The Venetian Empire by Jan Morris

Author:Jan Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141938028
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 1990-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

obtaining of the heavenly riches, and at the same time for the protection of your lives, your native land and property…’

It is a disquieting experience now, to read those fighting words in the porch of Santa Sophia, because for the past 400 years the old cathedral has been used as a mosque. It stands in the Turkish part of Nicosia, and is now the chief centre of the Islamic faith on the island. All its Gothic elaborations have been severely whitewashed, its stained glass is gone, and its high altar: instead a mihrab faces Mecca, and there are always Muslims meditating cross-legged on its carpets, or reciting the Koran to themselves in the shadow of its pillars.

Its doors are usually wide open to the street outside, and on the stillness of the old building market cries and blaring motor-horns intrude, and the buzzing of cicadas. Sitting in the narthex, beneath the great carved angels who still swing their censers above the main door, one can see the scene as it was in Bishop Contarini’s day. Beside Santa Sophia stood the domed Orthodox cathedral – Gothic arch beside Byzantine curve, the Latin out-facing the Greek – and in front the busy cathedral piazza was surrounded by handsome houses of the nobility, with the meandering city markets just around the corner. It was a very European scene, the very image indeed of the Christian presence in Cyprus, temporal and secular too. But when the Turks came, the day after the Bishop’s sermon, it proved that the Divine Providence had neglected to preserve either the lives or the property of his congregation, and as the houses of the rich were looted all around, Bishop Contarini was among the first to die.

As for Niccolò Dandolo, his head was sent along the road to Famagusta, in a basin carried by a peasant, and presented to the Venetian commander there as a memento mori.

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