Old Constantinople/Istanbul

Glimpses at a distant past, with a few notes on the Roman (Byzantine) Empire

Today, I’m going to take you to a place that’s always fascinated me: Constantinople.

Ever since my younger self, as a teenager, delved into atlases (esp. of Antiquity), read like all the classic mythical tales of the Greeks, Romans, and German peoples, I was fascinated by the culture and civilisation of the Byzantine Empire.

If you wish to look at this in a wee bit more depth, well, here’s the Wikipedia entry on “The History of the Byzantine Empire” (which is not all that bad) for starters. For those who are a bit more inclined to listening, I can (tentatively) recommend this podcast.

I say “tentatively” because I’m old-fashioned and read books, such as John Julius Norwich’s elegantly written three-vol. History of Byzantium. The literature is quite vast at this point, with substantial bodies of scholarship in Greek, Turkish, Russian, German, French, and Italian, too.

I claim no particular expertise here, and although my own interests every now and then brought me into close proximity with Constantinople and the Byzantines, I consider their most important contribution to European civilisation, such as it (still) exists, along the lines written by Norwich in his Short History of Byzantium (Penguin, 1998):

Our civilization has never adequately acknowledged the debt it owes to the Empire of the East. Were it not for that great oriental bastion of Christendom, what chance would Europe have had against the armies of the King of Persia in the seventh century, or those of the Caliph of Baghdad in the eighth? What language would we be speaking today, and what god would we worship? In the cultural field, too, our indebtedness is great. After the barbarian invasions and the fall of the Emperor in Rome, the lights of learning were almost extinguished in western Europe, apart from a few fitful monastic flickers; it was on the banks of the Bosphorus that they continued to blaze, and that the old classical heritage was preserved. Much of what we know of antiquity—especially of Greek and Roman literature and of Roman law—would have been lost for ever but for the scholars and scribes and copyists of Constantinople.

I do not have picture postcards from that period, though, but I do have some—actually, quite a lot—from post-Ottoman Istanbul. I shall post here, but I will begin with the “older” ones from before the First World War.

---

Greetings from Constantinople, shown is the “Turkish cemetery” at the Eyüb Mosque.

One of the city’s defining features is the Hagia Sophia, originally built by—the Byzantines. On this picture postcard dated 1913 (see the reverse below), we see the Galata Bridge across the Golden Horn.

And this is the reverse (Galata is the “old” name for the modern borough, or ward, of Karaqöy, here rendered in French):

Among the many treasures found in Istanbul, the Alexander Sarcophagus, preserved in the city’s Archaeological Museum.

Although not exactly from before the First World War, the below picture postcard shows the Galata Bridge across the Golden Horn (but in the opposite direction compared to the above postcard) with the Galata Tower of the fourteenth century dominating the area.

Finally, the oldest of the picture postcards from Istanbul/Constantinople—for Erich Sonntag, he used the latter term—shows a dervish, and it is dated 1902 on the reverse.

“Greetings from Constantinople”.