Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities QUOTES

1 " In the Roman psyche the East had long been a place of danger, but also a place of plenty. The first Emperor Augustus famously said of Rome that he found a city built in brick but left it in marble – all that money had to come from somewhere. India was repeatedly described in Roman sources as a land of unimaginable wealth. Pliny the Elder complained that the Roman taste for exotic silks, perfumes and pearls consumed the city. ‘India and China [and Arabia] together drain our Empire. That is the price that our luxuries and our womankind cost us.’ It was the construction of the Via Egnatia and attendant road-systems that physically allowed Rome to expand eastwards, while the capture of Egypt intensified this magnetic pull. Rome had got the oriental bug, and Byzantium, entering into a truce with the Romans in 129 BC following the Roman victory in the Macedonian Wars that kick-started Gnaeus Egnatius’ construction of the Via Egnatia, was a critical and vital destination before all longer Asian journeys began. "

― Bettany Hughes , Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities

2 " The stories abounded, both recounting these cross-continental journeys and perhaps inspiring them – how Hellenic Jason gathered his Argonauts together (including Augeas, whose vast stables Herakles would be forced to clean) for adventure and profit, how he stopped off along the Bosphorus and discovered the land of the rising sun before other Greek heroes headed to Asia in search of Helen, Troy and glory. In the Homeric epics we hear of Jason travelling east where he tangles with Medea of Colchis, her aunt Circe and the feisty Amazon tribe. Lured by the promise of gold (early and prodigious metalworking did indeed take place in the region – perhaps sparking the Greek idea that the East was ‘rich in gold’) and then detained by the potions and poisons of Princess Medea, Jason succeeded in penetrating the Caucasus – a land which, in the Greek mind, wept with both peril and promise. It was here that Prometheus was chained to a rock with iron rivets for daring to steal fire from the gods. Archaeology east of Istanbul demonstrates how myth grazes history. "

― Bettany Hughes , Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities

3 " This Proto-Indo-European term ghosti (from which we get the words guest, host and ghost) referred to a kind of unspoken etiquette, a notion that on seeing strangers on the horizon, rather than choose to fell them with spears or sling-shots, instead we should take the risk of welcoming them across our threshold – on the chance that they might bring new notions, new goods, fresh blood with them.

Over time this word-idea evolved into the Greek xenia – ritualised guest–host friendship, an understanding that stitched together the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. "

― Bettany Hughes , Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities

4 " Justinian and Theodora’s time in power was also marked by the number of refugees they welcomed in to Constantinople. Struggling, homeless, stateless travellers came from East and West fleeing from the Persian and ‘barbarian’ troubles. Many arrived displaced from the Danubian and Gothic provinces by Huns and Goths; victims of Vandal atrocities had had their tongues cut out. The imperial pair built a hospice for refugees. The city was starting to build her reputation, which she still holds today, as a place of refuge. "

― Bettany Hughes , Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities

5 " Coming as a kind of pleasure-package with her parents and sisters, as a girl Theodora performed acrobatic tricks and erotic dances in and around the hippodrome – part of the fringe of shows, spectacles and penny theatricals that accompanied the games. It was said by contemporary chroniclers that one of Theodora’s most popular turns was a re-enactment of the story of Leda (the mother of Helen of Troy) and the Swan (Zeus in disguise). The Greek myth went that Zeus was so enraptured with Queen Leda when he espied her bathing by the banks of the River Eurotas that he turned himself into a swan so that he could ravish the Spartan Queen. Theodora, as Leda, would leave a trail of grain up on to (some said into) her body, which the ‘swan’ (in Constantinople in fact a goose) then eagerly consumed. The Empress’s detractors delighted in memorialising the fact that Theodora’s services were eagerly sought out for anal intercourse, as both an active and a passive partner. As a child and as an adolescent woman Theodora would have been considered dirt, but she was, physically, right at the heart of human affairs in a burgeoning city in interesting times.

Theodora was also, obviously, wildly attractive. Born in either Cyprus or Syria, as a teenager – already the mother of a young girl and with a history of abortions – she left Constantinople as the companion of a Syrian official, the governor of Libya Pentapolis. The two travelled to North Africa, where, after four years of maltreatment, she found herself abandoned by the Byzantine official, her meal-ticket revoked. A discarded mistress, on the road, was as wretched as things could get in the sixth century. (...)

Theodora tried to find her way back to the mother city, making ends meet as a prostitute, and the only people to give the twenty-year-old reject shelter were a group of Christians in the city of Alexandria. That random act of kindness was epoch-forming. "

― Bettany Hughes , Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities

6 " On 1 April AD 527 the Illyrian soldier was officially named Justin’s successor. When Justinian was acclaimed emperor he made his way in through Constantinople’s Golden Gate, down the processional route of the Mese, bordered originally with those wide vegetable gardens – the stuff of life of the city – and then with canopied walkways and sculptures (canopies and shops are still here, selling everything from apple tea to diamond-studded handguns). The shouts of acclamation for Constantinople’s new ruler would have bounced off the marble colonnades and the bronze statuary lining the processional way. And one in the city in particular must have listened to this brouhaha with great pleasure. Three years before, a rather extraordinary woman had moved into Justinian’s palace apartments to share his bed, and just three days after his investiture Justinian and his new wife, his showgirl-bride Theodora, were crowned together as joint emperor and empress.

Enjoying a flurry of revived interest in the twenty-first century, Empress Theodora deserves every moment of her late-found fame. Now honoured as a saint by the Greek Orthodox Church, this player in Constantinople’s history has not been universally loved: ‘This degenerate woman [Theodora] was another Eve who heeded the serpent. She was a denizen of the Abyss and mistress of Demons. It was she who, drawn by a satanic spirit and roused by diabolic rage, spitefully overthrew a peace redeemed by the blood of martyrs,’ wrote Cardinal Baronius. Our most detailed source for Theodora’s life is a lascivious, spittle-flecked diatribe, a Secret History written by our key source for Justinian and Theodora’s reign, Procopius (Procopius would write both hagiographies and damnations of the imperial couple and their works). Clearly gorged with literary and rhetorical tropes, Procopius’ account has to be taken with a large amphora of salt – but many of the details ring true both for the age and as a backstory to the remarkable life of this girl from Constantinople. "

― Bettany Hughes , Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities

7 " Sometimes what-if fantasies are useful. Imagine that the entirety of Western civilisation’s coding for computer systems or prints of all films ever made or all copies of Shakespeare and the Bible and the Qur’an were encrypted and held on one tablet device. And if that tablet was lost, stolen, burnt or corrupted, then our knowledge, use and understanding of that content, those words and ideas, would be gone for ever – only, perhaps, lingering in the minds of a very few men of memory whose job it had been to keep ideas alive. This little thought-experiment can help us to comprehend the totemic power of manuscripts. This is the great weight of responsibility for the past, the present and the future that the manuscripts of Constantinople carried. Much of our global cultural heritage – philosophies, dramas, epic poems – survive only because they were preserved in the city’s libraries and scriptoria. Just as Alexandria and Pergamon too had amassed vast libraries, Constantinople understood that a physical accumulation of knowledge worked as a lode-stone – drawing in respect, talent and sheer awe. These texts contained both the possibilities and the fact of empire and had a quasi-magical status. This was a time when the written word was considered so potent – and so precious – that documents were thought to be objects with spiritual significance. (...)

It was in Constantinople that the book review was invented. Scholars seem to have had access to books within a proto-lending-library system, and there were substantial libraries within the city walls. Thanks to Constantinople, we have the oldest complete manuscript of the Iliad, Aeschylus’ dramas Agamemnon and Eumenides, and the works of Sophocles and Pindar. Fascinating scholia in the margins correct and improve: plucking work from the page ‘useful for the reader . . . not just the learned’, as one Byzantine scholar put it. These were texts that were turned into manuals for contemporary living. "

― Bettany Hughes , Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities

8 " And this mother of all churches was dedicated to Sophia, Holy Wisdom. The word sophia in Greek originally meant a kind of practical skill. Characters in Homer were described as sophos – wise – if they could tame a horse, or build a boat. This sense continues into late antiquity, personified as Lady Wisdom. Not only does Lady Wisdom allow a mystical, distinctly sensuous appreciation of the world and its mysteries; she encourages a foot-forward, practical engagement with it. This is the wisdom of the streets and of women, not just of men in their study halls. Sophia appears as a fleeting character in the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament, as well as in numerous popular religious writings. Lady Wisdom is more frequently found in the Apocrypha – religious works that were often believed to contain inconvenient truths and so were exiled from canonical texts. For many Christians Sophia was understood to be a kind of sublime force which had birthed Jesus himself.

Sophia might not have ended up in the canon, but she was a popular and populist notion in both antiquity and the medieval world. Our word wisdom and Sophia share a common, prehistoric sense – the Proto-Indo-European root suggests a clear-sighted understanding of the world. The Sophia church was also dedicated to the Logos – the Word – the manifest and recondite Wisdom of God. So this great building was made up not just of bricks and mortar but of an idea – an imaginative understanding of the eternal power of both masculine and feminine ways of being wise, of the possibilities of negotiating the world with both mind and mystery. It is a remarkable statement from a building at the heart of the city that considered itself the heart of the world.

In the Hebrew Bible Sophia’s equivalent Hokhma is described in Proverbs 8 as being ‘better than rubies, and all the things that may be desired . . . I am understanding . . . set up from everlasting, from the beginning . . . whoso findeth me findeth life’. The building of Haghia Sophia was not just a placatory offering to the divine; it was an answer. "

― Bettany Hughes , Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities

9 " hombre "

― Bettany Hughes , Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities

10 " The history of this place with three names–Byzantion or Byzantium (c. 670 BC to AD 330), Constantinople, al-Qustantiniyye then Kostantiniyye (c. AD 330 to 1930), Istanbul or Stimboli (c. AD 1453 onwards)–is often isolated into discrete blocks: ancient, Byzantine, Ottoman, Turkish. "

― Bettany Hughes , Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities

11 " Symeon the Sanctified was allowed on to Mount Athos – a eunuch who would then go on to found a monastery of eunuchs in Thessalonika. A sizeable number of patriarchs – the leaders of the Orthodox Church based in Constantinople – were eunuchs. The presence of this third sex – complicating the binary division of male and female – also, arguably, allowed women to enjoy an atypical degree of power in the city, a tradition that endured for 1,500 years, beyond the Ottoman conquest of the city in AD 1453. "

― Bettany Hughes , Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities

12 " Rivayete göre şeytan, Mesih İsa'ya Asya yakasındaki Çamlıca tepelerinden, "dünyanın ve içindeki krallıkların bütün ihtişamı budur" derken Boğaz'ı, Haliç'i ve Bizans akropolisini göstermiştir. Burası kusursuz ve bu yüzden sürekli yeni baştan hayat bulan, baştan çıkarıcı şey olarak tasvir edilecek bir yerdi. "

― Bettany Hughes , Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities