SAINT IRENE- AYA IRINI
Church of St. Irene is of Byzantine construction and style. This was the first Christian church put up by the Byzantines in the city. When Constantine the Great took possession of the city he enlarged this church; excavations have revealed that before the church was dedicated to St. Irene, it served as a temple to Aphrodite and some other Roman Gods. In the interior of the church there is a fresco in black and white which is attributed to the pre-christian era and dates probably from the first century A.D.; while certain designs on the door belong to the 12th century B.C., one of them being Phrygian in origin. Up to the year 360 this church of Constantine constituted the city's cathedral. At that date, after the construction of Saint Sophia, these two sanctuaries, joined by a common courtyard, formed the Great Church under the title of Megalo Ecclesia.
In 381, under Theodosius, the second oecumenical council met here. Following the revolt of Nika in 532, both St, Irene and St.Sophia were devastated by fire; Justinian subsequently reconstructed St. Sophia and enlarged it, to make it the greatest of existing churches. In 740 still further improvements increased the extend of the church.
When the Turks took the city, they did not convert St. Irene into a mosque, but because of its proximity to the Palace it sewed for a long time as an arms depot; towards the end of the 19th century, Fethi Ahmet Pasa, who was Ambassador of the the Sublime Porte at the court of Louis. Philippe of France, deposited some antique remains in the church thus making it the first archaeological museum.
Following the proclamations of the Republic, Saint Irene served as a Military Museum, but in 1946 this function ceased and the church underwent extensive restorations.
Saint Irene has the form of a domed basilica. There are two rows of columns and three naves, of which the centre one is twice as wide as the other two. There are galleries above the apse and the Narthex. The semi-circular apse contains several rows of benches for the use of the faithful; two people sitting at the furthest remove from each other could still converse quite easily in low tone, a condition very favourable for hearing the chanted liturgies of the church service.
St. Irene has two cupolas; one resting on the pendentives before the nave, the other between the Narthex and the Great Dome.
After St, Irene, still on the left, we come to the old State Mint House, which had been installed here for a number of years; it has, recently, been transferred to a new building on Yildiz Avenue. To the right of the Mint House we see an oven and then another which was reserved for the baking of the Palace bread. There used to be a woodshed here when the Palace was occupied. Inside the Palace were kitchens catering for 15,000 persons. The hearths and stoves of the Seraglio, the smaller palaces, and the dependent buildings, all had their stocks of wood, tanked up against a long and ancient wall which skirted the Mint House mentioned above. The wood was brought by ship and unloaded at the port near the place called Demir Kapi, then piled up in store rooms and dispatched in accordance with local needs. The Palace woodmen were called "Zuluflu Baltacilar" (Sappers with Curved Fringes) and they belonged to a special squadron, strapping fellows from the Anatolian mountains, young and strong, distinguished by their long locks of hair curving down to the earlobes. Since their work necessarily took them into the Harem, they were compelled to wear stiff collar-wings at either side of the neck, which prevented them from easily turning their heads...
Since the Ottoman administration was never essentially aristocratic and individual merit always found preferment, several great offices of state and high military commands were filled from the ranks of these humble servants of the Seraglio. It was a former member of the sapper company, Baltali Mehmet Pasa who let his army to victory over Peter the Mad (Peter the Great) of Russia at the battle of the Pruth, crushing the Russian force as in a vice and taking the Emperor himself prisoner; it was only through the intercession of the Empress Catherine, who came in person to plead for the Tzar's life, that the latter was spared.
Skirting the wall, on our right, until we reach the end of it, we shall come to a fountain with cone-shaped stone before it. Both are associated with bloody events. Heads severed from the living body or hacked from the corpses of those put to death by order of the Palace or other authority, by the executioner's knife or the strangler's cord, were exposed for a statutory period on the column, and the high executioners washed the blood from their scimitars and axes in the fountain. Spine-chilling memories; however, we must add that the Ottomans did not practise the system of "Inquisition”, so dear to Europe. Such instruments as the nail studded torture chest were unknown here, as were various other inventions, as cruel as they were barbarous. The Ottomans took the shortest way: they contented themselves with on stroke of a keen blade to separate head from body - and that was that!
