“Every night a fire descended from the sky, stood over the City, and enveloped her with light all night long. Their first interpretation of this heavenly sign was that God was expressing his wrath against the Christians, indicating that the City would be burned and that her inhabitants would be enslaved to the Turks. But…another interpretation was put forth: God was fighting on the side of the Christians, whom he protected and defended; for this reason, the Turks would be unable to prevail…On the night before the scheduled departure the heavenly sign descended in its customary manner but did not envelop our City as it had before when it stood above her all night long; now it seemed to be far away, then scattered quickly, and vanished at once.”
- Makarios Melissenos, The Chronicle of the Siege of Constantinople: April 2 to May 29 1453, Book 3
I do not think the bright light floating over the Hippodrome is a sign that God will save us, because I do not think God exists.
My name is Alexios Laskaris and I am a nobleman from Colophon. My family is very old and I am a son of one of its obscure, splintered branches. When the Seljuks took Colophon, I journeyed to the City….my grandfather lived here originally, and I took his dusty title deed from an old traveling chest before I fled. I showed it to the local prefect in Galata. He allowed me back into my ancestral home – some dive that no one had stayed in since the old man left. As soon as I moved in, the Turks approached us and all the attentions of the City turned towards the rabble at the gates.
And then some days ago, it appeared – some kind of bright flame just flying, unmoving, above the dome – the Hippodrome had been long unused, as no one was in the mood for games – and the Christians would look at it and point and wonder. “It’s a sign from Christ!” “It’s a harbinger of the Saviour!” “The light will repel the Turks and send them back to the borders of Asia Minor. Then some brave Akritas can deal with them.”
This was what the idiots pointing at the light would mutter to one another. And there were false prophets and soothsayers and heretical quacks peddling matia and charms and spells to stop missiles. I had to laugh – even facing imminent destruction, Constantinople still somehow managed to be packed full of bullshit artists.
I was among those who’d long since ceased to pay attention to the light. You could tell the cynics from the faithful now that the danger was close – trapped between those grand old Theodosian walls, we all revealed our true colours to each other. There were beggars in finery and magnanimous tramps, hopeless atheists and fervent fanatics storming about confident in the knowledge that Christ would whisk them away at the sight of the first falling arrow. The cynics ignored the light, and the others often stopped to look at it. At night, there were groups of people who would gather in Galata and pray to the light, assuming it to be a manifestation of the Panayia, or of some saint or other. And they made me laugh, Alexios Laskaris, who saw the Turkish galleys closing in on the Colophon harbour and left his life to burn away behind a mountain pass…
And now there is nowhere left to run to, without any identification save that bestowed on my by the state. Laskaris is an old name and I am known – there is no hope of blending in among the invaders. There is no particular reason to. I am ready for death. My son and daughter are dead, you see – I left them behind in Colophon – and so the laughing rictus-faced bastard haunting the Galata district is a mere ghost awaiting a mechanical process, a finishing, an ironic telos.
It is night, and the streets are filled with sensitive supplicants. Many are in armour – there are contingents who expect the Turks to attack at any moment, now, and go about in full armour at all times – even sleeping in it. I am still of fighting age – but I do not have a suit of armour, and I have made no effort to find one. Near Galata tower, there is a little square, and a church close by. Everything stinks of incense and sweat and melting wax. I sit on a stone and watch the people pass by. Now, soft prayers are filling the grey streets – thin stone paths stripped of gold ornaments, our statues knocked down long ago by the Franks – and suddenly there is a voice:
“Kyrie, why do you not pray?”
A gold-haired waif beseeches me. I look into her fair face and my expression does not change.
“I have nothing to pray for, child. My family is dead. The Turks surround us. No hope remains.”
“You have no faith?” She asks. There is no fear, only curiosity.
“No longer.”
“God will not like that.” She says simply. “He will not mind you dying, but you must believe in Him. You must.”
“Why?”
The child’s face screws up in an effort to answer. “It is the way things are.” And she turns away to join a throng of worshippers.
“Wait.”
Pause.
“Can’t you escape?”
“Not alone.”
“Where are your parents?”
“Dead. Killed in Cappadocia.”
She sits down beside me on my bench. We watch the supplicants. The stars are manifold, eternal, endless. The fire above the Hippodrome is still there, and as we watch it seems to flare up. It knows what I am thinking; all this creation is mere matter and the girl and I are about to join it, become one with the dirt. Alexios Laskaris, the last of his name, worm food along with the rest of the profligates.
The vespers have begun. Some archimandrite is braying out the start of the service and the crowd, one agnostic sound, is bleating along. Constantinople is dark and cold. The girl kicks out; her feet do not reach the ground.
A troop of soldiers marches past.
“Why would I take you with me? I did not take my family from Colophon.”
“You can still go. Help me. Your family would have wanted to leave too.”
“I did not see what it would do for them to take them away. My son insisted on fighting. My daughter on remaining with her family. They bade me go. I did not want to. I do not want to now.”
“But you could save us both now.”
“Where would we go? The Morea? It is too far for these ailing feet. And the Maniates would never let me go back after what I did to them in the nineties.”
“Then you could stay and fight. Like Father. In the advance guard.”
“Where he will be the first to fall. Why bother? These walls, these men with swords and pots of boiling oil…they are not for me either. Let those who wish to die fighting do so. I can only collapse. For me, there is no resurrection of the dead, and no life in any age to come.”
“But there is, Alexios Laskaris.” The girl says, suddenly frighteningly articulate. “All these battlements, all the men and women preparing to fight – even the light in the sky – your home in a city that has stood for a thousand years…My Lord’s creation is for you. Do not cast it away.”
“You-“
Even as I look over at her the golden light around the waif is fading away; I manage to read some of the letters around her halo. “H AGIA-“
“Who? How?”
She smiles. “Only one of a thousand. It does not matter who I am. What matters are the souls of the living – and that includes you, Alexios Laskaris. Though you may not understand or care. Do you recall the lengths to which the Devil went for Job?”
“Of course.”
“Then you understand even the meanest soul is worth everything. The desert fathers – in their stories, a devil perseveres in search of a soul for the monk’s whole life and considers every wasted moment worth a potential success. And you, a sinner – you who were not encouraged to leave by your children, but fled Colophon in the night and took your land title with you – even you are equal to the brave and hopeless Constantine Palaiologos, scratching his head with the Venetians in the palace on the hill.”
“This must be a trick.” I cannot hide my shame. I try anyway. How can she know?
“I strongly urge you to put aside your doubt.” And she flares up again, turning the world white and even blocking out the flame above the sky. The golden light around her golden face returns and it says H AGIA–
She laughs. “Not this time.”
“You can laugh at a time like this?”
“I can always laugh. For I have sat at the right hand of the Father…”
“You could explain that light,” I point, “if you were a saint.”
“I could.” She gives a mysterious smile. “I will not do so.”
“Then I must die to find out.”
“It is no different from any other mystery. But if you choose to die before the ordained time, even as eternity accepts you, you will never understand what the light means.”
“I don’t see the point of escape or of fighting. We are surrounded. Why do we not give up? God has never intervened. It is a wasted effort.”
“You act because the world calls you to. It is the voice of God.” The saint says. “What more can I tell you? You know the Laws. You are a learned man, Alexios Laskaris. You know all I can say. This world is and forever will be full of suffering, and death, so much death that you will never be able to stand it and you will blinker yourself merely to avoid recognising the pain of life. And yet this is the sign of the Existence, and the subsequent indication of your duty. There is no use telling you this.”
“Tell me something I do not know, then.”
“Listen.”
The vespers continue, their low hum coming from the closest church. The independent worshippers are in the streets, on their knees, looking up at the burning light. Their faces are haggard; their children brace arms around their waists and necks. Another small squad of soldiers marches past, lighting their way with torches, muttering about defences. Cicadas scream somewhere.
“This is the last gasp of the city of Constantine.” The saint says. “Would you kill all these people now? Would you take a knife, and walk over to that group over there, and begin ending their lives one by one?”
“Of course not.”
“Why not? They have no chance to survive, you said. You will all die when the walls come down.”
“Is that what will happen? Is this a prophecy?”
“No, I am merely reflecting your own thoughts. I reveal nothing of the future. That is not my purpose. Such things are no longer done. You have precedent to guide you now.”
“And precedent tells me we will all perish here.”
“So why not kill everyone here now? Death at your hands would be less ignominious, less painful.”
“They have hope. I have no right to take it away. Besides…”
“You harbour the morality of Christ even if you convince yourself you do not believe.”
“Well, I do not believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But these are people. They are fundamentally like me.”
“This is the Logos. Without the Lord’s nature in you, you would not believe they were like you. You do believe in Him, then, although you have managed to convince yourself you do not.”
“If you say so.”
“So, I have taught you something you did not realise. You knew it and refused to know it. You are a believer after all.”
“Fine. It does not matter what you say. The Turks will stab me and I will fall; I will be eaten by the creatures of the earth. Why do you continue to speak with an unrepentant sinner?”
“I want you to turn that formidable mind of yours over to the light above the Hippodrome.”
“Why? Some trick of the light, I expect.”
“Climb and see for yourself.”
“Climb! At my age?”
“What more can you hope for? You know I am of otherworldly origin. You have seen a little of the glory I have been given. Who else can you trust? I must become your new foundation, for now. And I am telling you to climb atop the Hippodrome and look at the light.”
I shake my head and my tired bones. And then I do a curious thing: I find myself standing up, and looking in the direction of the building.
“Is this some compulsive power?”
“I would never be able to convince you to do anything you did not choose to do.” The saint says.
Then why, I wonder, am I walking toward the Hippodrome, the saint in tow, a little golden waif in plain robes once again? What nervous impulse draws my feet toward that dead stadium where Justinian crushed the people’s will all those centuries ago at the kingdom’s height, where a thousand rebellions were put down, a thousand plots whispered in the busy stands, and countless agonised competitors met their ignominious ends? Why do I see myself walking past an Armenian soldier, waving grimly, and approaching the staircase at the side of the building; why have I gone into the skeletal stands and found myself alone with only the saint treading softly beside me?
There is a ladder leaning against the top row of seats and it is resting against a tall strut from which I can reach the roof. I begin to climb, and my bones do not ache at all. The saint is below me on the ladder, and she too is totally silent.
We are now atop the roof. Nobody, not even the publican rabble praying to the light, has noticed our shadows standing out against it. It is very close and burning hot. I turn my attention first to the streets below. The City is unusually reserved. There is the hum of prayer – the vespers ending – a few random shouts and curses; the soft murmuring of the worshippers below. People are made visible only by lamps and torches. The sky is a beautiful canvas above and in the dark there is no Constantinopolitan skyline to blemish or block it: I marvel at it for some moments.
In boyhood I wanted to be an astronomer. My father bade me enter the family business. Secular achievement was the only true metric of success: our family had always known that the empire held its citizens back with religious diversions on purpose to abet the rich and the intelligent in their aspirations.
Then I turn my attention to the light. Its proximity increases its brightness, and this with the heat emanating from it make my eyes water. I could walk a few feet forward and touch it, if I wanted to.
“It is not a trick of the light.” The saint externalises my thoughts.
“No.” I reply. “Some kind of…fireball?”
She is silent again. Then-
“Do not touch it!” For I have reached out a hand.
“Why?”
“You will be burned away. It is a dangerous thing, this light. Made to fly above the heads of men. To touch it is to admit yourself into a larger world – in which you, a mortal, would be swallowed up in a moment, like a fish in a pool with a shark.”
I suddenly cannot stop tapping my foot. “You are already too close. It is affecting your body. Step back.”
I follow her instructions. The tapping ceases after a few seconds. I feel weak again, and sit on the cobbled roof of the Hippodrome.
“Why did you bring me up here?”
“To show you the phenomenon up close. To demonstrate that you were, in a sense, right. It is a physical thing, this light. This lightning.”
“Then why all the speeches? And how can you have produced that light yourself earlier?”
“But the physical world has its roots in the metaphysical; discovering a mechanical cause for something does not invalidate its status as being a creation of the Lord. This is merely a glimpse, a hole into another world.”
“But it’s just a physical phenomenon. You said so a moment ago.”
“Exactly. That is my point. All of creation is a window into the metaphysical. What you consider remarkable and unremarkable is only a result of exposure. In reality, all of that which is visible is by necessity mechanical and this is no argument against the Lord because He is working in a different sphere of being.”
“Again, why show me this? Why tell me?”
“Your experience colours your view of what is normal. In other words, you appeal to precedent to understand new events. The light is here to remind you that you cannot always do that. As an unbeliever, you have no frame of reference for this. So too is your expectation for the future an illusion. You cannot know for certain that everyone in the City will die.”
“So you brought this light here?”
“Not I. I have no such power.” The waif says, and approaches me and the light. “Would you prefer an explanation, now that you understand its significance? Now that you have come here I do not begrudge its provision.”
“Very well.”
“This is what will come to be known as ‘St Elmo’s Fire.’ Somewhere in the Hippodrome wall there is a heavy metal rod which constitutes part of the foundations – this rod has conducted electricity over time and created an invisible field in which a quantity of plasma is sustained, continuously leaking from the roof of this building. The plasma has created the ‘fire’ you see here. If you were to walk into it, you would draw it into yourself, be electrocuted, and likely not survive.”
“’I believe in all things visible and invisible.’” I quote, suddenly tired. “This light of yours…I feel it’s quite noble.”
verso folio 