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| Hagia Sophia |
Mother Ximenes' Handbook for Grade School Nuns features a section that says a priest is living in the walls of this structure. He will come out when the church is returned to Christian hands [St. Fidgeta & Other Parodies, 107].
The Church of Holy Wisdom was originally a Christian church at Constantinople (now Istanbul), later a mosque, and now converted into a museum. With the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Hagia Sophia became a mosque, and in subsequent years all the interior figure mosaics were obscured under coatings of plaster and painted ornament; most of the Christian symbols elsewhere were obliterated. The four slender minarets, which rise so strikingly at the outer corners of the structure, were added; the crescent supplanted the cross on the summit of the dome, and the altar and the pulpit were replaced by the customary Muslim furnishings.
Author/historian David Read writes that the legend of the disappearing priests is probably the best known of the stories to come out of the siege of Constantinople in 1453. "Sir Steven Runciman, among others, mentions it in The Fall of Constantinople 1453, and his notes point to the chronicles of Georgios Phrantzes, Michael Critobulus and Leonard of Chios as sources for the legend. The Sultan is supposed to have ordered his masons to break open the wall into which the priest or priests had disappeared, but they could not break it down. Neither did the Byzantine masons, whom the Sultan had thereupon summoned, have any success either.
"In another legend, the altar of the Hagia Sophia was supposed to have been rescued and placed aboard a ship to be taken for safe-keeping, but the vessel sank in a storm and now the altar lies at the bottom of the Sea of Marmora. Even if storms should be raging all around, it is always calm above the altar, and heavenly music can be heard and the perfume of holy incense can be smelled by fishermen and divers who venture near. When Constantinople is Christian again, the altar shall rise to the surface and return of its own accord to the city.
"Another legend from the siege has a priest who, frying some fish by a stream, threw them back, half-cooked, into the water when the Turks were about to capture the city. Still alive today the fish, according to legend, are supposed to allow themselves to be re-caught, cooked and eaten when Constantinople is a Christian city once again.
"And naturally, the last emperor, Constantine XI, was not really killed during the siege, but was saved by a miracle, turned by an angel into a block of stone. When the time is right, he will come back to life and retake the city at the head of a vast army, wreaking terrible vengeance upon the Turks."
Some lucky enough to survive what followed claimed that there had, indeed, been a miracle at the very moment when the doors were broken down. A pair of priests, resolutely conducting Mass even as the screams rang out, grasped the most precious objects on the altar and simply melted into the southern wall. For centuries after, believers would maintain that on the day that Constantinople became a Christian city once again, the priests would reappear and resume the service at precisely the point where it was broken off.
What Life Was Like Amid Splendor and Intrigue: Byzantine Empire AD 330-1453, page 124 |
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| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia |
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