Stanley Stewart - In the Empire of Genghis Khan - A Journey Among Nomads

In antiquity Constantinople’s position exaggerated the usual anxieties about nomadic barbarians. Rumours of the mounted Scythians who roamed the Don steppes on the far side of the Black Sea echoed the Greek legends of centaurs, creatures who were half-man, half-horse, whose untamed desires were a threat to civilized order. But the city was little troubled by nomadic invasion. By the time the Turks descended on Constantinople in the spring of 1453 their own pastoral origins were all but forgotten. They had picked up Islam, the manners of the Persian court and the habit of cities generations ago.

Though the Mongols never took Constantinople, the city contains one curious remnant of the Mongol Empire, a thirteenth-century Byzantine church known as Mouchliotissa, or Our Lady of the Mongols. The church is a unique link to the Greek capital before the Turkish conquest as it is the only Byzantine church that was not converted into a mosque. I had faxed the Patriarchate from London to ask about Mouchliotissa and had received a most courteous reply from the Metropolitan of Laodicea, a city of the Byzantine Empire that was in ruins before Columbus set sail for America. He invited me to call on him when I arrived in Istanbul. He would arrange for a visit to the church. His fax concluded with the blessings of the Patriarch for my journey, and I basked momentarily in the idea that I was setting off for Outer Mongolia with an ecclesiastical blessing more ancient and more grand than that of the Pope.

The Patriarchate of the Greek Orthodox Church, the Vatican of the Eastern Church, remains in Istanbul as if the Turkish conquest of 1453 were a temporary aberration, unlikely to last long enough to make it worth moving house. Though Greeks continued to live and worship in Istanbul for centuries after the Turkish conquest their numbers were in continual decline. In the twentieth century, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Turkish nationalism and Muslim fundamentalism have seen a dramatic exodus of Greeks, and today less than 4000 remain in a city with a population of 12 million. Yet the Patriarch continues to inhabit his city as if nothing had happened. Though he presides over a worldwide flock of Orthodox Christians, his congregations here in Istanbul, his own seat, have withered away. This anomaly lends the Patriarchate a curious make-believe air, like the last Emperor in China’s Forbidden City, a court ruling over a vanished kingdom.

On a bright morning I hailed an old hadji in a woolly cap and a silk waistcoat and took a river taxi up the Golden Horn. The Patriarchate stands in Fener, once a Greek district, now a poor Turkish quarter with a strong fundamentalist character. Ringed by high walls, and guarded by sentries, it is a place beseiged. Muslim fundamentalists, who have a knack for creating artificial enemies, regularly target the Patriarchate as if its elderly clerics posed some threat to the religious fidelity of a nation of 60 million Muslims. Graffiti are scrawled on its walls, and last year a bomb was thrown into the courtyard from a neighbouring minaret, narrowly missing the fifty-year-old doorman and the 1500-year-old library.

I was welcomed by George, a secretary, who apologized that the Metropolitan was late. Despite the fact that his diocese had been Muslim for over five hundred years, the Metropolitan apparently was run off his feet. I settled down in George’s office to wait. A tall heavy-set man, dressed like everyone else inside these ancient walls in long black robes and a thick beard, George looked like an august ecclesiastical dignitary. It was a surprise to learn he was a high-school senior from Minneapolis.

The dramatic decline of the Greek community in Istanbul has made it very difficult for the Patriarchate to fill job vacancies, even within its own walls. Their appeals to the wider Greek world had brought George, a Greek-American boy from Minnesota, to work here in his year off between high school and college. They had got lucky with George’s appearance. He had the tall face, the deep-set black eyes and the dark brow of an archbishop. They gave George his robes, he grew a big beard – he looked like the kind of guy who could do this over a weekend – and suddenly he looked more like a patriarch than the Patriarch did. George might have stepped out of an eleventh-century mosaic. But despite the impressive air of religious gravitas the high-school senior kept breaking through.

Istanbul was not George’s kind of city. Diplomatically he tried to express enthusiasm for the antiquities, for the Bosphorus, for the food, but his American horror at the chaos and the general decrepitude of the place was impossible to keep in check. He was homesick for the Midwest. I asked what he missed most. He chewed his pencil. I was expecting him to opt for the communion of his family or the fellowship of his home church.

‘Cheetos,’ he said after a time.

‘Cheetos?’

‘Yeah, you know. Those cheese-flavoured things.’

The Cheetos were not just a blip. In George two distinct personalities co-existed uneasily. He told me he was planning to be an Orthodox priest then almost in the same breath complained about how difficult it was to meet girls in Istanbul. Candidates for the Orthodox priesthood who are already married are generously allowed to keep their wives, he explained, but those who are unmarried at the time of induction are obliged to remain celibate. In September he would begin three years in an American seminary, not the best place to pick up girls. George was desperate for a love interest. There may have been sound ecclesiastical reasons for this but it tended to come across as the kind of hormone rush common to most nineteen-year-old males.

As delicately as his patriarchal persona would allow he enquired about my time in Istanbul, steering the conversation gently towards social activities. I knew what he was after – where was a good place to pull in Istanbul – but the clerical office, the robes, the icon above his desk, made it difficult to broach the subject openly.

The telephone rang. It was a school friend from America. In an instant the bearded cleric fell into the patois of an American high school.

‘Hey, Bobby. How’s it going?’ said George. ‘Hey man, I got to get outta here. It’s been nine months. This place is driving me crazy.’

He listened for a time, then he asked, ‘How’s that girl from St Paul’s?’

There was a pause. George was chewing the corners of his beard.

‘You know, the one with the halter top. Debbie. We met her at the Dairy Queen.’

There was a much longer pause. George’s face darkened as he listened. There had obviously been a few developments in the life of Debbie of the Dairy Queen.

After a time George shrugged. ‘Hey, who’s worried?’ he said. ‘There are other girls.’

They chatted for a while about basketball and the Chicago Bulls then George hung up. He seemed to have shrunk a little inside his robes.

‘Hayal Kahvesi,’ I said. ‘It’s just off Istiklal Caddesi, near Taksim.’

‘What’s that?’ George’s thoughts were still with Debbie’s halter top.

‘It’s a café,’ I said. ‘You can get a beer, listen to live music. It’s a good place to meet people.’ The thought of George turning up among the hip modern crowd of this trendy café in his robes flashed through my mind.

‘Dress is casual,’ I said.

The Metropolitan of Laodicea never arrived. He called from his mobile to apologize that he had been held up and to say that he had arranged for the priest of Mouchliotissa to take me to the church. Father Alexandros turned up presently, out of breath, and dressed like an undertaker. He was a handsome fellow in his mid-forties with dark luxuriant hair, long eyelashes, and the mandatory beard. He had been a pharmacist but when the Patriarch began to run short of priests he prevailed upon Alexandros, a family friend, to give up aspirins and Night Nurse for incense and holy water.