Architecture of traces and ascriptions: interpreting the vanished Great Palace of the Byzantine Emperors in Constantinople

Fabrications, June, 2006 by Nigel Westbrook

   Beneath history, memory and oblivion.
   Beneath memory and oblivion: life.
   But the writing of life is another history.
   Incompleteness.
   --Paul Ricoeur (1)

This paper was prompted by the 2000 proposal to develop the site of the vanished Great Palace of the Byzantine Emperors, comprising the territory of Eminonu (Istanbul, Turkey) from the Byzantine sea walls on the Sea of Marmara to the littoral at the north-east of Haghia Sophia, as an open-air museum. Despite their great historical, archaeological, and cultural significance, the remains of the Palace are largely inaccessible to public scrutiny, buried beneath layers of the Ottoman city that are, in turn, equally significant in these respects, the proposed museum site thus constituting a sustained process of spoliation, reconstruction and re-use. I will propose, here, that the Great Palace, arguably the most influential model for mediaeval Western European imperial architecture, had a second existence, after its destruction, as a literary topos, accorded new meaning as the symbolic centre of a lost Greek homeland. Despite its physical inaccessibility, the symbolic structure, topography and ritual life of the Palace may be partially understood today through its layers of literary 'ascriptions'. I will concentrate on a more prosaic meaning of this term, namely the attribution of significance to certain architectural forms, maintained through ritual practice. I use ascription to convey the sense of those qualities, symbolism and significance conferred upon, imputed to or derived from the Great Palace, and propose that it was subject to a similar process during its above-ground existence through a process of formal, symbolic and ritual spoliation.

We find a precedent for this phenomenon in the period of the so-called Macedonian Renaissance (867-1081), when attempts were made to link the Dynasty, and Byzantine culture, back to the perceived golden age of Justinian the Great (r 527-565). Two members of this Dynasty, Leo VI 'The Wise' and Constantine VII Porphyrogennitus authorized new palace structures adorned with spoliated classical sculptures, and commissioned or wrote literary works that recalled and revived palace ritual of the Justinianic period. (2) These texts included, as I will discuss, the Book of Ceremonies of Constantine VII, De Ceremoniis Aulae Byzantinae. (3)

From Edmund Gibbon until recent times, historians have commonly depicted Byzantium as a static, backward-looking, decadent and orientalized culture, unable to adapt to historical change in order to ensure its survival. (4) However, more recent scholarship by Mango and others emphasizes the substantial transformation that occurred over the duration of its history. (5) Constantinople's physical fabric evolved from a late Roman structure of public streets and squares, civic buildings and statuary to something more closely resembling a mediaeval city. Its heart, from foundation as the Second Rome (324) until the tenth century, was the Great Palace of the Byzantine Emperors. However, by 1453 the Palace had fallen into a state of moldering ruin, stripped of its gilt bronze roofs and architectural ornaments. Gazing upon its remains, the Ottoman conqueror Mehmet II was drawn to muse upon the fate of imperial vanity.

This paper argues that the traditional conception of Byzantine culture, and specifically of its architecture, as static and anachronistic is undermined by the complex mechanism of recollection within its history, and by its enduring influence upon mediaeval architecture in western Europe. Spoliative and ascriptive processes underlay the construction and development of St Mark's Cathedral in Venice, for instance, and the Papal Lateran Palace in Rome, through the appropriation of Byzantine Imperial motifs. The operation of these same processes in the Great Palace itself deserves some attention.

The Site as Literary Topos

Over the long history of Constantinople, geographical markers and monuments were constantly supplanted by new constructions imposed by a succession of conquerors. The Great Palace, a veritable city of ceremonies, was buried beneath a succession of later structures, the Ottomans spoliating its elements, or using them as foundations to form new monuments. In time, over several iterations of this process, the Byzantine Palace became completely detached from a physical topography, while its ceremonies were echoed in Orthodox religious ritual, and in the secular music and poetry of Greece.

The Palace, as a literary topos embedded in the tenth century Book of Ceremonies, became identified with the imperial institution, and was to persist as the nostalgic centre of a Greek homeland for centuries after the 1453 fall of Constantinople. Long after its physical disappearance, the Great Palace continued to exist, but as a locus of culturally circumscribed aspirations; with the great church Haghia Sophia, it was the symbolic heart of a mythical Constantinople, the desired site of nostos or homecoming. It endured thus even after the reinvention, first by Western neo-classical architects in the nineteenth century, and then by the Greeks themselves, of the village of Athens as the "timeless classical" site of a national capital. Athens, re-planned as a neoclassical city, was now centred on the symbolic structures of a classical "golden age", the Agora and Acropolis, pieced together from stones which had been used and reused for millennia, rather than on its humble and more recent Byzantine and Ottoman monuments. (6) This "new" classical site was to form the second topos of a reinvented Greek nationalist ideology, both expansionist and revanchist, from the Treaty of Constantinople (July 1832) until the disastrous Greco-Turkish war of 1920-22, which put paid to the old Megalo Idea, the dream of an expanded Greece with its capital restored to Constantinople. This failure, and the subsequent displacement of Anatolian Greeks, led to Athens supplanting Constantinople as the topos of homecoming.