Part 19 (2/2)

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 54.--S. THEODOSIA. THE INTERIOR, LOOKING WEST.

(From a Photograph.)]

Access to the galleries is gained by means of a staircase in the northern bay of the pa.s.sage under the western gallery. For some distance from the floor of the church the staircase has wooden steps, but from the first landing, where a door in the northern wall stands on a level with the ground outside the church, stone steps are employed for the remainder of the way up. The wooden steps are Turkish, but may replace Byzantine steps of the same material. The stone steps are Byzantine, and could be reached directly from outside the church through the door situated beside the landing from which they start. Probably in Byzantine days the stone staircase could not be reached from the floor of the church, and furnished the only means of access to the galleries.

The galleries are covered by the barrel vaults of the cross arms. At the east end of the northern and the southern gallery are chapels covered with domes and placed above the prothesis and the diaconicon. As stated already, the aperture in the roof of the chamber in the south-eastern dome pier opens into the floor of the southern chapel, and probably a similar aperture in the roof of the corresponding chamber in the north-eastern pier opened into the floor of the chapel at the east end of the northern gallery. The presence of chapels in such an unusual position is explained by the desire to celebrate special services in honour of the saints whose remains were buried in the chambers in the piers, as though in crypts.

The domes over the chapels are hemispherical and rest directly on the pendentives. They are ribless and without drums. The arches on which they rest are semicircular and, with their infilling of triple windows, are Byzantine. We may safely set down all four angle domes as belonging to the original design, though the arches by which they communicate with the galleries are pointed, and are therefore Turkish insertions or enlargements.

On the exterior the eastern wall of the church is fairly well preserved.

The three apses project boldly; the central apse in seven sides, the lateral apses in three sides. Although the central apse is unquestionably a piece of Byzantine work it does not appear to be the original apse of the building, but a subst.i.tute inserted in the course of repairs before the Turkish conquest. This accounts for its plain appearance as compared with the lateral apses, which are decorated with four tiers of five niches, corresponding to the window height and the vaulting-level within the church. As on the apses of the Pantokrator (p.

235) the niches are shallow segments in plan, set back in one brick order, and without impost moulding. In the lowest tier three arches are introduced between pilasters, with a window in the central arch. Above the four tiers of niches is a boldly corbelled cornice, like that in the chapel attached to the Pammakaristos. One cannot help admiring how an effect so decidedly rich and beautiful was produced by very simple means.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE XLV.

(1) S. THEODOSIA. DOME OVER THE STAIRCASE TO THE GALLERIES.

(2) S. THEODOSIA. THE NARTHEX, LOOKING NORTH.

_To face page 172._]

Details of the tiled floor and of several carved fragments are given in Fig. 76.

For some time after the conquest the building was used as a naval store.[283] It was converted into a mosque in the reign of Sultan Selim II. (1566-74) by a wealthy courtier, Ha.s.san Pasha, and was known as Ha.s.san Pasha Mesjedi.[284] Its t.i.tle, the mosque of the Rose, doubtless refers to its beauty, just as another mosque is, for a similar reason, styled Laleli Jamissi, the mosque of the Tulip.

Before leaving the church we may consider the claims of the tradition that the chamber in the south-eastern dome pier contains the tomb of the last Byzantine emperor. The tradition was first announced to the general public by the Patriarch Constantius in a letter which he addressed in 1852 to Mr. Scarlatus Byzantius, his fellow-student in all pertaining to the antiquities and history of Constantinople.[285] According to the patriarch, the tradition was accepted by the Turkish ecclesiastical authorities of the city, and was current among the old men of the Greek community resident in the quarter of Phanar; he himself knew the tradition even in his boyhood. Furthermore, distinguished European visitors who inquired for Byzantine imperial tombs were directed by Turkish officials to the church of S. Theodosia, as the resting-place of the emperor who died with the Empire; and the inscription over the door of the chamber referred to that champion of the Greek cause. Strangely enough, the patriarch said nothing about this tradition when treating of the church of S. Theodosia in his book on _Ancient and Modern Constantinople_, published in 1844. In that work, indeed, he a.s.signs the tomb in question to some martyr who suffered during the iconoclastic period.[286] This strange silence he explains in his letter written in 1852 as due to prudence; he had reason then to 'put the seal of Alexander upon his lips.'

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 55. (For other details in the church see Fig. 76.)]

The tradition has recently received the honour of being supported by Mr.

Siderides, to whom students of Byzantine archaeology are so deeply indebted. But while accepting it in general, Mr. Siderides thinks it is open to correction on two points of detail.

In his opinion the church of S. Theodosia was not the first sanctuary to guard the mortal remains of Constantine Palaeologus, but the second. Nor was the body of the fallen hero, when ultimately brought to this church, placed, as the patriarch supposed, in the chamber in the south-eastern pier, but in the chamber in the pier to the north-east. The reasons urged in favour of these modifications of the tradition, as reported by the Patriarch Constantius, are substantially the following:--In the first place, the body of the last Constantine, after its decapitation, was, at the express order of the victorious Sultan, buried with royal honours, [Greek: meta basilikes times],[287] and therefore, so Mr.

Siderides maintains, must have been interred in the church which then enjoyed the highest rank in the Greek community of the city, viz. the church of the Holy Apostles, the patriarchal cathedral after the appropriation of S. Sophia by the Turks. The church of the Holy Apostles, however, soon lost that distinction, and was torn down to make room for the mosque which bears the name of the conqueror of the city.

Under these circ.u.mstances what more natural, asks Mr. Siderides, than that pious and patriotic hands should remove as many objects of historical or religious value as possible from the doomed shrine, and deposit them where men might still do them reverence--especially when there was every facility for the removal of such objects, owing to the fact that a Christian architect, Christoboulos, had charge of the destruction of the church and of the erection of the mosque.

Some of those objects were doubtless transferred to the church of the Pammakaristos,[288] where the Patriarch Gennadius placed his throne after abandoning the church of the Holy Apostles; but others may have been taken elsewhere. And for proof that the church of S. Theodosia had the honour of being entrusted with the care of some of the relics removed from the Holy Apostles, Mr. Siderides points to the inscription over the doorway leading to the chamber in the south-eastern dome pier.

According to the inscription that chamber is consecrated by the remains of Christ's apostles, _i.e._ the relics which formed the peculiar treasure of the church of the Holy Apostles.

This being so, Mr. Siderides argues, on the strength of the tradition under review, that the remains of the last Constantine also were brought from the church of the Holy Apostles to S. Theodosia under the circ.u.mstances described.

As to the position of the imperial tomb when thus transferred to the church of S. Theodosia, Mr. Siderides insists that it cannot be in the chamber in the south-eastern dome pier: first, because the religious veneration cherished by Moslems for the grave in that chamber is inconsistent with the idea that the grave contains the ashes of the enemy who, in 1453, resisted the Sultan's attack upon the city; secondly, because the inscription over the doorway leading to the chamber expressly declares the chamber to be the resting-place of Christ's apostles. Hence Mr. Siderides concludes that if the tradition before us has any value, the tomb of the last Byzantine emperor was placed in the chamber in the north-eastern pier, and finds confirmation of that view in the absence of any respect for the remains deposited there.

To enter into a minute criticism of this tradition and of the arguments urged in its support would carry us far beyond our scope. Nor does such criticism seem necessary. The fact that the last Constantine was buried with royal honours affords no proof whatever that he was laid to rest in the church of the Holy Apostles. If he was ever buried in S. Theodosia, he may have been buried there from the first. The lateness of the date when the tradition became public makes the whole story it tells untrustworthy. Before a statement published in the early part of the nineteenth century in regard to the interment of the last Byzantine emperor can have any value, it must be shown to rest on information furnished nearer the time at which the alleged event occurred. No information of that kind has been produced. On the contrary, the only contemporary historian of the siege of 1453 who refers to the site of the emperor's grave informs us that the head of the last Constantine was interred in S. Sophia, and his mutilated body in Galata.[289] The patriarchal authorities of the sixteenth century, as Mr. Siderides admits, while professing to point out the exact spot where Constantine Palaeologus fell, were ignorant of the place where he was buried. In his work on the mosques of the city, written in 1620, Evlia Effendi not only knows nothing of the tradition we are considering, but says expressly that the emperor was buried elsewhere--in the church of the monastery of S. Mary Peribleptos, known by the Turks as Soulou Monastir, in the quarter of Psamathia. In 1852 a story prevailed that the grave of the last Constantine was in the quarter of Vefa Meidan.[290] From all these discrepancies it is evident that in the confusion attending the Turkish capture of the city, the real site of the imperial grave was soon forgotten, and that all subsequent indications of its position are mere conjectures, the offspring of the propensity to find in nameless graves local habitations for popular heroes.

NOTE

The first edition of _Ancient and Modern Constantinople_ was published in 1824. In it there is no mention of any tomb in the church of S.

Theodosia. The second edition of that work appeared in 1844, and there the author speaks of a tomb in the church, and suggests that it was the tomb of some martyr in the iconoclastic persecution. The patriarch's letter to Scarlatus Byzantius was written in 1852, and published by the latter in 1862. In that letter the patriarch reports for the first time the tradition that the tomb in S. Theodosia was the tomb of Constantine Palaeologus. In 1851 a Russian visitor to Constantinople, Andrew Mouravieff, who published an account of his travels, says that in the church of S. Theodosia he was shown a tomb which the officials of the mosque a.s.sured him was the tomb of the last Christian emperor of the city.[291] Lastly, but not least, in 1832 the church of S. Theodosia underwent repairs at the Sultan's orders, and then a neglected tomb was discovered in the church by the Christian architect who had charge of the work of restoration, Haji Stephen Gaitanaki Maditenou (see letter of the patriarch).[292] It is difficult to resist the impression that the discovery of the tomb at that time gave occasion for the fanciful conjectures current among Turks and Greeks in regard to the body interred in the tomb. See the article of Mr. Siderides, who gives the facts just mentioned, without drawing the inference I have suggested.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 56.]

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