The spring today, in the Church of St Mary of the Spring in Baliklí, Constantinople. The current church is not Emperor Justinian’s original, which was apparently destroyed during a siege by the Ottomans in 1422. A small chapel was erected there in 1727, but in 1821 (the year the Greeks declared independence) the Sultan’s elite bodyguard, the Janissaries, sacked the chapel and poisoned the spring. Rebuilt in 1835, it was ruined during the Istanbul Pogrom of 1955, which also desecrated the churchyard. A new church in a sympathetic traditional style now stands on the site.
Part 1 of 2
ON April 4th, 450, Leo Marcellus, a soldier in the Roman Army, was passing by a grove near the Golden Gate of Constantinople when he saw a blind man stumbling about helplessly. Leo led him gently to a seat, and looked about for water.
As he did so, he heard a lady’s voice say, ‘Go into the grove, Emperor, there is water there.’ He could not see the speaker or any ‘Emperor’, but obeyed and sure enough, found a spring bubbling up. ‘Put a little mud on his eyes’ suggested the voice. Leo complied, and to his lasting wonder the blind man’s sight was restored.
Seven years later, Flavius Ardabur Aspar, who had played puppet-master to the Emperors for thirty years, put Leo on the imperial throne, though Leo cut Aspar’s strings soon after. Among Emperor Leo’s first acts was to build a church at the spring, dedicated to Mary – he realised the voice was hers – and consecrated on the Friday after Easter Day, 457.
Précis
In 450, a Roman soldier in Constantinople went to fetch water for a blind man. As he went, a woman’s voice calling him ‘emperor’ directed him to a spring, which subsequently cured the man’s blindness. Later on, Leo unexpectedly became Roman Emperor, and guessing the voice had been the Virgin Mary’s, he dedicated a church to her on that spot. (59 / 60 words)
Part Two
In 1836, this ancient icon was discovered at Argokili, high up in the rocky hills of the Greek island of Naxos. Excavations where water was seeping up uncovered a cave with steep steps leading to an exit above, that had apparently been a lookout post in the days of the Christian Roman Empire (330-1453). The icon shows Mary holding the child Jesus as water flows everlastingly into a basin; and unusually for icons of this type, it also shows the Emperor Leo and his guard. A great festival is held at the church at that spot every year on Bright Friday, the Friday after Easter Day.
THE small chapel at the spring was rebuilt on grander lines by the Emperor Justinian a century later,* but was badly damaged when the Turks besieged Constantinople in 1422. And by that hangs an even stranger tale.
On May 23rd, 1453, a monk was busy cooking in the precincts of the ruined church with the Turks once again at the gates. He had just laid some fish in a frying pan, when a man rushed in to warn him that Sultan Mehmet had broken through.*
The monk, however, refused to believe that the City favoured of God could fall to the heathen.* ‘Nonsense!’ he said, prodding the sizzling fish. ‘I’d sooner believe these fish could leap alive from the pan, and swim in the spring.’ At that instant, the fish leapt into the air, landed in the spring, and began swimming about.
Fish swim in the pool to this day, giving rise to the Turkish name for the locality, Balikli.*
It is Nikephoros Kallistos (?1256-?1335) who tells us the backstory of Leo. Procopius of Caesarea (fl. 500-565) says only that Justinian was out hunting when he came across a tumbledown chapel on this spot, and learnt that it marked a miraculous healing spring discovered long before.
See The Fall of Constantinople.
But it happened to Jerusalem on many occasions. See Psalm 79, and The Jerusalem Temple. The Biblical authors put that down to Israel trying to solve her problems with conventional political wisdom rather than by trusting in God, and the Greeks after 1453 likewise connected the Fall of Constantinople with the adoption of the heretical Filioque in the fool’s hope of military assistance from the governments of Western Europe.
Balıklı in Turkish, Balukli (Μπαλουκλί) in Greek. The Turkish word means ‘with fish’.
Précis
One day in 1453, a monk was frying fish near a healing spring in Constantinople sacred to the Virgin Mary. When the monk was told the Turks had broken into the City, he scoffed at the news, saying it was as likely as that his frying fish would jump into the spring – which they immediately did. (56 / 60 words)
