Download PDF | John Freely, Ahmet S. Çakmak - Byzantine Monuments of Istanbul-Cambridge University Press (2009).
400 Pages
This is the story of the Byzantine monuments of Istanbul, the city known in the medieval period as Constantinople and in classical antiquity as Byzantium. Constantinople was the capital of the Byzantine Empire from 330 until 1453 and was renowned for the beauty and grandeur of its churches and palaces. The extant Byzantine monuments of Istanbul include more than twenty churches, most notably Hagia Sophia, as well as the remains of the land and sea walls, the Hippodrome, imperial palaces, commemorative columns, reservoirs and cisterns, an aqueduct, a triumphal archway, and a fortified port.
They are described here in chronological order and in the context of their times, through the political, religious, social, economic, intellectual, and artistic developments in the dynasties that came to power during the turbulent Byzantine Age. A major part of the architectural and artistic heritage of Byzantium, these monuments also serve as a link between the world of classical antiquity and the new epochs of early modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire.
John Freely is professor of Physics at the University of the Bosphorus in Istanbul. He is distinguished author and coauthor of more than thirty books on travel, including the renowned Strolling through Istanbul and, more recently, Istanbul, the Imperial City and Inside the Seraglio.
Ahmet S. Cakmak is professor emeritus in the Department of Civil Engineering and Operations Research at Princeton University. He has written extensively on aspects of Byzantine architecture and served as coeditor of Hagia Sophia: From the Age of Justinian to the Present.
Introduction
This is the story of the Byzantine monuments of Istanbul, the city known to the Greeks as Constantinople, the ancient Byzantium. Constantinople was, for more than a thousand years, capital of the Byzantine Empire, which in its earlier period, from the fourth to the sixth century, was synonomous with the Roman Empire. During those centuries, the religion of the empire changed from pagan to Christian and its language from Latin to Greek, giving rise to the culture that in later times was called Byzantine, from the ancient name of its capital. As the great churchman Gennadius was to say in the mid-fifteenth century, when the empire had come to an end, “Though I am a Hellene by speech yet I would never say that I was a Hellene, for I do not believe as Hellenes believe.
I should like to take my name from my faith, and if anyone asks me what I am, I answer, ‘A Christian’ Though my father dwelt in Thessaly, I do not call myself a Thessalian, but a Byzantine, for I am of Byzantium.”’ The surviving Byzantine monuments of Istanbul include more than a score of churches, most notably Hagia Sophia. Other extant monuments include the great land walls of the city and fragments of its sea walls; the remains of two or three palaces; a fortified port; three commemorative columns and the base of a fourth; two huge subterranean cisterns and several smaller ones; three enormous reservoirs; an aqueduct; a number of fragmentary ruins; and part of the Hippodrome, the city’s oldest monument and the only one that can surely be assigned to ancient Byzantium. Other remnants are preserved in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, particularly in the galleries devoted to Istanbul through the Ages and Byzantium and Its Neighbors. Still more are preserved on a deeper level in the city itself, for the streets and squares of Istanbul are built on those of medieval Constantinople and even, in some cases, of ancient Byzantium.
The monuments are described in chronological order as the history of the city unfolds. The first chapter is devoted to the ancient city of Byzantium, and the second describes the events that led Constantine the Great to shift his capital from Rome to Byzantium, which he rebuilt to create the new city of Constantinople in A.D. 330. The next five chapters follow the development of the city during the late Roman era, which can be said to end with the reign of Justinian I (r. 527-65), when the empire reached its peak. Subsequent chapters give an account of the empire’s sharp decline in the medieval era, its slow recovery during the rule of the Macedonian and Comnenus dynasties, its near downfall in the Latin occupation of 1204-61, and the final two centuries of Byzantine Constantinople under the Palaeologus emperors, when Byzantium flourished in a last renaissance before its fall to the Ottoman Turks under Sultan Mehmet II in 1453.
The ups and downs of the empire are reflected in the architectural history of the city, particulary that of its churches. The oldest, St. John of Studius, is a classical Roman basilica, the type used for the first purpose-built churches in the fourth and fifth centuries. The churches of Justinian’s reign — SS. Sergius and Bacchus, Hagia Sophia, and Hagia Eirene — belong to an extraordinary period of prolific and fruitful experiment in architectural forms, as if the architects were searching for new modes of expression for a new age. The decline of the empire in the medieval era is evidenced by an apparent total absence of building activity, for there are no extant churches in the city erected in the three centuries between the reigns of Justinian and Basil I (r. 867-86), founder of the Macedonian dynasty. That was also the time of the iconoclastic movement, when virtually all of the religious images in the churches of the city were destroyed.
Iconoclasm ended a quarter of a century before the rise of the Macedonian dynasty, the beginning of the so-called Middle Byzantine period, when new churches were built and decorated with figurative mosaics. The churches of this period, including the years of the Comnenus dynasty, were smaller than those of earlier times and of a new type, the so-called cross-domed church. Such churches were also built in the Palaeologan revival after the Latin occupation. The dating of churches in the Middle and Late Byzantine periods is often difficult, particularly since most of them have been rebuilt on several occasions, though structures of the Palaeologan era can usually be distinguished by their highly decorative stonework.
The Palaeologan era also produced the extraordinary mosaics and frescoes in the Church of Christ in Chora, the current Kariye Camii museum, the supreme achievement of the last Byzantine renaissance. Throughout the book, the monuments of the city are described in the context of their times — as part of the interrelated political, religious, social, economic, intellectual, and artistic developments that occurred during the principal dynasties that came to power over the long turbulent history of the Byzantine Empire. The monuments that they founded stand today as a major part of the architectural and artistic heritage of Byzantium, a link between the ancient Graeco-Roman world and the new worlds of Renaissance Europe and the Ottoman Empire.
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