History
Some time before 1087, Anna Dalassena, mother of Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus, built on the top of the fourth hill of Constantinople a nunnery, dedicated to Christos Pantepoptes, where she retired at the end of her life, following Imperial custom. The convent comprised a main church, also dedicated to the Pantepoptes.
On April 12, 1204, during the siege of Constantinople, Emperor Alexios V Doukas Mourtzouphlos set his headquarters near the Monastery. From this vantage point he could see the Venetian fleet under command of Doge Enrico Dandolo deploying between the monastery of the Euergetes and the church of St. Mary of the Blachernae before attacking the city. After the successful attack he took flight abandoning his purple tent on the spot, and so allowing Baldwin of Flanders to spend his victory night inside it. The complex was sacked by the crusaders, and afterward it was assigned to Benedictine monks of San Giorgio Maggiore. During the Latin occupation of Constantinople (1204–1261) the building became a Roman Catholic church.
Based on this information, the Patriarch Constantius I (1830–1834) identified the Eski Imaret with the Pantepoptes church. This identification has been largely accepted since, with the exception of Cyril Mango, who argued that the building's location did not actually allow for complete overview of the Golden Horn, and proposed the area currently occupied by the Yavuz Sultan Selim Mosque as an alternative site for the Pantepoptes Monastery. Austay-Effenberger and Effenberger agreed with Mango, and proposed an identification with the Church of St. Constantine, founded by the Empress Theophano in the early 10th century, highlighting its similarities to the contemporaneous Lips Monastery.
Immediately after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the church became a mosque, while the buildings of the monastery were used as zaviye, medrese and imaret for the nearby Mosque of Fatih, which was then under construction. The Turkish name of the mosque ("the mosque of the old soup kitchen") refers to this.
The complex was ravaged several times by fire, and the last remains of the monastery disappeared about one century ago. Until 1970 the building was used as a koran school, and that use rendered it almost inaccessible for architectural study. In 1970, the mosque was partially closed off and restored by the Turkish architect Fikret Çuhadaroglu. Despite that, the building appears to be in rather poor condition.
Read more about this topic: Eski Imaret Mosque
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