Ghost Church
Little mysteries: the stub of a pillar, its break rounded with age, sticking up through the sidewalk next to a parking lot. Across the narrow street, another pillar-sized lump, mortared all over with stones. Nearby, two arches stacked in front of a staircase going into a hill, with a brick barrel-vault ceiling, leading up to a bright pink-stuccoed wall behind a mosque. From the harsh recent restoration, you’d never dream how old it is. A block away, another pillar stub sticking out of the sidewalk. This one is a different kind of marble.
A sealed iron door in an old wall under a row of hotels. A hoary wall rearing up between a parking lot and a restaurant terrace. A ragged ruin over the Basilica Cistern, its windows Ottoman, its foundation Byzantine. Just hints, clues in a puzzle.
Once consecrated as holy, a place cannot be de-consecrated. So says a dear friend. Since he is a Canon in his church, with a lifetime spent studying such things, I listen to him. If so, then there is a certain parking lot in my old Sultanahmet neighborhood that is holy as all get-out, and on three theological pillars to boot: Muslim, Christian and Judaic. Before that, there was most likely some Pagan altar with flute and drum, an ancient withered seer behind the statue of the god, angels with wings coming out of their hips…
Walking around here for years, mentally lining up all these clues; speculating on some great temple all across the hill, its perfect Greek geometry leveling the lumpy streets. We must create our picture from minute fragments. Like sex in the movies under the old moralistic American Production Code, we have to make our guesses from the architectural equivalent of a hairpin on a pillow: that lone pillar stub sticking up out of the cobblestones. Our hairpin, so to speak, led to St Jacob’s Chapel, hidden under a building near the foot of the hill. Going down!
