has been so bound up with the history of a people as the Holy Wisdom. It was under this dome that seventy-four Emperors were crowned. Here Ignatius refused Holy Communion to Bardas; the Synod of 869 deposed Photius; the three Legates, in 1054, said, "Let God see to it and judge," as they laid the Bull of Excommunication on the altar. It was at the old altar under the dome of the Holy Wisdom that, in 1204, the Latin Mass announced to the angry Byzantines that they must now obey a Latin lord, and that, fifty-seven years later, the Greek Liturgy told them that their own Emperor was restored. Here Constantine XII received Holy Communion on the morning of May 29, 1453, before he went out to die for his city and his Empire, and now, on a column in the church, you may still see the blood-red mark of Mohammed the Conqueror's hand. Since the Turk sits on the throne of Justinian, his faith is preached in Justinian's church. He has covered up the old Saints with the names of the four Khalifahs, and has put a Mihrab pointing to Mecca behind the place where the old altar stood. To the Turk the church has been almost as important as to the Christian: it has been the model of a whole school of his architecture, too.[1] But whatever remnants of enthusiasm or chivalry remained among the Christians under his rule clung to the great church they had lost. The Holy Wisdom was a type of the old Empire, and the rayahs who dreamed of the day when their land should once more be Christian and free, summed up all their hope in the one picture of its reconsecration.
They have taken the City, they have taken it, they have taken Thessalonica,
They have taken the Holy Wisdom, the great Cathedral,
Which had three hundred altar-bells and sixty two great bells to chime.
For every bell was a priest, for every priest a deacon.
And as the Most Holy was taken, and the Lord of the world went out,
A voice was heard from heaven, a voice from the Angels' mouth:
"Leave off your psalms," they said, "set down the Most Holy, and send
Send to the land of the Franks, and tell them to come back to take it,
To take the golden Cross, and the book of the holy Gospels,
And to take the holy altar, lest the Turks should destroy or defile it."
- ↑ The great mosque of Ahmed is the best known example of a large class built in imitation of the Holy Wisdom.
