This is the story of the ending of a civilization
of the breaking of a way of life,
the story of a nation facing extinction and of the choices
that its people made the story of the ending of the Empire
of Byzantium and of the beginnings of the modern world.
The last years
of the Empire of Byzantium were filled with stress and beauty.
Faced with enemies looking for friends and always waiting for the ending.
As it fell, Byzantium's ornaments its arts and peoples
settled on the West like sparks from a burning forest parks
that lit the Western World.
I'm standing high above the Golden Horn in Istanbul, in modern Turkey.
I'm standing right on the edge of Europe, too.
That's Asia over there.
Now, eight hundred years ago from here to the great blue sea
was the most famous palace in the world
lts wealth, its beauty
its sacredness was the envy of people from Iceland to China.
Only the angels in heaven the Byzantines had said
knew the date of the ending of this dazzling city
the capitol of the Empire Byzantium which they called Constantinople.
Late in the Middle Ages
though in the last two centuries of Byzantium
when the Crusaders had half destroyed the city
and with the armies of the Turkish Sultans closing in upon its walls
you didn't need to be an angel to know the end was very close
The broken Empire of Byzantium prepared to face its destiny.
The emperors moved their palace here to Vlackany, right on the city walls
Here, they could face all their enemies the Turks, the Westerners.
Here, too, was a great church and a most sinister prison
where half a dozen emperors were executed or blinded
in terrifying family feuds.
Just like the emperors, Jesus, Mary and all the saints
had also moved out onto the city walls
This is the great Monastery Church of St.
Savior Ankora, St.
Savior in the fields In the last centuries of Byzantium,
the city's greatest icons were in this church
waiting to be paraded around the walls in times of siege.
St. Savior's was Byzantium's last master work
the jewel box set beside the city walls.
Inside these little city churches many people found their individual
answers to the most terrible dilemma that any culture has to face,
the threat of annihilation of the death of a nation.
The imperial crown was stored, here alongside the holy pictures.
It's said that on the last night of Byzantium, on the 28th of May, 1453,
as the Emperor Constantine Palaiologos was praying,
the Virgin Mary came down from heaven
and asked him to return the crown to her,
as God withdrew protection from his holy city.
Above the door, in shining gold an image of the church's greatest benefactor
Theodore Methokitis, Prime Minister and High Chancellor of Byzantium.
Look at him, with his turban
and his caftan - the very model of an Eastern gentleman.
Yet, Theodore and the Byzantines were a very ancient people,
the living remnants of the world of Greece and Rome.
Even by Theodore's day though by the 1320s, the great Chancellor had come to
the conclusion that Byzantium's ancient heritage was quite exhausted.
But, all one really had to do, was to wait and pray and silently endure.
His church was a meditation on eternity.
Theodore's artists have given us one of Byzantium's finest images,
perhaps one of the greatest paintings ever made.
I say that, because it's a painting
about humanity about the value of humankind.
What's going on?
That's Christ in the middle, resplendent, white.
He's burst through the gates of hell he's got the hands of Adam
and Eve that's all of us.
And he's pulling them from the grave.
It's the hands. Look at the hands.
It's the hands that's got the urgency in them
the hands that are insisting upon this resurrection.
Not from earthly empires, but from the value of humankind, itself.
It was those ideals that drove Byzantium in its final years.
The idea that like the kingdom of heaven,
Byzantium was not a kingdom of this world.
It was a belief in the inevitability that the world came,
had a beginning, will come to an end.
So when the emperor went onto to the walls and took with him
the most ancient icons of his faith, and he knew that he would die,
he also knew that he was right.
Many Byzantines believed that if an enemy ever broke through
these vast old city walls the very statues of the ancient emperors would
come alive and drive the invaders from the city.
For them, Constantinople was a sacred city, the center of the world.
Inviolable.
Yet, they, too, could see the Turkish armies drawing ever closer,
and their ancient city descending into ruin.
By the 1400s, many of Byzantium's brightest minds had left
the gathering gloom and darkness of the crumbling city,
and settled in a fresh, new town beneath the mountain tops of southern Greece.
A sparkling town, on a hilltop, close to the ruins of ancient Sparta,
a town called Mistra.
A miniature kingdom ruled by the Emperor's brother, Theodore,
and Queen Caliope his Italian wife, where Jews, and Greeks, Byzantines
and Italians; Greek and Latin could live happily together.
One of the lovely things about Mistra is how small it is, how tiny, how human.
Everything, here, is democratic. As you walked down the street,
you'd have bumped into everybody.
You might have seen Italian merchants.
You might have seen beautiful Queen Caliope,
walking amongst the flowers.
And you might have seen the retired Emperor John, here to visit his family,
now a monk buzzing busily from church to church.
But, the hub of Mistra's life was a charismatic teacher,
from Constantinople, a follower of Plato the ancient Greek philosopher,
a man called Plethon.
In Plethon's time,
Mistra was already fineness, it was a little paradise, they said.
The men were handsome, the women were beautiful
and the stones were from ancient Sparta, itself.
But, everybody knew that they were doomed.
Here, Plethon founded the last academy of Greek philosophy.
Here, he taught future patriarchs of Constantinople,
and future cardinals of the Church of Rome, as well.
As they mingled with philosophers of late Byzantium, for a brief while,
Western visitors to Mistra witnessed
the last flowering of the living world of ancient Greece.
This is the estate of a grand Byzantine nobleman. Not much left of the garden,
just a few wild herbs, a little spinach.
But, you know, Plethon must have lived in a house, like this.
It really corresponds to the old philosophers way of thinking about things;
upstairs, the noble family, downstairs, the servants and the animals.
The third class would have been merchant classes,
they would have built a smaller house.
But this, this is grand.
Look at the fireplace; great big flue going up through the wood ceiling,
and the tiles, to the outside.
Just like a modern fireplace with a big canopy coming down the front,
those two holes, there, supporting the wood that held the cooking chain,
that hung right down there with a big pot on it,
and two great stones underneath.
Everything was cooked there.
If they wanted to roast anything they'd send it out to a local bread oven
Now,
all the rest of the activity of this house went on in one big room.
What you gotta think of, here,
is little cubicles with curtains around, the lavatory, the beds,
any little private areas that people wanted.
This was a very simple life, because these were leading men of Byzantium.
Plethon was very proud of it.
He said that even great Queen Caliope,
herself, would have lived in a house like this, actually had given up
the soft and decadent ways of the Italians and taken up our own
innocent behavior, he said.
So, you gotta think, old Plethon sitting,
perhaps in the evening light, looking out over the valley of Sparta,
what would he have done?
Well, he scribbled letters to the Duke.
Plethon was very worried about the condition of Byzantium.
He thought the world needed reformation,
and he came out with all these amazing ideas,
from ancient Greece, he was a bit of an old fascist, really.
A lot of his ideas were terrible, but he was a magnetic character.
People loved him.
Like all professors, they loved listening to him,
and didn't take a word of notice of what he said.
At the heart of Mistra was the court.
And, at the heart of the court, this little pretty church,
named after the great old court Church of Constantinople, St. Sofia.
There's not much left, here, now, just Christ, up there on the wall,
and a few beautiful fragments of marble.
Most of the church has been stripped out completely.
There's even a little double-headed eagle still up there,
a double-headed eagle of the last Emperors of Byzantium.
But, the real treasure is, here, on the floor.
Look at this. You see that?
That stone, there, that purple stone, that's Imperial porphyry.
That's a stone, well, it's a whole magical stone of Byzantium.
When this church was built, it hadn't even been mined for a thousand years,
yet little chippings of it were taken, around the world,
and set in floors, like this.
It was the stone in which Roman emperors had been born in rooms
that were covered in it.
This stone, was probably the very stone where the last Emperor of Byzantium
was crowned, Constantine Palaiologos.
The last ruler of Mistra was crowned, here, on the sixth of January 1449.
Three years later, he died fighting on the walls of Constantinople
as the Turks took the city.
In the 13th Century, a family of nomad turkish shepherds, called the Ottomans,
packed their tents and rode out of Central Asia.
Two centuries later, the Islamic armies of the Ottoman Turks,
commanded by members of that same family conquered
most of the territory of Byzantium, and a large part of Southeast Europe, too.
The center of this enlarging
Turkish empire was a city at the borders of modern Greece and Turkey,
the city of Edirne, the capital of the turkish sultans.
In those days, Edirne was a hectic, international city,
the city of great mosques, hospitals, concert halls,
munitions works and grand bazaars.
This is one of the colleges of learning, at Edirne.
In sultan Mehmet's time, there were many of them, here,
and they formed a circle like a university around the court.
It was an international university.
There were Italians, here, teaching the sultan's children how to speak Greek.
Byzantine nobles sometimes sent their children here for a good education.
Old Plethon came here, as a young man.
Here it was he met Persian fire worshippers who taught him
all about their strange religion.
Here it was, too, he first read the works of the ancient Greek, Aristotle.
Clearly, this dynamic, international, rich, powerful society
was far more than a match for the poor old Empire of Byzantium.
It was also clear that the ancient city of Constantinople had been engulfed
by this adolescent, multinational empire
But Constantinople lay at the strategic center of its trade routes,
and on the supply lines of the Turkish armies
that were eating into Eastern Europe.
That is why Byzantium was doomed.
In 1438, the Emperor, John VIII, sailed out of Constantinople
in a last attempt to beg aid from the reluctant West,
in his struggle with the Turks.
After seventy-seven days at sea, the imperial convoy arrived
at the friendly port of Venice.
The West had always said that military aid for Constantinople
was dependent upon Byzantium's reunion with the Church of Rome.
The churches of the East and West,
Greek and Latin, were split apart six centuries before.
So, the Emperor John had sailed with his theologians and his bishops,
not his generals or his admirals.
In all, some seven hundred people on the sea, the scholars of Byzantium.
Plethon, too, had come especially from Mistra,
in Greece, as had many of his pupils.
The most extraordinary thing about this gathering, that there were
bishops and priests from all the cities of the ancient East,
all the cities founded by Greece and Rome the cities of Alexander the Great,
the cities of the Seven Wonders of the world,
all had their representatives at the council,
all at once and all together.
It was as if the old world had come to meet the new.
But, there was plague abroad, in Northern Italy.
Two Byzantine bishops perished in the first weeks of negotiations.
The emperor, and his retinue, rode away from danger,
over the mountains and down to the central plain of Italy.
Here, perhaps, at Florence, they might forge their union
with the West that Byzantium so desperately needed.
And, here, too, they were memorialized in the frescos of the Benozzo Gozzoli
painted in the townhouse of the Medici family,
the bankers who were sponsoring this council of the churches.
That's John VIII, John Palaiologos from Mistra, Emperor of Byzantium,
come to the West to seek aid. He'd ruled twelve years, at this point.
And, when he got here, the Florentines, those dedicated followers of fashion,
thought he was a knockout. They had never seen turbans like that,
or crowns like that.
The jewelers liked it; the, the Florentine weavers liked it;
the painters liked it.
This was a man whose dress and demeanor influenced fashion, here,
almost for a century.
They didn't like him much, though.
They thought all the Greeks were haughty sarcastic people who seemed
to be laughing at jokes they wouldn't share with the Florentine,
the untaught, really.
What they were experiencing, actually,
was a typical Greek thing, it was the full force of the divine right of kings.
See, in the West, that had rather diminished.
The West, that had pinched the idea that the Emperor had, now,
taken to electing Western emperors, they were confirmed by popes.
There was common law, power in the West that seeped down, and down,
and down away from the man who, now,
was like only at the top of a vast pyramid of power.
In Byzantium everything resided in the one man.
Now, in the West, here it is, after a stroll in the country, Cosimo,
and the other seven hundred Medici, all on their horses,
this is entirely reversed. I mean, here you've got a man who is a banker,
a politician, a multinational businessman, you might say,
the West was entirely different.
The central disagreement, then, was about these different attitudes
to power in East and West,
about power and precedence amongst the lords of earth and heaven.
Most of the Byzantines, though,
were insulted at the very idea of arguing about God,
whose majesty and dignity was beyond all human understanding.
They thought that the clever Roman clerics they faced each day
were simply impertinent and immature.
After a year of recrimination and debate the Emperor John,
still desperate for military aid, simply ordered his delegation to agree
to most of the West's arguments.
On the sixth of June, 1439, the great Act of Union was signed
in Florence Cathedral, right under the huge, beautiful,
brand new dome, an act of union between two churches,
between the Pope of Rome, and his assembled clergy,
the Emperor of Byzantium,
and whichever of his Greeks decided to turn up that day.
The real buzz, in Florence, though, wasn't in the great cathedral,
it was in the streets. The Byzantines were here.
These weren't the old school teachers
that rich Florentines paid to teach their kids.
These were the geniuses, the brightest minds of Byzantium,
and here they were carrying all the wisdom of the ancient world, it seemed.
Now, the brightest of all these Greeks, was Plethon.
He taught practically all the people in the Greek delegation.
He came straight from Mistra.
He was very old; he was eighty, and he was as charismatic as ever.
He gave lectures, here, and the effect was amazing.
Back at Constantinople, though, the union with Rome caused riots.
Italian priests were insulted in the city's churches.
And Western Europe sent no aid.
Disillusioned, disappointed, the Emperor John died a few years later.
He was buried here, in the monastery of Christ Pantecrat,
Christ Lord of Earth and Heaven.
And at the same monastery, Genadius, the theologian, preached that the union
with Rome would bring down the wrath of God upon Byzantium.
Meanwhile, at Edirne, the new, young Turkish sultan, Mehmet,
had taken up the Ottoman throne.
In Constantinople, the new emperor, John's brother, Constantine,
soon discovered that he now had a dangerous and most impatient neighbor.
In April 1452, there was a huge row at the court of sultan Mehmet II.
Byzantine ambassadors had turned up complaining that the young man was breaking
all his father's treaties. He was, too
He was building a huge castle right next door to Constantinople,
called the Cutthroat.
It was the first stages in his planned attack upon the city.
And now, in his reply to these ambassadors,
he tried to scare the pants off.
Listen to this, these are his very words "Have you the right, or the power,
to control my actions on my own territory?
Inform your king that I am very different
from my father, that my resolution surpasses all my ancestors.
This time, you can return in safety.
But, the next man who delivers a similar message to me, will be flayed alive."
Back in Constantinople, the new emperor,
Constantine XI reluctantly composed his reply.
"It is clear," he said to the sultan,
that you desire war more than peace.
So, let that be your desire.
I release you from all your oaths and treaties with me,
and in closing the gates of my city,
I tell you, I will defend my people to the last drop of blood.
The Turkish mosques in Byzantium were shut.
The Turkish troops who were sightseeing in the city were thrown out the gates.
Byzantium was at war.
Mehmet was actually very touched by Constantine.
After all, the Ottomans and Byzantines had lived side by side
for a very long time.
They'd fought together in wars, they'd intermarried.
But, Mehmet was also very determined.
Listen to his reply. "I shall take your city,"
he tells Constantine, "or the city will take me.
If, however, you admit defeat, and withdraw,
I will give you Mistra and its province and we shall be friends.
If you deny me peaceful entry, however, I shall slay you and all your nobles.
I shall slaughter the inhabitants of your city and allow my troops to plunder it.
The city, itself, is all I want, even if it is empty."
Constantine's reply was brief,
"You may have anything you want of me, other than the city.
I will not flee from it, nor will I evacuate.
You may have anything but the city.
For the city, I would rather die than live."
On the evening of the twenty-eighth the sultan Mehmet addressed his armies
standing assembled outside the city walls.
"I give you," he said, "the capital of the ancient Romans,
the summit of power and glory, the center of the world
I give over to you, the men, women, and children of the city,
its gold and silver, its silks and furs.
All I want are the buildings and the walls.
It really was the standard offer of a medieval commander to his troops
before the final assault.
And they roared in agreement.
"There is but one God," they said, "and Mohammed is his prophet."
On the fringe of empire,
high in the mountains of Northern Romania,
contemporary Byzantine artists
made precious records of the fall of Constantinople.
Here's the Turkish armies waiting for Mehmet to order
the final assault upon the city.
The cannons, large as dragons, it was said,
bore down from Edirne to pulverize the city's vast, old walls.
The Turkish navy, fighting all along the Golden Horn,
forcing the tiny armies of the Byzantine's
to fight on two fronts at once.
On the city walls, the Byzantines parade the holy icon of the virgin,
the city's sacred shield, just as they had done for a thousand years and more.
Every hall, each crack of weakness in the ancient walls,
were strengthened by the prayers of priests, the women and the children.
There's the emperor ordering the wall's repair with rocks and stones,
and the Empress, too, with her ladies. Here, though, the artist is in error.
There was no queen.
Constantine XI, Constantine of Mistra, was childless and a widower,
the last emperor would leave no heir.
On the last day of Byzantium, an eerie quiet fell over the city.
Mehmet had told the Turks to rest, for a whole day, before the last assault.
He gave the emperor time to walk with all that was left of the armies
and nobles of Byzantium, once again into the great church, and there,
after all their arguing in Florence,
the Greeks and the Latins joined together in a last service.
And the emperor went to the altar and was given the last rites.
Then, he walked back to the palace,
and there he made a speech to his commanders.
A speech, you might say that it was the last speech of the ancient world.
He encouraged them not to be frightened when the Turks attacked.
He said that their ancestors, the ancient Romans, were terrified
when Hannibal's elephants had charged towards them, but they hadn't run away.
Because they were human beings, people with will and mind
and not given to animal desires and that he, and his commanders,
had mind and will and God and belief upon their side.
It was those beliefs of mind that stem back to Greece and Rome
and fueled the modern world.
And, then, Constantine, the eleventh of that name,
went with his men back to the outskirts of his empire,
to the walls now of his city, and there he died, the ruler of Rome,
the king of Christendom and the Emperor of Byzantium.
What actually happened to him is a mystery.
Turkish historians tell us only that the Emperor was very brave.
But, Constantine died fighting by the city gates.
"The city is taken," he's supposed to have cried, "And I'm still alive."
But he ran off, towards the battle, and into the flash of legend.
The man, then, killed ten pashas and sixty soldiers with his lance.
And, at the end, poor Constantine was toppled from his horse
and cried to God Almighty, the Creator of the Universe.
And the Turks cut off his head and stuck it on a pole.
As he rode through the streets of Constantinople
on the first day of the Turkish conquest, sultan Mehmet found whole districts
of the sacred city derelict and abandoned saw hovels and graveyards built
amongst the ruins of its legendary palaces.
He was awed, though, by the imperial church of St.
Sofia and declared its venerable shell to be a building made for God.
So, the church of St. Sofia, the Church of the Divine Wisdom,
was converted to the Mosque of Al-el Sofia,
the Mosque of the Divine Wisdom.
Images of old Byzantium had glimmered at the edge of Asia for a thousand years.
Now, new ghosts, new legends, and new peoples came to haunt its fabled stones.
Legend tells that Mehmet rode into St. Sofia on his war horse
and placed his finger in this magic column
and spun the church around to face Mecca, for the call to prayer.
History tells that the sultan ordered the tomb of Constantine the Great,
the founder of Byzantium, to be demolished along
with the burial church of the ancient emperors.
And this great mosque, the funerary mosque of Mehmet the Conqueror,
was put up in its place.
Yet, Mehmet, a humane and sympathetic man,
still wondered at this ancient, ruined city and its unyielding inhabitants.
The most eminent Byzantine left alive inside the city,
was Genadius, the theologian.
Mehmet visited him, here, in the monastery of Christ Pantacret.
"Who were the people of this crumbling, ancient city?" the sultan asked him.
And what, exactly, was their faith?
Like most of the inhabitants of this most stubborn city,
Genadius would only answer for himself "You may not call me a Greek," he said,
"because I do not believe as those ancient pagan people once believed.
You might call me a Byzantine, because i was born in this city.
But, I prefer, simply, to call myself a Christian."
He might also have added that he considered himself
to be an exclusive member, a leading light of the society
that was Goïs kingdom on this earth.
Mehmet was pleased enough with the old boy's answer
to give the penniless church a bag of gold, made Genadius its leader,
to give him a white mule, and to give him authority, too,
over all the Christians of his empire.
It was an arrangement that lasted for four centuries.
As for Genadius' beloved monastery, well
its church became a medressa, an Islamic public school.
One Zarich became a very famous preacher in this city.
Now, when Mehmet first came to the church,
his quick eye had noticed the great lion of stones sarcophagi
along the aisle, there.
In fact, they were the tombs, the sarcophagi,
of the last kings of Byzantium.
John of Florence was buried here,
his brother, their queens, these he took for his new palace in the city.
He also took a slab of stone, laid in that trench over there.
For centuries pilgrims had believed that
that had been the very slab of stone on which
the body of the Lord jesus Christ had laid, after the crucifixion.
They said you could still see Mary's tears upon it, glistening like pearls.
Over the centuries, Zarich's school became a mosque.
The district became quite poor.
The mosque sold off its great, white, shining marble pillars
and put in these bulks of stone, instead.
And the great screen, the altar screen, from the church whose golden panels
now stand on the high altar of St. Mark in Venice, were turned into that,
a minvah, a pulpit for reading the Koran
So, it almost seems to have gone doesn't it?
But, there's still something here.
If you lift the carpets of the mosque, and go through to the ancient floor,
underneath... then you'll see a memory of lmperial Byzantium.
There are still descendants of the Byzantines, today,
the dwindling community of the ancient heart of one
of the largest cities in the modern world.
Their worship, in their sole surviving ancient church, is guaranteed
by the proclamations of ancient sultans hanging on its walls.
Their church has survived schism and poverty.
For a while, the deep distrust of Rome led them towards Calvinism.
But, here, they are, still, in their holy city with their own faith.
Scattered, too, from myriads of monasteries of far flung churches,
pale shadows of the ancient, earthly Empire of Byzantium.
Most of Constantinople's ancient churches though,
were soon converted into mosques.
This little mosque was once a chapel in the ancient palace of Byzantium.
Endowed with lands and properties, these converted churches
were transformed into self-financing, charitable trusts
the religious and financial centers of this city's neighborhoods,
and the means by which Constantinople was converted to Islam and revived.
Under Turkish rule, Constantinople was to become a rich and thriving city,
once again, the center of a mighty empire,
just as it had been a thousand years before.
Just before the conquest of Constantinople, a radical young bishop,
called Bessario, Plethon's most brilliant pupil,
had returned to Italy and he been made a cardinal of Rome.
Some historians detect his portrait in this tragic,
bearded figure talking with Italian friends,
chic young men of the Renaissance, painted by Piero della Francesca.
Here, at Rome, Bessario did what Byzantines had done
at Constantinople for centuries, he made a villa by the city walls.
This villa, one of the first in the modern Western world,
memory of old Byzantium.
Bessario spent his life making a memorial for Byzantium,
by founding an academy of scholars.
You know, I suppose Bessario brought his academy, here,
when it got very hot in the summer months.
His academy was a group of people who he'd gathered around him,
some were exiled Byzantines, many of them were Europeans,
but everybody who could help him hold the identity of Byzantium together
for as long as possible, poets, artists, writers, translators;
all sorts of people.
Couldn't have been that difficult to find people,
because this was a really fashionable idea.
Dear old Plethon had introduced Plato to the West.
The Renaissance was beginning, this is early renaissance building.
For a few years, this was the coolest place on the planet.
So, you gotta think, perhaps, this was the place too,
where one day in the summer, 1452, Besarrio sat down to write to Mistra.
He was writing a letter of condolence to Plethon's sons.
The old man had died with the Spring flowers in June, of that year.
Bessario wrote a letter, such a letter.
He said that Plethon had been his teacher, his father, and his friend.
It was one of the last authentic letters of the ancient world.
After that, Byzantium became something to be seen in libraries, and museums.
Above all, Bessario preserved the dream.
He gathered the pure air of Mistra,
the ideals of Constantinople, the energy of ancient wisdom
and made a single, beauteous image of that most complicated empire.
Bessario was an enabler, a producer, a preserver of ideas and images,
the assembler of the largest Byzantine library the world has ever seen.
A collection whose fragments are still stored in the great libraries of the West.
The man was Mr. Byzantium.
He supported huge numbers of fellow exiles.
He also used to place refugees all over Europe in jobs.
This is a handmade Greek text of Homer's lliad,
made by a refugee from Mistra.
And, in the front of this beautiful volume,
is a picture of Homer wearing a Byzantine hat.
The West had seen nothing like this flood of wisdom
that was pouring from Byzantium.
Homer, Ancient Roman Law, and a myriad of other texts.
And they'd seen nothing like Bessario's academy.
Part of the modern world, its science and its scholarship was started
by these exiles from Byzantium.
Plethon and Bessario first taught the West all Plato's heady individualism
that so fills the modern world.
Bessario, too, told a Westerner about an ancient text
that inspired Columbus to sail West from Europe on the East wind to America.
There is, though, a deeper and yet more fundamental legacy,
a vision of the universal order that stretches back through Byzantium,
through Rome and Greece to the Bible in the most ancient East.
A vision that still fills the world, today.
A vision that exiled Byzantine artists drew out for us in dazzling detail,
at Varonets, the most beautiful of Romania's lonely monasteries.
See that cross, there, in the middle?
That's the cross of our Lord,
standing on the holy throne of Byzantium, the center of the world.
To the left, to the left is good, paradise.
There's all the lords and ladies of Byzantium pressing
through the pearly gates.
On the right, hell.
The Turks and everybody else, all the bad people struggling to get out.
Good and bad, plus and minus, past and future, with heaven above,
and hell below, and pure energy in the center.
A structured, universal order that
the modern world still understands and uses every day.
And, if there's nothing there then you can see even the modern world.
Just look at those demons, as black as SS Officers,
prodding their victims towards the ovens.
That's a hell we made reality.
Look at that, over there, in paradise,
the tree of life, the center of man's wisdom,
the very plant of the god Gilgamesh six thousand years ago in ancient Uru and
Mesopotamia searched for.
To him, the elixir of life was understanding.
For us, perhaps, it's penicillin.
Then, again, there's something here
that's unique above all the bustle of the world,
the lords and ladies, the gods and demons,
coming through and behind the very scroll of time, itself,
the lord of the universe.
The heart of the atom, heaven's order in a grain of sand,
Byzantium's fundamental legacy, this image of a universal structure.
The universal order is as basic to the order of the modern world
as is DNA to every individual in it.
Nowadays, Constantinople, heart of old byzantium, is called Istanbul,
an old Byzantine phrase that simply means: The city.
Inside the modern city, though, the past is disappearing.
Ruins are often melancholy, but they should seldom make you angry.
The end of Byzantium wasn't really brought about
by the wicked West or the terrible Turk.
Things pass, as the poet said.
If the cowboys had never shot the Indians,
the Great Plains would not be filled with shining teepees
and herds of buffaloes.
Nonetheless, we should honor the past and cherish it.
It's a memory, a solid memory, of our beginnings.
We think of Byzantium, too as a flash of silver,
as a dream of jewels, as an image of a god sitting on a golden throne,
and of an emperor sitting, in his palace, in his imitation.
Think of the culture that gave us the rule of Roman law
and the image of a Holy Mother, much beloved, caressing a baby child.
And think of Byzantium, too, this extraordinary empire set between
the East and West whose very ending set those two things far apart.
But, in whose own time gave so many good ideas to both of them.
When sailing from Byzantium, listen to the city's fading sounds.
Visit, in your mind, its golden images and all the shadows of its history.
And as you wave goodbye,
you'll discover that you could never really leave the past behind.