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The Old Greek Orthodox Quarter

The Kariye Museum of St Saviour in Chora and the heart of the former Greek community

St Saviour in Chora is one of the main sights. It's an old church out by the city walls in Fener. Inside, the walls and ceilings are covered in mosaics. When you see something about Istanbul's history and you see one of those shimmering tiled pictures, all gold and vivid colours, chances are you are looking at one of the images from the Chora church.


It's out of place, too. A big, crumbling Byzantine church in the middle of modern tenement blocks. It's a very Middle Eastern neighbourhood, lots of hijabs, lots of Arabic graffiti. As you walk down you glimpse the domes above the concrete roofs. It sits in a quiet square, lined with gift shops and a few restaurants. Hawkers hanging around, selling spinning tops and shoe-shines.


It doesn't look promising. The entrance was surrounded by scaffolding and a bored guard checking tickets. Pass through a dark passage and you enter into the overly lit narthex.


Inside, you are going to walk around gawping. Everything is high up. The ceilings are covered in mosaics. Lines of saints like a school photograph. Scenes out of old stories, playing out like comic books. I'm too cheap to buy the guide and too much of a barbarian to know the biblical references. It reminded me of what the Vikings who scratched their names in the Haghia Sophia must've felt like. In another section, which looks later, the walls are painted with frescoes that aren't in the best of shape.



Inspired by the Turin Shroud?

The Turin Shroud (or at least the original relic it was based on)  was kept in Constantinople. A mediaeval chronicle describes it being displayed every Friday at the St Mary at Blachernae church, not far from the Kariye Museum.

There is a theory that the very distinctive Byzantine Pantokrator image found in the Chora church, and elsewhere in Byzantine art, was based on the image from that original relic. 

It's a funny place. Like the Haghia Sophia, the Church of St Saviour is a museum. They make that pretty clear. It's a museum, not a church. It's got a gift shop and glass cases and, most importantly, spotlights. In the Haghia Sophia you get a feel for how it must have been. It's dark and atmospheric and when you look up the cherubs on the piers are terrifying as they loom out of the gloom at you.


St Saviour doesn't have much natural light. It would have been dark, lit by candles and oil lamps. Flickering, living light. The gold would have shimmered and almost moved. The images would have come in and out of focus through clouds of smoke and incense. In use, it would have been a moving vision for anyone who saw it. Today, it is lit as a museum, the mosaics and frescoes are exhibits, pure and simple. No attempt is made to be sensitive to its original appearance, just spotlight it and let the tourists stare.


The end result is boring. Sure, it is beautiful. But it is dead. You might as well just look at a picture in a book. A lot of the church is off limits too, apparently for "restoration". I got there and I just wanted to shuffle round, gawp, take a few pictures and get out. I'm an atheist but the Haghia Sophia moved me with it's dark grandeur, Haghia Eirene with its stark simplicity. At St Saviour, it was just, well, I've done it. What's next?


It took me a while to work out what else bothered me. Later in the day when I was reading my guidebook. St Saviour was a mediaeval building. I just assumed it was from the same era as the Haghia Sophia. The mosaics and frescoes, they were even later from the 1300's.


In Europe, that was the start of the Renaissance. This was the time of Giotto. The paint was barely dry on the frescoes when the Van Eyck brothers were starting the Ghent Altarpiece, maybe one of the greatest paintings of all time. BY comparison, these are clumsy and heavy. When European painters were discovering new techniques and new styles, the Byzantines were producing art that had not changed in almost a thousand years. The artworks in St Saviour look no different to the ones in the Haghia Sophia despite being centuries apart. When I found out the paintings and mosaics had been done in the 1300's it really surprised me because it showed no progress from those done in the 600's.


It highlights why Byzantium declined. It was a place stuck in the past, holding on to a golden age of Roman emperors and great generals like Belisarius. I almost felt cheated. To put it into perspective, we are as close in time to the artists of St Saviour's as they were to those who decorated the Haghia Sophia. That's not a society that had a future. A hundred years later they had been over-run. As sad as it was that Constantinople fell, it was like shooting a knackered old horse in the head.


I took my pictures and went back outside into the sunshine. I sat on some steps for a few minutes and then went for a wander in the narrow streets. Heading toward the Fethiye mosque.


I liked this part of the city. This was not the tourist area. The streets were narrow and full of graffiti, cars parked wherever there was space. I felt uncomfortable for a while because I felt so out of place. But then I realised I was choosing to feel out of place. No-one cared. People were just getting on with their lives and once out of range of the hawkers near the church, no-one bothered me. Istanbul is an easy city to pretend you are on a Jason Bourne adventure in but most of it, or at least most of the places you are likely to end up in (and at least in daylight), seem reasonably safe.

Fener

The Greek Quarter

The Greek quarter of Fener was named after the Phanarion: a Greek lighthouse that served as a beacon for the Golden Horn. It sits just to the south of the Chora Museum.


It's the Orthodox equivalent of the Vatican. The Greek Patriarch of Istanbul is as close to a pope as you'll get and his headquarters is the Patriarchate complex located here.


It looks like a fortress. Mainly because it is. The Greeks have been under siege here, on and off, for a long time. Admittedly, they have not always been great neighbours themselves but the Greeks have suffered far worse under the Turks than the other way around, including assassinations, executions, bombings and even organised pogroms against them.


There are a lot of Greek sites in Fener worth a visit. The Fethiye Mosque was the Church of the Pammakristos originally. There is the Church of St Mary of the Mongols. Further inland are the churches of Constantine Lips, The Pantocrator and the Holy Apostles (now that Fatih Mosque). Dominating the skyline is the Red Castle, or the Greek Orthodox college of Phanar.


Right on the Golden Horn is the Church of St Stephen of the Bulgars. In the 1800's the Bulgarians broke away from the Greek Orthodox church. They were so pissed off that they actually had a church cast in iron in Vienna and shipped piece by piece to Istanbul. The whole thing, walls, columns, the lot. Now it is closed for "restoration". What that means is they put up a building made entirely of iron right next to the sea and now it's rusting.


Apart from the religious buildings you wouldn't really guess Fener was the Greek quarter. Most of the Greeks quit Istanbul after the pogroms of the 1960's. At one point the Turkish government blew up Ataturk's birthplace in a false flag operation to lay the blame on the Greeks. The city went crazy and in one night people were killed, property was burnt to the ground and the bodies of the Patriarchs were dug up from their tombs at the Shrine of the Zoodochus. After that no-one wanted to hang around and the population dropped from 65,000 in the 1960's to a couple of thousand today.


Fener is also home to a big Jewish community and the Ahrida synagogue is the historic centre of it.

Getting There

"In Chora" means "in the country" and it's a long way from central Sultanahmet. On a tour bus or a taxi it isn't that far. But I hate groups and I'm too cheap so I like going under my own steam. Under your own steam, it takes a bit of effort.


You could get a bus from Eminonu. I chose to use the tram from Sultanahmet and change to the line which runs along the Theodosian walls. Get on in the city centre, it takes you along the old Roman road until Topkapi station. Leave the station and walk to the nearby T4 tram stop. Get the tram to Edirnekapi.


At Edirnekapi, cross through the walls at what would have been the Charsius Gate. Go down the main road and turn left down one of the side streets after about 100 metres.


It takes a while but there is plenty to see on the way. For starters, you're out of the tourist zone and you get to see something a bit more like "real" Istanbul. There's stuff all along the T1 tram route. Grand Bazaar, the Byzantine Bodrum Mosque and the Baroque Tulip Mosque are all within walking distance of each other.


If you get off at Aksaray then you can visit the Church of Constantine Lips, the Mosque of the Holy Mantle, the Fatih Mosque (the Church of the Holy Apostles) and the Church of the Pantocrator if you don't mind some walking.


Topkapi Station, where you change for the T4 line, is not far from Yedikule Castle or the remains of the Monastery of St John Studios. You can carry on to Aksemsettin tram stop and walk to the Shrine of the Zoodochus Pege, the "life giving spring" at the Monastery of Mary in Balikli, one of the oldest Greek Orthodox sites in the city. It's also the burial place of the Patriarchs.


The T4 line follows the old city wall built by Emperor Theodosius. My guidebook suggested that the walls weren't that safe to visit on your own but, from the tram, there were plenty of joggers, dog walkers and pedestrians around. At Edirnekapi, just inside the gate, is the stark Mihrimah Mosque which marks the highest point of the city.


The other option is to take the ferry up the Golden Horn from Eminonu and get off at the Ayvansaray pier. You can walk inland from there. On the way you can visit the palaces of Blachernae and the Porphyrogenitus, the remains of Byzantine palaces along the walls.


Also on the way are a couple of hezrat shrines. The hezrat (or sahabas) were Companions of the Prophet (like Eyup Ensari was) killed during the First Siege of Constaninople. Their tombs are dotted around the city, with a lot along the walls which makes sense if they were part of a besieging army. Visiting them seems to be a bit of a tradition (there are tour companies that will drive you round them all over the course of a day). How likely these graves are to be of the original guy is anyone's guess. They can't even agree on who is officially buried in them at some sites. Would the Byzantines have preserved the remains of an enemy for 800 years? Did they have accurate enough records to re-locate the graves when the Ottomans finally seized the city? I don't know but it's an interesting tradition and I always enjoy a historic tomb.


If I ever do it again I think I'd take the tram route to Topkapi (maybe take in the Shrine of the Zoodochus from Aksemsettin station) and do some of the sights along the way. T4 tram to Edirnekapi, museum, mooch round Fener and then the ferry from Aksaray back to central Istanbul.


St Saviour in Chora (Kariye Museum) is part of the Museum Pass deal.