Wisdom from the Phanar – Moscow Truth

The dense Istanbul aroma of flowering, the bright palette of a spring fire that has flared up inspire not only poets, but also politicians to make lyrical statements that, according to their authors, have an impact on the centuries-old course of events and, of course, the results of the upcoming political elections.

Offering viewers of the Turkish channel KararTV a more rational use of the area of ​​​​historical heritage, the greatest architectural creation of the “Holy Wisdom” as a museum for tourists, presidential candidate Temel Karamolaoglu announced a possible intermediate solution to the contradiction between secular and Islamic views on this problem. On Twitter, he added a little later: “… her soul will be reborn.” An uncompromisingly opposite statement was immediately made by the current President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, taking credit for the resumption of religious services here after an almost ninety-year break.

Speeches are relevant only to the political topic of the day. A miracle of architecture, a technical challenge of the early Middle Ages – a huge dome 61 meters high above a large-scale rectangular space that was no less innovative for those times, sharply different from the Gothic oppressed style, remains an unsurpassed masterpiece. The geometric harmony of the columns of the upper and lower tiers, their marble decoration, flooded from above through the arched vaults with sunfall, legitimized the Eastern Romaic character of the Orthodox religion in stone. The construction of the “Holy Wisdom” continued until 537. It was conceived and started by the autocrat Justinian of Thracian (now Serbia) origin. His amazing fate testifies to the fact that in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, until the 11th century, the promotion of a lower-class warrior in the service to the imperial crown did not constitute an insurmountable obstacle. He was not a friend of the aristocracy, preferring capable non-careerists and, as the Byzantine chronicle says, “devoted to the state.”

Turkish politicians are literally devoted to their special patriotism. Each, expressing the interests of a separate party electorate, in general, without contradicting the historical mission of Islam, they call for continuing to preserve the stone monument of culture, captured in 1453 together with Constantinople. This historical event has important components invisible to secular society. The main one is the separation of Eastern Orthodoxy from Latin heresies and Western political dictates. The other is the restoration of the status of the Byzantine patriarchate, granted by the Ottoman Sultanate in order to strengthen power within the empire and eliminate the source of external threats. In order to split the cunning religious union of west and east that had formed at that time, the Patriarch of Constantinople was given back many privileges and even the right to ride a horse.

The capture of the great Byzantine city was preceded by a dogmatic fall, when on December 12, 1452, in “Hagia Sophia”, Metropolitan Isidore of Kiev, in the presence of the emperor, the episcopate and the laity, the union of the Ferrara-Florence Cathedral was proclaimed. Without going into details, it must be said that his decisions were based on the attempts of the Latin Church to assert itself in the universal supremacy through false teachings. Byzantium, out of desperation, tried in vain to acquire a strategic ally in the West. But just six months later it was all over. Surprisingly, attempts to commit such blunders are being made by the throne of Constantinople even now.

On March 25, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, placing behind him two or three Ukrainian priests who are in schism with the Russian Orthodox Church, apparently to portray the background of universal support on television, signs an agreement with the Lithuanian government. What is this document about between the religious and secular parties in a foreign church canonical territory? No intelligible information about its content followed. On the other hand, accusations rained down on the side of the church and secular leadership of Russia for allegedly “shocking kidnappings of children from Ukraine.” How can you call the evacuation to Russia of children from minefields and from destroyed cities stuffed with weapons a kidnapping? The result of the three-day visit of the Ecumenical Patriarch to the northern hemisphere was the proclamation of the possibility of his cooperation with the Lithuanian government to take care of Ukrainian refugees in cassocks that fit compactly in the local TV studio and, probably, someone else who was simply late for the broadcast. For the hierarch, there are supposedly no problems in Hagia Sophia. From the Phanar on the southern side of the Golden Horn of the Fatih municipal district of Istanbul, where the Patriarchate was once restored by Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror to attract the Roman population to his side, there is not a word about the current Turkish political statements and about church services in the greatest temple. Bartholomew is busy deepening the schism, clumsily cutting off the canonical Orthodox unity, guided by the directives of the West. The methods are not new. So at the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century, a prominent representative of one of the Cretan dynasties, the Greek Prime Minister Venizelos, sent 20 thousand soldiers to fight against the still fragile young country of the Soviets. In response, Lenin sent Atatürk a wagonload of gold. And thanks to this, Venizelos, having first-class rearmed with the European allies, cut out Smyrni, a city on the shores of the Aegean Sea, plunged into confusion the masses of the people of Asia Minor. Chains of slavish persecution were cast upon numerous peoples. Hundreds of thousands of refugees literally rowed in the Black and Aegean seas to the shores of salvation.

What is instructive today that tragic picture. The Entente successfully traded with Russia, pushing their foreheads against the kindred Orthodox Russian and Greek peoples. Such is the historical unchanging external influence of the West on the East. The West will continue to push.

Boris Vakulenko.