CONVERSATIONS WITH THE PATRIARCH

ATHINAGORAS

Part One.

A MAN WHOSE NAME IS ATHENAGORAS

Phanar

In Istanbul, when you leave the new quarters and cross the bridge in the very middle of the Golden Horn, where on the other side a gigantic highway cuts through the Byzantine and Turkish flesh of the old city, passing under the aqueduct of Valens, who so Roman, victoriously steps over it, you need to turn right and go out into the street that runs along the Golden Horn. Now it is an industrial area where timber is processed, which is brought by ships from the coastal forests of Asia Minor. Everywhere there were sawmills, the screech of metal biting into the trunks, trucks driving around in the dust or mud, hangars cluttered with boards. Here and there, from a small wasteland, you can see the narrowing bay, the dusty square along the pier, where the heavily loaded steamers serving the coast are always puffing. Your gaze reaches the old wall of Theodosius and the Street of the Tombs, the sacred land of Eyup, where the last companion of the Prophet died in a futile siege of the city. The barges have been dragged ashore, where among the old cans they are waiting for a new painting. In summer, when children bathe here among pot-bellied feluccas, the plane trees are already turning yellow. Opposite, on the other side of a quiet water stream, on a hill covered with yellow grass and white steles, is a Muslim cemetery. At its foot there are shipyards, the rattle of hammers on iron. On the shore, where

We are standing, the slope is rising just as quickly. Leaving behind the reddish ruins of the sea wall, now almost gone, we come to picturesque Turkish houses with wooden tiers. The whole panorama of life in the Mediterranean metropolis opens up before us. In summer, everyone waters the street in front of their doorstep, vineyards and wisteria stretch from façade to façade, melons and watermelons are piled up in front of the house. Further, the streets, unevenly laid out with stones, turn into rural roads. Fig trees, the ruins of an old mosque, stone flowers for women next to the tombs, columns swelling at the end of turbans for men. Trucks and American cars are almost hesitant to climb here, there are more animals than cars; there are beautiful horses with collars decorated with blue beads to protect the evil eye; seabirds and vultures circle over the garbage.

On the floor of the slope, suddenly and as if out of place, there rises a gigantic red-brick building, which would have passed for Oxford College, had it not been crowned with a dome and on the top of its walls there was no black Greek ornament of gigantic proportions. This is the main lyceum of the Greek patriarch – Rum Pathkanesi.