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Even before their conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Ottoman Turks referred to The City’s inhabitants as “Rum,” or “Romans.” In this, they were simply following the local practice: that’s how Constantinopolitan Christians referred to themselves, and continue to refer to themselves to this day. They knew themselves to be citizens of the Christian Roman Empire. They would never have heard of the word “Byzantine,” a term first used to describe the Eastern Roman Empire in the 16th century, and had you called them “Hellenes” or “Greeks” they would have felt affronted, thinking you were calling them pagans. No, they were Romans, thank you very much. And that’s why, if you Google Earth “Istanbul,” you’ll find that the place where our OCF Real Break team has spent the past couple of days working is labeled “Egrikapi Rum Mezarliki,” or “the Cemetery of the Romans at the Crooked Gate.”
The cemetery just outside the northernmost stretch of Constantinople’s famous land walls, often called the Theodosian Walls, after the fifth-century emperor during whose reign they were first erected. Four miles of triple fortifications running from the Sea of Marmora at the south to within half a mile of the Golden Horn to the north, the Walls proved impregnable to would-be invasions by land for more than a millennium. At the north-westernmost corner of the historic City, the Theodosian Walls connect up with a single wall of defense that bulges out toward the west for a few hundred meters to accommodate the once enormous, no longer extant Imperial Palace at Blachernae. Egri (Crooked) Kapi (Gate) was what the Ottomans called one of the gates of this final half-mile stretch of land wall, an entrance the Greek-speaking residents of the City knew as “Pyle Kaligareia,” or “Gate of the Bootmakers’ (Quarters).” It’s just a couple hundred yards north of the cemetery’s northernmost boundary. When present day residents of Istanbul speak of Egrikarpi, however, they are referring to a section of the City rather than to the gate itself.
The roughly triangular-shaped piece of land that is the cemetery is just outside the final few three hundred meter stretch of Theodosian Walls. Its northern boundary is the first hundred meters of the Blachernae Wall, where it begins to move out toward the west. Its three-hundred-meter-long western boundary is the multi-lane highway that runs along the length of the land walls. Its eastern boundary is marked by a stone wall, 350 meters long and 4 meters high, which doesn’t look to be more than a couple of hundred years old. About fifty meters separates the cemetery’s eastern wall from the Theodosian Walls. Another 200 or so meters south of where the cemetery’s east and west boundaries come to a point is the Gate of Charisius, through which the 21-year-old Ottoman Emperor Mehmet II, the Conqueror, entered the City of his dreams on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, following a siege of seven weeks. Outside this gate is a well-maintained cemetery for the fallen heroes of the conquering forces.
There are several hundred graves or tombs in the Cemetery of the Rum, the great majority of them crowded together in the southern of the enclosure. It is rare to see a grave here inhabited by a single person; most contain the remains of several members of a family or even of two or more related families. Most of the markers date from the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries. Perhaps twenty Christians were buried here in the 21st century, the most recent in 2006. A century ago, this was one of several cemeteries which met the needs of an Orthodox Christian population that made up about a third of the City’s one million inhabits. Today, there are more Christians buried in this single space than there are alive to tend their graves. An estimated 1500 Greek Orthodox Christians remain in present-day Istanbul, a city of more than 15 million. Almost every Greek who could do so left the City in the twenty years between the horrifically violent anti-Christian riots of September 6th and 7th, 1955, and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. After nearly seventeen centuries, the Orthodox Christian community of Constantinople seems on the verge of extinction.
Given the demographic situation, an informed first-time visitor would expect to find signs of neglect at the cemetery, such as graves buried under ivy or weeds, or dislodged by growing tree roots. What came as a shock to the 22 members of our OCF Real Break team is the evidence of vandalism everywhere. There is hardly a grave with a marble covering that hasn’t been smashed, or a standing cross grave marker that hasn’t been pushed to the ground, or a image of a deceased person on a memorial that hasn’t been defaced. Along the entire length of the eastern wall are broken bottles and other debris, tossed down from the men who gather on top of the wall on most afternoons, to smoke and drink and occasionally harass the few Greeks who continue to visit and maintain the graves of their loved ones. Packs of dogs roam freely, finding shelter in the spaces opened up by the vandals’ sledgehammers and crowbars. Everywhere, bones. Some, too large to be human, are probably the remains of larger animals fed on by the dogs, though it’s hard to imagine what they might be – horses? bulls? mules? We found a couple of dogs’ skulls. Sadly, many of the ribs, vertebrae, limbs and skulls we discovered while raking up broken glass and weeds or collecting plastic debris from opened graves could only be of humans.
About midway between the anti-Greek riots of ’55 and the Turkish invasion of ’74, with the Orthodox Christian population on the wane but still significant, a Constantinopolitan named Kyriakos Pamoukolgou, knowing that he was nearing the end of his long life, had a chapel built in the middle of the cemetery, dedicated to his patron saint, Kyriacos the Anchorite (hermit) of 6th-century Palestine. (The Christians who remain here now call the cemetery “St. Kyriako’s.”) Pamoukoglou fell asleep in the Lord in 1972. He was buried a few yards from the entrance of the church he left behind, not far from the remains of his own father, the Priest Panagiotis. In recent years, His Grace Bishop Dionysios of Synada has begun a tradition of gathering his few remaining clergy and the faithful of his diocese to chant the Service of the Epitaphios, or Lamentations, at the Church of Saint Kyriakos on Holy Friday evening.
This past Monday morning, when we first drove in to the cemetery, I worried that His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew had made a mistake by asking our team to help restore it rather than, as we’d expected when arranging for the trip, a house of worship in need of repair. The enormity of the task was immediately evident, at least to me. And the presence of local loiterers, or malingerers, on the eastern wall gave me a sense of futility, a fear that whatever we repaired would be destroyed before we left on Saturday. The students, however, don’t seem to have entertained such doubts. They hit the ground running, eager to do whatever was in their power to restore a sense of peace and dignity to the place where so many who have gone before them await the Resurrection.
Yesterday morning, we were surprised shortly after we began our workday by His All Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew, who greeted each of the students individually as he explored the cemetery in search of the graves of departed clergymen or people he had known. We found five hierarchs at rest here, as well as several priests, presvyteres and chanters. (A monument near the church lists first among the deceased buried here the renowned chanter and composer of Byzantine music, Petros Lambadarios, who reposed in 1777, but we found no markers dating back earlier than the late 1800’s.) As I write this, they are nearing the end of the third and final day of their labors. I will be there shortly, to lead them in prayer for the repose of the souls of those who lie asleep there. I’ve asked each of the team members to bring me the names of the people whose graves they worked on. May God grant them rest where the righteous repose, and may their memory be eternal!
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