Church
Historians Procopius and Cedrenus state that Emperor Justinian erected a new church, larger than the first, in the last years of his reign (559-560), utilizing materials that had remained after the erection of the Hagia Sophia. After the erection of the sanctuary, the Byzantines named the Gate that was situated outside the walls of Theodosius II "Gate of the Spring" (Greek: Πύλη τῆς Πηγῆς).
After the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, the church was torn down by the Turks, and the stones used to build a mosque of Sultan Bayezid. Only a small chapel remained at the site of the church. Twenty-five steps led down to the site of the spring, surrounded by a railing. In 1547 the French humanist Petrus Gyllius noted that the church no longer existed, but that ailing people continued to visit the spring of holy water.
As a result of the Greek War of Independence of 1821, even the little chapel was destroyed and the spring was left buried under the rubble.
In 1833 the reforming Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II gave permission for the Christians to rebuild the church. When the foundations of the original church were discovered during the course of construction, the Sultan issued a second firman permitting not only the reconstruction of the small chapel, but of a large church according to the original dimensions. Construction was completed on December 30, 1834, and the Ecumenical Patriarch, Constantius II consecrated the church on February 2, 1835, celebrating with 12 bishops and an enormous flood of the faithful.
On September 6, 1955, during the anti-Greek Istanbul Pogrom, the church was one of the targets of the fanatic mob. The building was burned to the ground while the abbot was lynched, and 90 year old Archimandrite Chrisanthos Mantas was assassinated by the mob.
Another small chapel has been rebuilt on the site, but the church has not yet been restored to its former size. The spring still flows to this day and is considered by the faithful to have wonderworking properties.
Read more about this topic: Life-giving Spring
Famous quotes containing the word church:
“Exporting Church employees to Latin America masks a universal and unconscious fear of a new Church. North and South American authorities, differently motivated but equally fearful, become accomplices in maintaining a clerical and irrelevant Church. Sacralizing employees and property, this Church becomes progressively more blind to the possibilities of sacralizing person and community.”
—Ivan Illich (b. 1926)
“The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without....”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“The church is a sort of hospital for men’s souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. Those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their Retreat or Sailor’s Snug Harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples sitting outside in sunny weather.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)