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:
“He prayed more deeply for simple selflessness than he had ever prayed before—and, feeling an uprush of grace in the very intention, shed the night in his heart and called it light. And walking out of the little church he felt confirmed in not only the worth of his whispered prayer but in the realization, as well, that Christ had become man and not some bell-shaped Corinthian column with volutes for veins and a mandala of stone foliage for a heart.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“This is what the Church is said to want, not party men, but sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging persons, to guide it through the channel of no-meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and No.”
—Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801–1890)
“He felt that it would be dull times in Dublin, when they should have no usurping government to abuse, no Saxon Parliament to upbraid, no English laws to ridicule, and no Established Church to curse.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)