The Patria of Constantinople
τὰ πάτρια Κωνσταντινουπόλεως
By Peter Mark Adams
Patria, combining mythology, ethnography, geography and archaeology, constituted a popular literary genre in late-antiquity; as though a compelling need had arisen to preserve and celebrate a cultural inheritance; the myths and history peculiar to a region, a people or a city; the legendary accretions of its archaic traditions, its gods and demigods, sacred places, rites and festivals; their re-telling constitutive of a distinct Hellenistic identity. As such, patria sought to delineate their subjects through their most essential relationships: the boundedness of a determinate, immemorial landscape; a topography construed through the archaising narrative lens of myth and legend; and the interweaving of the lives and loves of the ancient Hellenistic gods as they fleetingly transited the linear plane of the temporal.
‘The Patria of Constantinople’ of Hesychius of Miletus, a chronicler resident in the city during the sixth century, provides just such an encompassing account of its archaic origins; re-contextualising the physical topography and history of its imperial centre as one bounded not by its proliferating Christian edifices - a significant omission in that day - but the infinitely older lens of its mythically-imbued landscape.
Cast back across the gulfs of time, Hesychius’ gaze upon the mythical past serves as an occluded admonishment, a form of resistance to and rallying point against Justinian’s great religious persecutions; persecutions that involved the unleashing of religious fanatics to arrest, confiscate, torture and either execute or force conversions of educated Hellenists and pagan peasants alike; to encompass the destruction of the Hellenistic cultural legacy - its temples, statues, sacred groves and altars - both in the city and throughout the Hellenistic cultural oecumenon - the ancient cites of the Aegean littoral, Troy, Assos, Priene, Ephesus and Clazomenae; the great hill city of Pergamon; Sardis, the first step on the Royal Road to Persia; the Ionian cities of the Meander valley and delta - historically great centres of philosophy, poetry and science - Miletus, Aphrodisias, Tralles; and of course, the eternally enduring cities of Athens, Damascus and Alexandria. Throughout this, the most civilized of realms, religious fanaticism became the order of the day. How does this background of religious tyranny affect the way in which Hesychius composed his work, and more to the point, how we read it today?
Hesychius’ Constantinopolitan landscape hinges upon its headland - the ‘Horn’ - bounded upon three sides by water; to the north the Golden Horn - the confluence of the sweet waters of Europe, the Cydarus and Barbyse, flowing from the hills of Thrace and giving out to the Bosphorus to the east as it snakes north to the Euxine Sea and to the south to be similarly engulfed by the gaping mouth of the Sea of Marmara; but our tale commences far away, with the promptings of an oracular vision and the quest that it set in motion.
Sea-raiders, marauders, pirates; the Argives - those mythical warriors, whether known as Achaeans, Spartans or Danaans - put to sea at the prompting of Delphi’s Pythian priestess to found a colony. Having propitiated the daemons of place, they established themselves on the land known today as the shoreline of the Golden Horn. Thereafter, the thread of our narrative abruptly escapes its linear bonds - splitting into alternative, parallel accounts, multiple histories and their fanciful etymologies; or else slips into the eternally cycling non-time of myth, though still remaining, somehow, nestled within the more straightforward progressions of history; and as myth and history blend together as mythistorema (a neologism coined by the poet George Seferis), we lose any purchase upon or ability to reconstitute the course of actual events.
The Argives’ great Moon goddess, Io, whose bovine rape by Zeus - facilitated by Hermes murder of her appointed watcher, the many-eyed Argus - raised Hera’s ire and set Io off on her travels; and as she traversed the unbounded space of myth she transformed it into known, determinate places, the unformed chaos became a landscape; so that as she crossed, and in mythical time is always crossing, the straits separating Europe from Asia it became a definite body of water, the Bosphorus or ‘Bos-poros’ - quite literally, the ‘ox ford or passage’.
At the so-called ‘horn’ (kerato) of the headland, Io is said to have given birth to a daughter, Keroessa, the ‘horned’ whose name, features that recurrent ending - ‘-essa’, ‘-assa’, ‘-assos’, ‘-issa’ - so evocative of the archaic Luwian substratum of Anatolian culture; and a reminder of the time-depth from which these emergent shoots of myth arose. Born near the altar of the nymph Semestre, Keroessa, in her turn, bore a child to the sea god, Poseidon, named Byzas.
Raised in the wilds of Thrace, Byzas is led to his destiny following an eagle, a path that brings him to the same headland where his mother once bore him and where he will found the city that ever-after bears his imprimatur; a city built with the help of his father, Poseidon, and Apollo. After completing the circuit walls Byzas constructed sanctuaries for the gods: at Basilike, a temple and statue to the titan Rhea; near the sea, a temple and sanctuary of Poseidon; on the site of the Hippodrome, a sanctuary for the titan Hekate; an altar for the Dioskouri (Castor and Pollux) near the altar of Semestre, deities summoned by sailors for their control of the trade winds, and an eminently suitable choice for this sea-girt city. Near the Strategion, altars to the heroes Ajax and Achilles; at Sykai an altar for the chthonic seer, Amphiaraos; and a little up from the temple of Poseidon, a sanctuary of Aphrodite and Artemis.
This curiously detailed account of its mythical founding and archaic sacred sites counter-maps the city’s more familiar, Christianised topography familiar from the work of Hesychius’ contemporary, that covert Hellenist Procopius of Caesarea, whose ‘On Buildings’ exhaustively catalogues the churches commissioned by Justinian throughout the city. Hesychius’ ‘Patria’ re-constitutes the city’s ancient roots and thereby re-institutes the primacy of its Hellenistic identity. His archaising cartography serves to delimit the headland and enfold the imperial centre - the triplicity of its political, popular and religious identity represented by Palace, Hippodrome and the Hagia Sophia - that ambivalently named ‘Holy Wisdom’ - within the ageless continuity of the Hellenistic narrative tradition.
A century before Constantine transferred the capital of the Roman Empire to Constantinople, three centuries before Hesychius, in his ‘Anaplous of the Bosporos’ (‘Guide to the Bosphorus’) the second century CE geographer Dionysius of Byzantium described, with a mariner’s eye for the sea and its ever-varying conditions, a passage from the Sea of Marmara, up the Bosphorus to the Black Sea; a description acutely attentive to the harbours, complex eddies, currents and counter-currents, headlands, and winds that have forever proved hazardous to the inexperienced and the unwary. In the course of his travels he alludes to the horn as the ‘Bosporion headland’ and its myth of Io; and, like Hesychius, but three centuries earlier, describes the presence of an archaic temple of Poseidon, next to the sea, along with an altar dedicated to Athena. Although Poseidon was the most essential of all gods for a sea-faring people to honour, we find Athena ensconced throughout the Hellenistic world upon each city’s acropolis.
Athena was ever the goddess of wisdom. Whether in the form of a dazzling epiphany, a wise inner voice or assistance afforded by a stranger, Athena manifests herself just as her aegis enfolded the greatest of the Neoplatonists, Proclus Diadochus. Although Lykian by descent, Proclus was born in Constantinople. His successor as head of the Neoplatonic school of Athens, Marinus of Neapolis (Nablus), describes how Proclus was welcomed, at birth, by the city’s guardian, the Constantinopolitan goddess of wisdom, Poliouchos Athena; a deity who subsequently overshadowed and guided him, appearing in dreams to direct the evolution of his spiritual life and more specifically, to take up the study of philosophy in Athens. Small wonder, therefore, that when Justinian came to build a church (between 532 and 537 CE) that would dominate the skyline and proclaim his greatness, he simply named it ‘Holy Wisdom’ - ‘Hagia Sophia’ - the same name used for the church that had previously stood on that spot, and the one before that....
Whatever overt political functions Constantinople’s church of the Holy Wisdom served; it stood - and still stands - as the supreme dedicatory offering to a conception of wisdom in its most elevated, abstract sense; a sense expertly encapsulated in the building’s sophisticated stereometry, optical and acoustic design; a purity of conception underlined by its aniconic decorative design - for there was, upon its consecration, no figurative or overtly religious imagery whatsoever inscribed within its fabric. That said, its seemingly abstract decorative scheme encodes and echoes the ‘Patria’s’ repeated references to Poseidon; for therein we may find, if we are discerning enough, the distinctive emblemata of Poseidon, guide of souls through the southerly, solstitial gates, in the building’s southerly corner, directly under the gaze of Capricorn, the astral portal to the Platonic ‘Gates of the Sun’.
In his ‘On the Months’, another educated Hellenist resident in Constantinople during the sixth century, John of Lydia, an antiquarian and high court official, composed a comprehensive counter-mapping of the entire Christian liturgical year, month by month, from the perspective of its Hellenistic rites, rituals and festivities. John of Lydia includes an exegesis of the related myths and detailed discussions of their metaphysical significance citing such ‘heretical’ sources as Plato’s ‘Timaeus’, the ‘Chaldean Oracles’; distinguished Hellenists of the school of Athens - Proclus, Ammonius and Syrianus - as well as Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus. From our present perspective, ‘On the Months’ is particularly enlightening when it comes to the consideration of the winter solstice.
The celebration of the winter solstice during these centuries had both a traditional, popular component as well as an occluded, hieratic significance. The solstice festival was a continuation of, and in some ways a culmination of, Brumalia - an alternative name for the far more ancient ‘Kronia’, the festive season celebrating Kronos though better known in the Latin West as ‘Saturnalia’. Between the 24th of November and the 17th of December Brumalia was celebrated throughout the Hellenistic world; ‘bromios’ - ‘roaring’ or ‘noisy’ - also being an ancient epithet of Dionysus. With the onset of the solstice John of Lydia, informs us how, in December, even in his own time, pigs would be sacrificed as offerings to Kronos and Demeter and the first-fruits offered to the priests of the Great Mother goddess. The 692 CE, a century and a half later, at the Council of Trullo, the Church condemned the behaviour exhibited during the seasonal festivals the Bota, the Brumalia and the one held on the 1st of March. They singled out the dances and mystical rites performed by men and women in honour of the ancient gods; and in particular, the cross-dressing and invocation of Dionysus that these carnival-like rites involved. Much to the consternation of the Church, these festivals were still being celebrated in Constantinople, never mind the rural areas, as late as the tenth century, and indeed, possibly as late as the twelfth.
Of the hieratic explanation of the season’s myths, John of Lydia explains that Kronus’ imprisonment in Tartarus by Zeus is explained by the Neoplatonist Ammonius as a metaphor in which Kronus represents the soul and Zeus the force of generation and that just as the soul is confined in the body (demas) this is the equivalent of imprisonment (desmos); imprisonment like an oyster in its shell, as Plato’s ‘Phaedrus’ has it.
The city’s yearly festivities recognised the many faces of the divine; at the more hieratic level of the educated Hellenists these transitions, gradations, rubrics signified the different spiritual memes encoded within myth and legend but actualised through the phenomenology of participation that continued to resurrect the sacred landscape of myth and project it into the abstracted language of an enduring sacred architecture and antiquarian texts that retained a connection with the ancient lineage of Hellenistic culture.
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Peter Mark Adams is a professional author and long time Istanbul resident. I specialise in the ethnography of ritual, sacred landscapes, myth, consciousness and healing. Peter’s non-fiction has been published by Inner Traditions and Scarlet Imprint; literary prose and poetry in Corbel Stone Press’ literary journal, ‘Reliquiae: Journal of Landscape, Nature & Mythology’ and ‘The Bosphorus Review of Books’; literary and poetry reviews are featured on Paralibrum.com.