Jon and Shannon were received instead at the patriarch’s residence across the courtyard, where the great man himself greeted them with surprising warmth and excellent English. “I bid you welcome in the name of our sovereign Lord, Professor Weber, and also to you, madam.”
“This is my wife, Shannon, Your All Holiness,” Jon explained. “Thank you for this gracious audience.”
He bowed slightly. “No, it is our Christian community in Turkey and I who must extend gratitude to you for coming to defend our faith here in the heart of Islam.”
Bartholomew closely matched Jon in height, though with a stockier frame. He was a figure of authority in his late sixties, attired in a robe of basic black and clutching what was either a bishop’s staff or something of a tall cane-perhaps both. His face, animated with a pair of blazing blue eyes and a broad smile, was edged by a great beard of almost gleaming white that began at his temples and plunged downward halfway to his cincture. A large golden medallion with the heraldry of his office dangled from a chain, apparently having escaped the frosty forest that covered half his chest. By any standards, this was one striking man.
The patriarch ordered refreshments and led them to his office, which had an expansive view of the Golden Horn. Predictably, they first discussed the forthcoming debate and their respective roles in that exchange. When Shannon joined the conversation, her queries were usually about security matters, particularly when Bartholomew told of the series of bombings at the patriarchate. Inevitably, this begged her question, “How safe are Christians in Turkey, Your All Holiness?”
“As you must know, Madame Weber,” he replied, “even though Istanbul is at the dividing line between the Christian West and the Muslim East, Christians number less than one percent of the Turkish population, and we do have a militant Muslim minority that does not mean us well. However, the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, decreed that this nation would be a secular -not a religious-state, and the army has always enforced that mandate, even to the point of overthrowing several Turkish governments in the past that tried to favor Islam. At present, even though the religious parties seem to be growing in power, I truly believe the Turkish government will remain secular and provide us the protection that we need.”
Jon could hardly wait to bend the conversation in a new direction. Truth to tell, his ultimate goal was less to pit Christianity against Islam-he had not sought the debate, after all-and more to search the archives of the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate for precious manuscripts. He used history as his segue.
“Your All Holiness,” he began deliberately after a slight lull in their dialogue, “here in Constantinople-and I prefer to use its time-honored name-we have probably the most extraordinary city in the world. I find it remarkable that after Rome fell, New Rome-Constantinople-survived for another thousand years. It was this city, this cork in the bottle of Muslim expansionism, that virtually saved Christianity in eastern Europe. In the West, Islam rolled across North Africa, crossed at Gibraltar, conquered Spain, and then invaded France until the Muslim forces were finally stopped just south of Paris. But for Constantinople, the same could have happened in the East.”
“Well, for a while, it seemed as though it might,” Shannon joined in. “When this great city fell in 1453, Islamic hordes poured into the Balkans, conquering everything up to Vienna, where they were turned back by a Christian Europe that could now finally defend itself. What if there had been no Constantinople?”
Bartholomew had been nodding his concurrence. “Eastern Islamic forces would have joined with their Western forces and European Christianity would probably have been vanquished-as it has been wherever Muslims have conquered.”
Shannon added, “I have little patience with some of our bleeding hearts who point to the church’s great ‘sin’ in the case of the Crusades. That’s a myopia that sees only halfway into the past. If we ever ask ‘Who took more from whom-Islam or Christianity?’ there’s no contest. Christianity has taken not one square foot of territory from Islam that it did not originally possess, whereas Islam has taken Asia Minor, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, all of North Africa, and part of the Balkans from Christianity.”
“How very, very true, Madame Weber. I wish all Christians were as well informed. So often they can see back only to the Crusades.”
Jon saw his opening and plunged in. “And the losses to Christianity have been staggering, particularly here in Constantinople. Think of the precious church documents that were destroyed here-some probably from the time of Constantine or even earlier. By the way, wasn’t Constantine buried here?”
“Oh yes, indeed,” Bartholomew replied. “He was buried in the Hagioi Apostoloi, the Church of the Holy Apostles. He built the church and wanted to gather relics of all twelve apostles for the sanctuary, but he got only St. Andrew. Well, also the bones of St. Luke and St. Timothy. So yes, Constantine and his sons were buried here, and so were Justinian and Theodora and their family, as well as many of the Byzantine emperors and my patriarch predecessors-St. John Chrysostom, too. That wonderful basilica was second in importance only to Hagia Sophia itself.”
“Is it still standing?” Shannon asked.
Bartholomew shook his head sadly. “The Holy Apostles was rebuilt by Justinian in the year 550, just after Hagia Sophia, and it stood nine hundred more years until the Ottomans conquered Constantinople. That’s when the conqueror, Sultan Mehmed II, turned Hagia Sophia into a mosque and moved our patriarchate into the Holy Apostles. But when that church got surrounded by Turkish settlers who were hostile to Christians, Mehmed demolished the church and built the Fatih Camii on the site, the Mosque of the Conqueror. In fact, he’s buried there. And that mosque still stands, almost in the center of the Old City.”
“Where did the patriarchate relocate?” Jon inquired.
“To the Church of St. Mary Pammakaristos in the Christian district-and eventually, of course, to this place.”
“What happened to the treasures of the Church of the Holy Apostles-its icons, sculptures, sacred books, manuscripts, and-”
“The Venetians,” the patriarch muttered darkly, then, more distinctly. “What history calls the Fourth Crusade-although it was conceived and born in hell-invaded Constantinople instead of the Holy Land in 1204 and plundered the city. The Venetians even looted the Church of the Twelve Apostles, opening the tombs of the emperors-even the sepulchre of Justinian-and carting off their silver, gold, and jewels!”
Bartholomew had visibly changed. Gone was the genial patriarch. In his place was a scowling prophet with flushed countenance who had again wrapped his hand, or rather fist, around the knob of his staff as if to cudgel Venetians off the pages of history. “You know of the Emperor Heraclius?” he asked.
“Byzantine emperor soon after Justinian?” Shannon suggested. “Lived in Muhammad’s time?”
“Yes, exactly, Madame Weber. The Venetians broke open his tomb and stole the golden crown right off his head-with some of his hairs still attached to it! You can see it yet today at St. Mark’s basilica in Venice.”
The disaster at the beginning of the thirteenth century seemed to impinge even into Jon’s twenty-first. His hopes of finding any written materials from the time of Constantine seemed to vanish with the Venetians. Almost timidly, he asked, “What about the other treasures at the Church of the Apostles-the library, the codices, the manuscripts? The Venetians carted those off also?”