From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium. William Dalrymple

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СКАЧАТЬ nearby: sawdust on the floor, the acid stink of cheap Turkish cigarettes stinging the nostrils, the incessant thump of heavy hands on wooden card-tables; unshaven, unemployed men playing game after game of poker. Outside a man in a waistcoat, flat cap and dirty apron pushed a handcart of fruit along the cobbles. It could have been a Bill Brandt photograph of the London East End in the thirties.

      I walked back to the Phanar an hour later. The Patriarch’s secretary had still not returned, but this time I did manage to speak to a member of his staff. Fr. Dimitrios was initially suspicious and evasive, but after reading Fr. Christophoros’s letter he took me up to his office overlooking the Patriarchal church. There we talked about the city’s dwindling Greek minority, the last descendants of the Byzantines left in what was once their capital city.

      According to Fr. Dimitrios the population of Istanbul was still almost 50 per cent Christian at the end of the nineteenth century. The tumultuous events of the first quarter of the twentieth century – the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish victory in the 1922 Greco-Turkish War and the expulsion of all the Greeks in Anatolia in exchange for the Turkish population evicted from Northern Greece – did not alter this. By the terms of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, the 400,000 Greeks in the city and its suburbs were specifically allowed to remain in their homes with their rights and property intact.

      All this changed in 1955 when Istanbul played host to the worst race riot in Europe since Kristallnacht. In a single night, with the police looking on, thousands of hired thugs descended on the city’s Hellenic ghettos. Almost every Greek shop in the city had its windows broken; cemeteries were desecrated; the Tombs of the Patriarchs were destroyed; seventy-three Orthodox churches were gutted.

      ‘I was still a baby,’ said Fr. Dimitrios. ‘The rioters came into our house, but my mother had wrapped me up in the Turkish flag so the rioters did not harm me; instead they just broke the windows and the furniture then moved on. Afterwards the government said it was just a few ignorant people, but that’s not true: the riots were very well organised, all over Istanbul.’

      ‘I don’t understand what the Turks would gain by organising such a pogrom,’ I said.

      ‘The Greeks still controlled the commerce of the city,’ replied Dimitrios. ‘They wanted to drive us out and take over our business. They succeeded. By 1965, when I was ten, the Greek population had sunk to around seventy-five thousand. Today there are only – what? – five thousand Greeks left. All my childhood friends, everyone I grew up with, they’ve all moved away.’

      Dimitrios shrugged his shoulders.

      ‘I love this city, of course: it is my home. But frankly life is impossible here if you are not a Turk. The boys get abused on their military service; they are always sent to the most dangerous postings on the Kurdish front line. Then afterwards, when they come out, they can’t get government jobs. If you live here you have to spend your life pretending you are Turkish. Those Greeks who have stayed have started calling themselves Turkish names: if you’re called Dimitrios, you change your name to Demir; if your name is Fedon, you ask your friends to call you Feridun.’

      Dimitrios said that the war in Bosnia – with Orthodox Serbs committing atrocities against Muslims – and the recent resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism in Turkey, had made everything much worse. The Phanar windows were broken by stones on an almost daily basis, while its perimeter walls were regularly covered with spray-painted threats such as ‘Patriarch, you will die!’ Moreover, there had been a renewed bout of grave desecration at the disused Greek cemetery at Yenikoy; blazing rags soaked in petrol had been thrown over the Phanar walls, starting a small fire; and three small firebombs had gone off a month previously in two nearby Greek girls’ schools and the Church of the Panaghia.

      But the most serious problem, said Dimitrios, revolved around the Phanar gateway. In 1821 the Greeks sealed the main door of the Phanar after the Sultan had hanged the then Patriarch, Gregorios, from its lintel. The Turks always considered the sealing a snub, and recently the Refah party had revived the issue by threatening to break open the gate by force. Then last month, on the eve of the anniversary of the fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks, a huge bomb was found planted next to the gate inside the main courtyard. It was defused in time, but had it gone off not only the gate but the entire Phanar would have been reduced to a large crater.

      ‘They left a note near the bomb,’ said Dimitrios. ‘I’ve got a translation somewhere.’

      He rummaged around in his drawers and drew out a file. From it he took a single sheet of foolscap. ‘Read this,’ he said.

      FROM THE GENERAL HEADQUARTERS OF THE FIGHTERS OF LIGHT

      Our administration has targeted the Patriarchate and its occupying leader, who behind what he considers insurmountable walls takes pleasure in the shedding of the blood of the Muslim people of the East, and to this end he is working on suspect and fiendish plans. We will fight until the Chief Devil and all the occupiers are chased off; until this place, which for years has contrived Byzantine intrigues against the Muslim peoples of the East, is exterminated. Occupiers disappear! These Lands are ours and will remain ours. We warn you one more time: there is no right to life for those who are occupiers.

      Until the Greek Patriarchate and the Devil, the ridiculous Bartholomaios who wears the robes of the Patriarch, disappears from behind the thick walls where he plans his fiendish intrigues, our fight will continue. Patriarch you will perish!

      Long live our Islamic Fight! Long live our Islamic Liberation War!

      THE CENTRAL HEADQUARTERS OF LIGHT

      ‘After this,’ said Dimitrios, ‘our young have finally become convinced that there is no future for them here.’

      ‘I can see their point.’

      ‘Now it’s just the old who remain. Our priests here are sick and tired of funerals. A single baptism – or rarer still, a marriage – is the event of the year.’

      I asked whether the Phanar was getting enough young priests coming up to keep the place going.

      ‘The Turks closed our only seminary in 1971,’ replied Dimitrios. ‘It’s cut the bloodline of our existence. A decade from now, when the older bishops have all died, there will be no clergy left. After 1,500 years, the Ecumenical Patriarch will have to leave Constantinople.’ Dimitrios sighed. ‘A century ago this was the centre of Greek Istanbul. Today there are no Greeks at all left around here. On a very good Sunday the Patriarch may still get a hundred people in this church. On a bad one he can’t even fill the first two rows of pews. Come down and see what it’s like at vespers.’

      “Who will be there?’

      ‘I fear just you, me and the angels.’

      Fr. Dimitrios’s apprehensions were justified. The service had already begun. One old bishop was standing at a lectern chanting hymns for the saint of the day. The other officiating priest, a bent-backed octogenarian, clanked a thurible from behind the iconostasis. There was no congregation in this, the senior church of Eastern Christendom, the Orthodox St Peter’s; not one person occupied the empty pews. After a few minutes the bishop gave the dismissal and both old men quickly left the church.

      ‘Look at your watch,’ said Fr. Dimitrios. ‘Exactly 4.15. It never takes a minute longer when it’s an empty church. Our priests don’t feel inspired. In fact they feel almost embarrassed.’

      From the Phanar I walked through the old city to the Armenian Patriarchate in Kum Kapi, overlooking the Sea of Marmara. In London, Armenian friends had told me horror СКАЧАТЬ