The Legacy of New Rome – The Highlights of Byzantine Civilizations

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The Legacy Of New Rome Tour can be modified at your request

The city of the world’s desire; Constantinople.....It appeared to have been designed by geography and history to be capital of a great empire. No city has endured more attacks and sieges...

Situated at the end of a triangular peninsula, it was surrounded by water on three sides. To the north lay a harbour a kilometer wide and six kilometers long, called the Golden Horn; to the east the Bosphorus, a narrow waterway separating Europe and Asia; to the south, the Sea of Marmara, a small inland sea connecting the Aegean to the Black Sea. The city was both a natural fortress and a matchless deep-water port, enjoying easy access by sea to Africa, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Moreover, it was situated on the crossroads of the mainland routes between Europe and Asia, the Danube and the Euphrates.

The legendary founder of Byzantium was Byzas the Megarian, who established a colony on the acropolis in the year 667 B.C. Byzantium had been re-founded in 324 AD by Constantine the Great as New Rome, a new capital in a better strategic position than the old Rome on the Tiber. For over a thousand years thereafter, it had been the capital of the Roman Empire in the East. Emperor Justinian acceded to the throne (527-565 A.D.) and Byzantium entered the first period of its brilliance; an empire which stretched from the Euphrates to the Straits of Gibraltar. No other city in the world has such a continuous imperial history. Moreover, for much of its thousand years of empire it had been the largest and most sophisticated city in Europe, a teasure-house of the statues and manuscripts of the classical past, and the nerve-center of Eastern Christendom.

The most important examples of Byzantine art dating from empire’s heyday are in their former capital, Istanbul. The most monumental structure is the church of Hagia Sophia, built in 532-537 by the Emperor Justinian. This magnificent place of worship is now 1500 years old. “The church presents a most glorious spectacle, extraordinary to those who behold it and altogether incredible to those who are told of it. In height it rises to the very heavens and overtops the neighboring houses like a ship anchored among them, appearing above the city which it adorns and forms a part of it...It is distinguished by indescribable beauty, excelling both in its size and the harmonies of its measures...”So wrote the chronicler, Procopius, fourteen centuries ago, describing Hagia Sophia as it appeared during the reign of its founder, the Emperor Justinian the Great.

After the Conquest of Istanbul by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, for nearly five centuries, Hagia Sophia served the faithful Moslems of the city, just as it had served devout Christians for more than nine centuries before the Fall. Immediately after the Conquest, Sultan Mehmed thoroughly repaired the fabric of Hagia Sophia. Later sultans refurbished and adorned the interior of the building in various ways, so as to restore something of its ancient beauty. Something of the reverence which was accorded to Hagia Sophia in Ottoman times can be gathered from the fact that five sultans are buried in its precincts.

The Church of St. Saviour in Chora, is after Hagia Sophia the most interesting Byzantine church in the city because of the superb series of mosaics and frescoes which it preserves and which have been magnificently restored and cleaned. Mosaics and frescoes are the best-known forms of Byzantine art.

Cappadocia became a part of the Byzantine Empire in 395 A.D. It is an area to which Christianity spread in a very early period. By the 4th and 5th centuries it had become a religious center of some significance. The Orthodox faith and the rules of monastic life took shape for the first time in Cappadocia. Then St.Basil, who later became its bishop, together with St.Gregory of Nazianlos(formerly the village of Nenez,i, now Bekarlar) and his brother, St.Gregory of Nyssa(Theologos), laid down the rules of monastic life. St. Basil the Great, instead of hermit-like seclusion, favoured love and brotherhood, a communal life involving joint production of and sharing of necessities. During the Iconolastic Period, which took place in the Byzantine Empire between 726 and 843 the use of icons was prohibited. After the ban was lifted, frescoes again adorned the walls of churches between the 10th and 12th centuries.

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