Original subtitles

The Eye of All the World, the ancients called it,

the heart of a lost empire that had lasted for a thousand years and more.

Saint Sofia, The Church of the Divine Wisdom,

this was their crowning glory, the glory of Byzantium.

The vanished Empire of Byzantium, born of pagan Rome,

Byzantium,

the dream of a Christian Roman Empire that stretched from Spain to Syria.

Byzantium,

whose influence ran from northern Russia down to Nubia up on the Apennine.

Byzantium, gateway to a lost chapter of our past.

The Orient Express, I first traveled this line in the sixties.

I bought a ticket at Waterloo Station in London

for a ride to Istanbul in Turkey,

and a life long fascination.

It took three days to get there. It was hell on wheels, really,

goats in the corridor and communism out the window.

And, all of a sudden, the train swung round the bend and bang,

the orient hit me in the face.

A great golden city by the sea, set between the east and west,

you could see it had been the center of the world.

It was astonishing.

But, come to Istanbul,

and underneath, the magic ruins of the lost Empire of Byzantium.

The Orient Express stopped here, in the heart of the old city.

I got off it in clouds of smoke and steam,

haunted by the ghosts of Greta Garbo and Agatha Christie

by a thousand spies and archeologists,

by the kings and courtesans, of prewar Europe.

Istanbul, one of the very greatest of Islamic cities,

with the monuments of the conquering Turkish sultans

who had ruled here since 1453, dominating its skyline.

Underneath, though, are much older ghosts.

Brushed each day by people of the living city, the ruins of Constantinople,

the capital city of the Empire of Byzantium,

Istanbul, Constantinople, two names, new and old for the same grand city.

Sixteen centuries ago, in the year, 330,

the Emperor Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor,

chose this city, then a small Greek town to be his capital.

No one quite knows why.

One thing is sure though,

the great warrior emperors had left Rome and the cities of the west forever.

This mosque, the mosque of the Turkish sultan who conquered the city,

is built straight on the foundations of the most ancient burial church

of the mysterious emperors of old Byzantium.

What, then, was this most ancient half forgotten empire, the Empire of

Byzantium?

Byzantium, that magic spicy word.

Now, imagine that the empires of Greece and Rome had never died

but had been fused together in a single empire, set between the east and west.

And, imagine that the emperors of this kingdom,

the sacred emperors could be torn to pieces by the mobs in the street,

emperors who could mutilate their courtiers and children,

who killed their priest and blinded whole armies of invaders.

Yet, emperors whose artists made some of the most finest, the most

exquisite images the world has ever seen,

vision of heaven and earth, sublime architectures,

copied by everybody from the kaliphs of Baghdad to the popes of Rome,

the kings of Germany and the tribes of Nubia,

visions of heaven's order and earthly power

that sill lie deep within the modern world.

Just as this mosque, the Conqueror's Mosque, stands on the ruins of

Byzantium, so do we all.

This is where the Empire of Byzantium began,

beside this ancient column here on Main Street,

a lonely ancient relic in a modern city.

In the year of our Lord 330, on a lovely May morning,

the great procession came down this road.

It was the highway of an ancient city called Byzantium.

And, the procession was led by the great Roman Emperor, Constantine.

And he brought with him, a bunch of priests, pagan and Christian ones,

and they were all holding an incredible collection of relics.

There were twelve baskets filled with crumbs, the residue it was said

of our Lord's miracle of the loaves and fishes.

There was the very axe that Noah made the Ark with

and there was a statue that the

Emperor himself had brought secretly from Rome,

the statue of the Greek god, Paris.

And at the exact moment prescribed by astrologers,

they buried their relics just over there, at the foot of the column,

seven drums of palfrey brought from the Egyptian deserts.

And, Constantine renamed the city Constantinople and claimed it as

the capital of his grand new empire.

You know, over the years the column itself became to be seen as a relic

and the Byzantines, that's the people

who lived in this city, called it Christ's Nail,

because they thought that the great golden statue of Constantine upon the top

had something of one of the nails in Christ's crucifixion built into it

and every year on the New Year's Day, that's the first of September,

the Byzantines turned out at the bottom of this column

and sung hymns to Saint Constantine,

the founder of their city and the mighty empire called Byzantium.

Constantinople was designed to be the center of the Christian world,

the center of Christ's government on earth.

These great cups were made to hold the mystery of Christ's blood inside

the city's churches,

churches glowing with Roman gold and ancient holy images,

images that for a thousand years flooded right through Europe and the east.

This, then, is Byzantium's first story.

The story of how in two short centuries the dream was made,

the dream that was Byzantium.

Constantine, the Christian emperor,

the man who took the faith of Jesus and the God of Abraham

and created the beginning of the governments and churches in

which the west still trusts.

He was crowned, they say, in York, in England, in 306.

For forty years, he killed foes and family alike

and when he died, people were so frightened of him that no one touched

his body for a week.

This was the extent of Constantine's ambition,

the late Roman Empire with Constantinople, not Rome as its capital.

And in the far north, in Germany, the City of Trier,

the great imperial garrison, it still shows something of what ancient

Constantinople used to look like.

The city gate still guarding The Main Road into town,

a great grim gate, like the rest of the northern frontier,

Trier was continuously threatened by Huns and Goths and Vandals

and a dozen other warrior nations.

Constantine The Great, the emperor, himself,

would have walked down this same passage sixteen hundred years ago.

These vaults and arches are the architecture of his time.

Once you're through the gate,

most Roman towns look much the same.

They were, if you like, a sort of an abstract idea of a city

and they were stamped on every landscape from Yorkshire to Syria.

You can still sense their design in a thousand old world cities

and in the new world, too, from Washington to San Francisco.

Planners still use parts of the same old patterns.

All Roman towns had roads like this one,

wide thoroughfares that took you from the country to the heart of the city.

This one is at Palmyra in the Syrian Dessert.

In Constantinople it was called, quite simply, The Main Road.

Now, what you've got to see is that behind all these columns

there are little rows of shops running down the sides of the street,

butchers, bakers, candle makers, all sorts of people.

In Constantinople, it would have had the goods of the known world,

Africa, China, the Baltic, everything was for sale.

Just imagine the emperor is coming in in triumph, he's won a war,

he's coming through the gate,

the shop keepers have been told to dust down the streets,

flowers have been strewn all over the pavement,

roses are raining down upon him,

there are rugs and silks fluttering in the breezes all around him,

the whole town has been sucked out to come and see him.

Behind of course, behind the main street are the town houses,

servants, soldiers, all the people.

There were taverns, brothels, everything in a city.

And in amongst those,

studded in amongst those were those

huge buildings that Constantine had to build

before his city could really be called a Roman metropolis.

It's only a little building, but it was actually the heart of ancient Palmyra.

It's the center, the oval office where government was conducted,

where the town elders met, where plots were hatched, all that sort of thing.

Of course, in Constantine's great imperial cities,

this would have been a vast long hall,

and quiet often in the central hall of government,

great Constantine himself would have sat where now the altars of

Christian churches stand,

because this is basically the same building.

In the year 360,

Constantine's son built a magnificent church at Constantinople

especially for the drama of imperial communion.

Next door, those same pious emperors built a giant racetrack,

The Hippodrome.

You can still see part of its outline in the streets.

And here at last,

around this old Egyptian obelisk,

you can discover something of the atmosphere of ancient Constantinople,

the heart of old Byzantium.

This stone is like a giant mirror,

reflecting all the life that once went on around it.

There's the emperor and his family,

Constantine's successors come to the royal box to start a chariot race.

There's the obelisk in the middle to the race track

and the chariots, too, eight of them running all at once.

You would need a lot of luck to win.

This place wasn't just a race track, though.

This is a place where people met their emperor and his court.

It's the air, the space of Byzantium, a hundred thousand people roaring

as new emperors are presented to them as captives of foreign wars are

brought and thrown at the feet of the emperor.

It's the old parliament.

It's the real heart of Byzantium.

And, that scene there, where've you seen it before?

Look at it carefully.

The emperor is in the middle with his family, just like God.

Around them, stand the army and the court, just like the saints.

Beneath them,

begging mercy, are Byzantium's enemies, the damned.

It's a grand last judgment right here on earth,

with the emperor playing God.

So, that's it really,

the emperor brings happiness and harmony.

The theater brings luck and victory.

This is the center of the world,

an image, you might say of heaven on earth.

So, if we had pushed open the gates of the palace that once stood

beside The Hippodrome,

we would've really been opening the earthly gates of paradise.

Arcades of gold and marble,

silver boats on pools of mercury,

silk carpets, golden thrones

and halls of palfrey and bowls,

all are gone,

only echoes of them still remain in Syria, in Italy.

Once though Constantinople held the palace of all palaces,

The Palace of the Christian Empire.

Church, Hippodrome and palace,

Constantine had made a sacred engine that would power Byzantium forever.

To protect the Holy City of Constantinople,

the emperors of Byzantium built the largest city walls in all the world.

Armies that controlled the lives of millions road from these gates.

And, through them passed the produce of an empire.

The whole history of this city is in this gate,

the Great Golden Gate of Imperial Byzantium.

You see that great high span at the top?

That was once open to the skies.

For six hundred years, emperors and armies road through that gate

in triumph,

coming back from wars against the Persians, the Arabs,

the Bulgarians, the Russians.

And then, there was an earthquake

and the gate was blocked.

And, that final gate at the bottom that even a cavalry man couldn't

come through on a horse,

that gate was built in the final years of Byzantium.

So, this is a magic gate,

it's a gate of legends.

They say its wooden doors were covered with sheets of gold to give the

gate its name.

They say that the very last emperor, killed fighting on these walls,

is buried beneath these stones,

waiting for a call to take the city once again.

So, it's a gate of legend

but above all it speaks of imperial Byzantine power.

Power to control innumerable lives.

You know, there are thousands of blocks in this gate

and each one of them, each tiny mark

upon them, made by an individual human hand.

Endless lives absorbed in making millions of these blocks,

enough to build the whole city of Constantinople.

Now, this snowy marble, strange gray lines running through,

is found all over the Byzantine empire,

from Spain to Syria and back to Constantinople.

But, it comes from one island only,

one tiny island in the sea.

Southwest of Istanbul, three days sailing on an ancient slave ship,

is the Isle of Marmara,

its very name means stone.

In the first centuries of Byzantium,

slaves in their tens of thousands worked in these marble hills.

How the Byzantines loved marble.

In marble, says a priest,

God trapped fields of flowers and mountain forests,

and fish and fruit, and melting snows.

The ancient blocks, still strewn across the keys,

hint of the frantic energy that was once used to move their precious stone.

Still inside the modern quarries, an ancient stone that weighs around

a hundred tons,

part of it an enormous column

to memorialize the military victories of Byzantium.

If it were finished,

it would have had a spiral staircase cut in it and rows of sculptured

soldiers on it's turning surface.

It's still here, though.

It cracked as it was quarried.

In ancient times these quarries were called The Quarries of the Mother of God.

It might just as well have been called

The Quarries of the Mother of Constantinople.

The whole city was made here

and it was pre-fab city.

It wasn't just sent off in blocks, everything was finished.

If these had been finished, and gone to Constantinople,

each one would have been lettered, it had its exact place in everyone

of the ancient buildings of the city.

This, for example is the very tip of a building that would have looked

like a Roman temple.

Modern quarry masters tell me that

they find the best new seams of marble in the hills beside the ancient stones.

This would be a good spot then.

A giant lonely column shaft.

I've seen that same shape,

so called peacock's feather pattern

cut on a broken column lying right on The Main Street of Old Istanbul.

This was once a marble square on a highway at the middle of Constantinople.

I don't suppose the Turks of modern Istanbul

think much about ancient Byzantine victories.

Yet, there's still some fragments here of that great memorial column

that made it all the way from Marmara.

The ghosts of the imperial armies still lining the boots of their

processions through the city.

Just as all the ancient roads and sea lanes ran through the empire

to Constantinople,

so did the rivers of the region,

channeled into great aqueducts bringing treasured water to a thirsty city.

Underneath the town, cut deep into its hill top, an eerie underworld,

some fifteen centuries old, fresh water cisterns

so that the Byzantines could bath just like the Romans did, in marble halls.

And, everything made with the dazzling technology of ancient Rome,

father of Byzantium.

Marble columns,

high brick vaults,

the dark forest of Byzantium beneath modern Istanbul.

Those Greek letters harrowed into the column with a chisel point,

the marks of one of Marmara's quarrymen.

Food too, flooded into the enlarging city,

what a vast logistic exercise and earthly miracle,

supporting Constantinople's half a million people, Europe's biggest city,

and everything of course by hand.

There was no food industry,

everything was carried here in boats and carts.

The finest fish, the Byzantines believed, were caught beside the

emperor's palace,

between the rising of the Pleiades and the setting of the blood red

star, Arcturus.

Colors, smells and textures of the ancient everyday,

the raw ingredients of Byzantine experience,

the world of the ancient Mediterranean.

Just like the people of modern Istanbul,

the Byzantines loved fresh bread and fresh vegetables.

For the bread, at least the grain for it, they brought from their

province of Egypt.

The vegetables, they grew themselves,

in little plots beside their houses in the city,

in fields in a great green swath that ran for mile upon mile down the

walls of the city.

And, here's still a bit of it today,

growing more or less the same crops.

Look at the garlic, the onions, the dill, the dill they used to flavor fish,

especially those heavy yellow fish soups they so love.

This, well this is a ecological Byzantine delight here.

There's three or four different sorts of crops.

There's rocket for salad there's chard and cabbage again.

All sorts of things, mint all growing together in a great profusion.

And, at the end of it all, lettuce to calm your stomach.

So, when the peasants in the fields, just stopped there for a moment

and straightened their backs

to watch the lords of Byzantium, those great history makers riding by,

they too, could think, "We're not having such a bad time either."

The Byzantine economy was based on the classic Mediterranean diet,

wine, grain, cheese, vegetables, and olives.

Olive oil was a staple.

It was Byzantium's fuel.

It lit streets, and homes and lighthouses.

It oiled carts and cured baldness, and it was used for cooking.

In its first century, Constantinople's oil came mostly from northern Syria.

This is a wonderful thing.

It's a piece of Byzantine industrial archeology.

It's a factory for making olive oil.

This is a marvelous little place.

I'll show you how it works. It's very sensible, very logical.

The olives were picked from the trees,

they came down that little street in wagons,

they were tipped down through a

window, and they fell into that trough down there.

They were then scooped out of the trough

and put into this mill.

This is a great oil press for the berries.

You see this drum?

There were two of those, they fitted on end in here, side by side,

a bough between them,

and four or five men pushed round the outside

and reduced the olives, the skin and the stone into a sort of

horrible messy pulp.

That, then, was taken out of there and laid in these circles here.

Now, this thing in the wall here,

held a great beam that ran through the air.

And, hanging above this was a huge cylinder of stone.

That, then, was slowly dropped onto the massive olive paste

and the oil dripped down into these tanks.

Not the end, because, this after all, although it's cold pressed, is

actually a very impure oil at this moment.

So, they take it out of here and they put it into this tank here.

Now, this tank has already got water in it,

so as they pour the olive oil in, it floats to the surface,

all the impurities go down to the bottom.

And, see this little trench here?

A vital piece of gourmet equipment

because this is where the very finest oil ran from that impurity tank

down into this tank

to make fine clear olive oil for the tables of Byzantium.

This is Sergilla, one of three hundred ancient Syrian villages,

in the Byzantine olive groves,

provincial Byzantium preserved in fine cut stone.

Just off the main square is the public bath house, the forerunner of the

Turkish bath.

Saint John cast whores and devils out of one of these.

This is Sergilla's cafe cum town hall down on Main Street.

Old soldiers and half mad saints got drunk in bars like this,

money lenders, magistrates and merchants did their business here.

Can you hear the farmers, tough independent homesteaders,

chuckling about the prices that the city folk were paying for their olive oil?

Life was very good.

There was time for both the devil and his and for the church and all its works.

If you could come up this path, fifteen hundred years ago on the

first of September,

you'd have been accompanied by thousands of people shouting and

singing praises to the Lord.

It was the feast day of Saint Simon of the Pillar.

The first place these processions came to was this great baptistery.

Ten thousand people, whole cities full

have been baptized in this room in a single day

and then out they all went praising

the Lord, onwards to the Church of the Saint.

It's Roman architecture still of course,

arches, vaults, and column tops.

But, now, there's Christian crosses, too.

The ancient forms are turning into something else.

See, the wind of faith is bending all those ancient pagan patterns.

This is the start of what would become Byzantium.

And at the church's hub,

the remains of a fifty foot column on which Saint Simon lived.

So, who was this weird man who lived up a pillar

and half the world had come to see him

and when he died, they built this beautiful dancing church in his honor?

Well, as a young man, Simon, had worn clothes so rough they make him bleed.

Then he dreamt up the idea of chaining his left leg to a large rock.

That, before he went up the column.

But, Simon wasn't a nutter,

Simon had tremendous presence like an emperor.

He sat still and silent

and in his contest between flesh and the devil,

it seemed to most people that he was beyond touch.

And, there he was on his pillar, half way between heaven and earth.

A perfect man to settle disputes.

So they used Simon.

The farmers of Syria would come here when they were in arguments

and he would settle one against the other.

The Bedouin, Arab Bedouin came to see him too.

The emperor used to come to see him

and always he acted as a balance in society,

such a terrifying balance

that if he cursed somebody from the top of his pillar

a rock would explode next to the unfortunate individual.

So, Simon, it was a vital element in this new Christian empire.

An element which somehow had taken the old stern order of the Roman age

and left it half way between heaven and earth.

In eastern Mediterranean,

in the warm heartland of the pagan world,

the first Christian empire, the empire of Byzantium,

had found its balance.

It was a good life, a rich life and there was peace and plenty.

You know it always strikes me as funny, when people talk about the

fall of the Roman empire.

After all, standing here in Constantinople,

it just got richer, and richer, and richer, didn't fall at all.

I suppose, really, it's because Rome fell.

In fact Rome didn't fall,

it just got poor.

Constantine had moved the capital from the great old cities of the

west to here in the east.

And, with him moved the government, the generals, the artists, and the architects,

everybody who made the empire moved with him.

So, in 475, that's twenty five years after these walls were finished,

the last Roman emperor of the west,

a young man, a junior emperor,

sent the crown back here to Constantinople, to new Rome.

This was the new city,

and, I suppose really the story about the fall of the Roman empire,

that's the western empire,

was really invented in the Renaissance by the popes

who really wanted to get the idea of a pagan empire falling and a

Christian empire of the west rising.

They're good propagandist,

like Raphael and Michelangelo to budge them on their way.

But the truth is, the real truth is that old Rome, ancient Rome,

had been modeled on the great cities of the east.

When Antioch and Alexandria, all those great marble cities,

so when you say Rome fell, it didn't fall at all.

It simply went back home again.

After the last emperor of the west resigned,

Byzantium lost most of its European provinces,

only for a century though.

By the year 555,

brand new Byzantine armies had ruthlessly re-conquered some of them,

and in northern Italy, at Ravenna,

they left triumphant decorations in this church as a memorial

The man there is Justinian, the emperor,

who two hundred years after Constantine completely remade the

Roman empire.

The man who made Byzantium,

he was a man they said who was gentle and approachable, a man who never

showed his anger,

a man, who in the quietest of voices, could order the death of thousands.

He didn't organize the empire completely by himself, though.

His great strength was as a manager.

Those strong faces that surround him

were the faces of a great team of men he picked together.

And, he didn't really care whether they were Roman patricians or

from the humblest, roughest backgrounds.

He, himself had actually come from a completely illiterate peasant family

in Serbia.

Justinian though was only half the picture.

The other half was that most remarkable woman over there,

the Empress Theodora.

They married each other for love and they stayed together for

twenty-five years.

And, look at the young ladies of the court there,

they're looking sideways, a bit nervous,

you see it's not proper for young girls to look straight at you,

not unless you are a woman of power like Theodora.

But, that is actually a portrait of a woman dying of cancer.

Within two or three months of this mosaic being finished, Theodora was dead.

Justinian ruled for another twenty years.

He never remarried

and he went to her grave and lit candles until he was a very old man.

Although Justinian and Theodora restored the Roman empire,

this was no longer the ancient classical world.

They lived in a different age.

They spoke Eastern Greek instead of Roman Latin

and viewed the world in very different ways.

Look at these sculptures.

They're probably the last classical figures ever made.

They were made actually in the generations just before Justinian.

Now, at first glance, you might think they're just part of those usual old

classical things hanging around museums,

big stony Alexanders and Caesars all strutting their stuff.

But, they're not like that at all.

They're new, they're different.

Something else is going on.

It's very simple work,

very realistic in a way,

little light cut lines,

and a day old beard, lightly chiseled on the hard marble,

as if to emphasize his transience, it's insubstantiality.

These people are pensive, sad, and rather wise.

After all, hadn't the saints and bishops told them that

this life, this material world was only an illusion.

So, naturally, these statues don't strut their stony stuff like

Alexander or the emperors of Rome.

They are not heroic descriptions of skin and bone and straining muscle.

Each man stands inside his own mysterious inner space that each

one of must occupy,

and from that space, they look outwards from the soul towards the heavens.

As you might expect, if you should move around them,

solid bulk of marble and humanity seem to be nothing more than an illusion.

These brand new people, though, were clever and inventive, too.

Many of them were drawn here, to the center of the empire.

Most of Byzantium's brightest brains

were packed into these tiny streets and apartments that surrounded the

palace complex in Constantinople.

They were people here come to seek their fortune of the court from

all over the empire

from Spain, from Egypt, from Syria.

There were mathematicians, lawyers, doctors,

scientists, magicians, alchemists,

all sorts of weird and wonderful people packed and living tightly

together in these little streets.

In the 520's and 530's

there was a great excitement bubbling up inside this unique community.

Justinian and Theodora had planned to build new palaces and churches,

such as the world had never seen.

The ancient forms, arches, vaults and column tops were being used

for something revolutionary,

something that will be echoed in ten thousand different churches for

a thousand years and more,

the style that is Byzantium.

This seaside church, set right beside the palace was made for some of

Theodora's favorite priests.

It was probably the work of one

Anthemius, famous physician and mathematician.

This is where the style began.

Theodora built the church

to hold the bloodstained cloaks and bodies of two martyred soldiers,

Sergius and Bacchus,

the army's patron saints.

Now it's a mosque.

Anthemius' subtle compass has transformed all the usual ancient forms,

squares become circles, circles octagons

and all around a single central point, space spins into ever smaller spaces.

It's as perfectly mysterious as the finest natural crystal,

the walls, the columns seem to be nothing more than an illusion and

simply fade away.

Just look at that great big glorious dome like a huge melon divided

into sixteen sections

and held by eight wonderful swinging arches on those extraordinary

V-shaped pillars

and twenty-eight columns through the church.

It's like a vast net of stone and brick slung over this central space,

this strange mysterious space for the imperial communion.

It's a wonderful piece of architecture and it solved all sorts of problems

that you can't even see.

You see, those low domes exert tremendous pressure

and there's a force in this building to push the bottom of it out

so the whole thing comes crashing down.

Now, Anthemius, like every other architect,

has used stone here as lintels, and beams, as stress and strains,

the old way of doing things,

but he has come up with a brilliant idea to hold the church together.

It's this cornice,

this huge beautiful marble cornice with it's inscription to Justinian

and Theodora,

this isn't just here for decoration.

This links the church in a chain, it binds the stones together a great

necklace for the church

brought from a shiny island in a bright blue sea.

Throughout Justinian's long reign

the Marmara quarries were hard at work,

shipping stone for a new crop of imperial churches.

This was building on a grand scale,

churches for every country in the empire.

But, the biggest of them all was a new church for the imperial communion

at Constantinople.

For this, the quarry masters were cutting larger and yet larger versions

of Anthemius' clever interlocking cornice.

Here's a piece of one of those stone chains under construction, and

here's its secret.

Each block was held to the next block by a great iron bracket held in

lead that ran between the two stones.

Anthemius' engineers used rather a lot of iron in their buildings.

It's part of whole new series of techniques

that allowed them to think more daringly, more bravely than any

other architects had done before.

Above all, it enabled Justinian, himself, to have the ambition to

conceive of the greatest dome the world has ever seen.

Such mysterious cargoes,

such magic marbles from across the empire,

now sail the seas and came to the Holy City of Byzantium

to be gathered up upon the site of the imperial communion.

This is the finished dream,

intense climax of all of ancient engineering,

a lively frame built with prayer and pragmatism

to hold the largest dome the world had ever seen.

This though was just the outside of the sacred theater.

Inside, a forest of columns rises up in ecstasy.

The walls, glass and gold and marble,

light and dark,

insubstantial and illusory seem to simply fade away.

A perfect sea of space,

for God's holy wisdom to come down and touch the earth,

a perfect theater for the anthems of Byzantium.

Lo, the Lords of the heaven and earth have come.

Blood red columns of Egyptian palfrey

were taken so it was said from the Temple of the Sun at Rome.

The church's wooden doors from Noah's Ark.

The building's bronze was stripped from the Temple of the Goddess, Artemis,

one of the seven wonders of the pagan world.

No wonder, the building has itself become a legend.

Poets said the church can bind the size of sunset and the scale of quarries,

the hues of birds and fish and precious stones,

all the textures and experience of that ancient everyday,

the leading pink of baby's fingernails,

the rising of the bright red star, Arcturus.

In Byzantine, in Greek, this church was called the Church of Aya Sofia,

The Church of Holy Wisdom.

All of Justinian's enormous empire,

its wealth, its piety, its pagan heritage was gathered up inside it.

Throughout the next nine centuries,

this vast old building stood right at the center of Byzantium,

a symbol of its true destiny on earth.

And on the last day of Byzantium

the emperor and this troops came here to pray

before they walked out of the city walls to die.

For these were the vaults that held the dream.

The dream that was Byzantium.