Mary, and John pop into three dimensions. The folds of their garments are deep and shadowed, with the outer edges picking up the ambient light of Christ in his glory. The savior’s lapis-colored cloak shoots out from the flat surface, pushing the duller clothing of the Virgin and John into the background. Jesus’s pale and unlined face glows brighter against this golden background, his light-brown beard merging naturally with the flesh-colored skin and pinkish lips, all framed by a massive halo. With the uncanny depth of the folded gowns, and even the subtle indentations defining the line of Jesus’s collarbone, it is easy to forget that all this was achieved with tiny pieces of glass all assembled on a flat surface wel
l above the sightline of an observer.
But even though Christ is naturally at the center of the Deesis, in this version it is John who steals the show. He is wrapped in a green-and-brown cloak that is not so much draped as crushed, the lines harsh and angular, suggesting wrinkles more than folds. His hair is a mat of red and brown, furlike and mangled, sweeping back from his head and hanging down his back. His beard ends in rough ringlets, obscuring his mouth and contrasting with the light fuzz on the jawline of Jesus.
The expression on his face is one of the most anguished and moving expressions in the Byzantine tradition. His eyebrows almost touch, angling up to meet his furrowed brow. His eyes are hooded as he strains to gaze on the glorified Christ. It is here that the Deesis has its greatest element of visual depth, an exemplary exception to the general rule that Orthodox images eschewed perspective in favor of flatness. His right eye is slightly smaller than his left, making his face uncannily natural and full of life.
Unlike Christ or the Virgin, unlike the emperors and empresses depicted in other mosaics in the Hagia Sophia, John is neither an object of devotion nor a record of some great personage from the Byzantine past. Almost alone among the scores of sacred images that would have surrounded worshippers at the height of the church’s fame, he is meant to be a figure not of veneration but rather of emulation: the very model of piety in sin, rejection of the world, and selfless awe before the holy wisdom.
Literate Greeks would have been able to read the inscription on the far right of the panel. It identifies John not in the way he is normally described in the Western church—as the Baptist, the one who anointed Jesus with water from the Jordan River, a paradoxical act of wiping away the sins of the sinless Son of God. He is here called Ho Prodromos, the predecessor, the first on the road, the one who comes before. He literally points the way, his open left hand disappearing into the blankness of missing tesserae as he gestures toward his right, toward the light streaming in from a towering window, casting the viewer’s attention away from himself and onto the risen Christ.
