I have been to Constantinople twice: first at the end of September 1991, when I stayed there for a week, and then a year later, when I stayed for just two days. The first time I reached Constantine’s city was at the end of a journey prolonged by a coach breakdown, having crossed the Danube at Giurgiu and travelled through Bulgaria’s bleak landscapes. In 1992 I reached Constantinople again by coach, but this time travelling from Alanya, in southern Asia Minor, after an 800-kilometre journey across the Anatolian Plateau. It was then that I verified once more G.M. Cantacuzino – a view also expressed by Anton Bibescu and Matila Ghyka (I’d first encountered it in Malta) – which states that whenever he passed through Dobruja, it seemed to him as though he were entering another continent, and by extension, the world of the East. Arghezi also expressed this truth in an interview given towards the end of his life: ‘The land of Dobruja resembles that of Palestine. Jesus Christ must have passed through here’.
In the autumn of 1992, I was staying in Ephesus in Asia Minor, in a guesthouse reminiscent of Tulcea as it was a few decades ago; both towns have clay-soiled hills, sloping lanes covered in macadam, donkeys, striped melons, fig trees and a static, gentle light, akin to that which our interwar painters had found in Balchik. After my first night in Constantinople, as I stepped out of the hotel perched on a sloping lane, the morning chill filtering through the acacia trees, the salty air and the sparrows made me feel as though I were in Constanța. A few years later, when I travelled to Asia Minor once more, the aeroplane I was travelling on flew over both Constanța and Constantinople, giving me the chance to recall the view of the two transcontinental bridges spanning the Bosphorus that unfolds from the summit of Justinian’s residence. A panorama the likes of which no empire or city has ever seen. Perhaps it was this unrivalled and peerless view that led me to say I would swap ten days in Paris or London for a single day spent in Constantinople.
There is, however, another vantage point from which Tsarigrad can be admired: the 60-metre-high Galata Tower, with its circular platform offering a 360-degree view.
Galata is the name of an old Byzantine quarter of the city and of the bridge that connects it to the other bank of the Golden Horn, the magnificent estuary and harbour. The bridge we crossed a quarter of a century ago – intended for both vehicles and pedestrians, and lined with narrow stalls, inns and shops – burnt down in 1992 and was rebuilt. Built by the Genoese on the site of a Byzantine wooden lighthouse, the Galata Tower served successively as a Turkish prison and a watchtower. Restored on several occasions, with walls nearly four metres thick and fitted with a lift, it offers a view which, in good weather, provides a truly spectacular panorama.
I spent over an hour on its circular viewing platform one bright October morning when there were very few tourists. To the right of the view, blue with the sky and the waters stretching in every direction, lay the Golden Horn, whilst on the left lay the Sea of Marmara, also known as the Propontis or the White Sea, prompting me to recall Iorga’s observation that Byzantium was a thalassocracy. But the Galata Tower also offered a view out over the Bosphorus.
Looking once more at the Golden Horn, I gazed towards its narrowing end, where the Phanar district lies, along with the cathedral of the Ecumenical Patriarchate dedicated to Saint George, established there in 1600 after several relocations. Modest in size, the church cannot be seen from the top of the Galata Tower. Devoid of spires and a bell tower, it looks more like a secular building with Greek architectural features. Inside, however, Ilie Miniat preached, and on the premises, in 1848, Constantin Iconomos drafted the brilliant Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, which served as a response to Pope Pius IX and his call for ‘union’. That is why the cathedral of the Ecumenical Patriarchate remains to this day a symbol and a distillation of Orthodoxy, linking us to the era of Justinian and, consequently, to that of Photius.
On the circular platform of the Galata Tower, I recalled a verse by Baudelaire: ‘Free man, the sea will always be dear to you’ and I felt that spirit of the East which I first encountered as a teenager near the Greek church in Constanța, and which I have often rediscovered in Bucharest. Once, as I was walking past Manuc’s Inn and the Curtea-Veche Church one September afternoon, the light, the sky and the wind made me exclaim: ‘It’s just like Constantinople!’. There is, in fact, a novel set in Sulina – Europolis by Jean Bart – imbued with the same spirit. In no other city abroad, as far as I have travelled, apart from Belgrade, have I felt at home; only in Constantinople. And in the summer of 2008, whilst in Venice on a vaporetto travelling along the Grand Canal, I felt an overwhelming joy at discovering the resemblance to the Bosphorus, for which I felt a sudden longing at that very moment. That feeling was not the result of Venice’s countless Byzantine elements; it had no ‘cultural’ basis, but was simply an experience.
In October 1991, although it was travelling at a slow speed, the boat sailing through the Bosphorus seemed to me to be moving too fast and, for example, the walls of the Rumelia Fortress, which I had recognised, were rushing past before my eyes, just like the magnificent residences with their jetties, pontoons, moored caiques and gardens, some of which had once been inhabited by Phanariot or Moldavian-Wallachian princely families. Dimitrie Cantemir built a palace on the Bosphorus according to his own plans. He also had a house in Constantinople, in the Phanar, near the Patriarchate.
Dostoevsky’s prophecy that Tsarigrad would once again become the citadel of Christendom did not come to pass. I recall a discussion in the 1980s in which Father Stăniloae told me with regret that at the end of the First World War, in which Turkey had fought alongside the defeated Germany, if they had wished, the Western Allies could have awarded Constantinople to Greece. However, the British were the most vehemently opposed. At that time, for a while, the city of Constantine was divided into sectors by the victors, much like Berlin in 1945.
Although from the Galata Tower one can see the very spots through which the Turks entered Constantinople on the night of 28–29 May 1453, my state of mind was one of serenity and joy thanks to the beauty of the view, just as it had been from the summit of the Palaiologos residence and as it would be during the hours spent on the Bosphorus or beneath the dome of Hagia Sophia, where I felt happy.
