Everywhere, in short, the living successors of those Christian merchants, monks and bishops visited by John Moschos now find themselves under intense pressure. Yet when I began to research into Moschos’s travels, I discovered that despite this great Christian exodus, a surprising number of the monasteries visited by Moschos and Sophronius still – just – survived.
The monasteries on Mount Athos and in Coptic Egypt are apparently relatively healthy. Elsewhere, in south-east Turkey, Lebanon and Palestine, these timeless islands of Byzantium, with their bells and black robes and candle-lit processions, are said to be occupied by an ever-diminishing population of elderly monks whose heavily-whiskered faces mirror those of the frescoed saints on the monastery walls. The monks’ vestments remain unchanged since Byzantine times; the same icons are still painted according to the same medieval iconographic rules. Even the superstitions have endured unaltered: relics of the True Cross and the Virgin’s Tears are still venerated; demons and devils are still said to lie in wait outside every monastery wall. In the early fifth century Bishop Parthenius of Lampsacus reported that he had been attacked by Satan in the form of a black dog; on my last visit I was told an almost identical story by an old Greek monk in the Holy Sepulchre. A couple of years ago there was great excitement in a Coptic quarter of Cairo, when the Virgin was clearly seen floating over the towers of the Church of St Damiana.
Driving back home from Runciman, I knew what I wanted to do: to spend six months circling the Levant, following roughly in John Moschos’s footsteps. Starting in Athos and working my way through to the Coptic monasteries of Upper Egypt, I wanted to do what no future generation of travellers would be able to do: to see wherever possible what Moschos and Sophronius had seen, to sleep in the same monasteries, to pray under the same frescoes and mosaics, to discover what was left, and to witness what was in effect the last ebbing twilight of Byzantium.
The wooden simandron has just begun to call from the church; matins will begin in ten minutes.
Soon it will be dawn. The first glimmer of light has begun to light up the silhouette of the Holy Mountain. The paraffin in my lamp is exhausted, and so am I. The day after tomorrow I must leave Athos; ahead lies four or five days’ travel across Thrace to Constantinople, the great Byzantine capital where John Moschos completed his Spiritual Meadow.
The simandron is being rung for the second time. I must shut this book and go down to the church to join the monks at prayer.
PERA PALAS HOTEL, ISTANBUL, TURKEY, 10 JULY 1994
After the penitential piety of Mount Athos, arriving here is like stepping into a sensuous Orientalist fantasy by Delacroix, all mock-Iznik tiles and pseudo-Ottoman marble inlay. A hotel masquerading as a Turkish bath; you almost expect some voluptuous Turkish odalisque to appear and disrobe behind the reception desk.
I ate breakfast in a vast Viennese ballroom with a sprung wooden floor and dadoes dripping with recently reapplied gilt. The lift is a giant baroque birdcage, entered through a rainforest of potted palms. On the wall nearby, newly dusted, is a framed diploma from the 1932 Ideal Homes Exhibition, signed by the Mayor of East Ham.
The Pera Palas was bought by the Turkish government last year, and attempts to renovate the old structure seem to have started manically, then been abruptly given up. In the dining room the gilt is so bright you have to wear sunglasses to look at it; but upstairs the carpets are as bald as the head of an Ottoman eunuch.
The hotel has a policy of naming its bedrooms after distinguished guests, which has unconsciously acted as a graph of its dramatic post-war decline: from before the war you can choose to sleep in Ataturk, Mata Hari or King Zog of Albania; after it there is nothing more exciting on offer than Julio Iglesias.
At dawn the Sea of Marmara appears like a sheet of silver, with the stationary ships sitting as if welded to its surface. Now, at night, it becomes invisible but for the lights of passing ships and the distant lamps of Uskudar and Kadi Koy – Byzantine Chalcedon – shining across the Bosphorus.
From the old Byzantine Acropolis to the waters of the Golden Horn, the yellow glow of the sulphurous streetlights silhouettes the city’s skyline, with its minarets and rippling domes and cupolas. The perfect reflections of the great Ottoman mosques and palaces that form in the water below are intermittently shattered by skiffs and caiques crossing and recrossing the Hellespont. No other city on earth has so magnificent a position. With its remarkable configuration of hills and water, sitting astride the land and sea routes connecting Europe with Asia, the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, and commanding one of the greatest anchorages in the world, there could be no more perfect position for a great imperial city.
For over a thousand years Constantinople was the capital of Christendom, the richest metropolis in Europe and the most populous city west of the great Chinese Silk Route terminus of Ch’ang-an. To the Barbarian West Byzantium was an almost mythical beacon of higher civilisation, the repository of all that had been salvaged from the wreck of classical antiquity. In their sagas, the Vikings called it merely Micklegarth, the Great City. It had no rival.
From the Great Palace on the shores of the Sea of Marmara Justinian, probably the greatest of the Byzantine emperors, controlled an empire that ran from the walls of Genoa clockwise around the Mediterranean to the Pillars of Hercules at Ceuta, embracing Italy, the Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East and the North African littoral. From Constantinople armies were dispatched to build a line of border fortresses on the Tigris, to repair the walls of Rome and to reconquer North Africa from the Vandals. Architects were ordered to construct basilicas in the marshes of Ravenna, on Mount Zion and in the sands of the Sinai. When the Emperor ordered Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus to build the greatest church in the world and dedicate it to Haghia Sophia, the Divine Wisdom of Christ, stone was specially brought from as far afield as Libya, the Lebanon, the Atlantic coast of France, Mons Porphyrites in the distant deserts of Southern Egypt and the green marble quarries of Hellenic Sparta.
Half a century later, when John Moschos arrived in Constantinople, the city probably had a population of around three quarters of a million; it was said that seventy-two different tongues could be heard in its streets. Coptic monks rubbed shoulders with Jewish glassblowers, Persian silk traders and Gepid mercenaries who had walked to the city after padding across the ice of the frozen Danube. In the city’s great markets and bazaars, Aramaic-speaking Syrians would haggle with Latin-speaking North Africans, Armenian architects and Herule slave traders who knew only some debased dialect of Old German. Goldsmiths, silversmiths, jewellers, ivory carvers, workers in inlay and enamel, weavers of brocade, sculptors and mosaicists all found ready markets for their wares. Already, by the second quarter of the fifth century, the city boasted five imperial and nine princely palaces, eight public and 153 private bath houses; by the time of Justinian there were over three hundred monasteries within its walls.
Few who were brought up in this most cosmopolitan and sophisticated of cities could bear to leave it for long. ‘Oh, land of Byzantium, oh thrice-happy city, eye of the universe, ornament of the world, star shining afar, beacon of this lower world,’ wrote a twelfth-century Byzantine author forced to absent himself on a diplomatic mission, ‘would