Sea of Marmara

Constantinople was built on a promontory with the Marmara on one side, the Golden Horn on the other and the Bosphorus at its head, and the city's religious life was oriented to the water accordingly. Its sea walls ran for kilometres along the Marmara shore; its most venerated relic of the Virgin was kept at Blachernae by the Horn, and the tradition that her robe or her intercession turned back besieging fleets is recorded for more than one siege, giving the Akathist hymn its association with deliverance from the sea.

The Princes' Islands, a small archipelago an hour offshore, held a dense concentration of monasteries and became the empire's standard place of honourable disappearance. Deposed emperors, blinded rivals, empresses removed from power and patriarchs who had lost an argument were tonsured and confined there, and Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon's account of the iconoclast period records both iconophile and iconoclast losers being sent across the same water in turn. Exile to a monastery on these islands was a political sentence expressed in religious form.

The sea was also the approach for the fleets. Arab, Rus, Venetian and Ottoman ships all appeared on it, and the crusader fleet of 1204 crossed it before turning into the Horn to take the city, an event whose consequences for the relation between the eastern and western churches have never been undone.

After 1453 the sea remained the capital's front, and the islands kept their Greek Orthodox monasteries and villages under Ottoman rule, joined over time by Armenian and Jewish communities, so that a short ferry ride from the city led to a set of small places where three or four religious communities lived side by side. Several of the island churches and the Armenian and Jewish institutions there are still in use.

The most consequential of them is the theological school of Halki, founded in 1844 on the island of Heybeliada as the seminary of the ecumenical patriarchate. It trained the great majority of the patriarchate's clergy and many of its hierarchs. In 1971 a Turkish law brought private higher education under state control and the school was closed; the buildings and the library are maintained and the chapel is used, but no students have been admitted for more than half a century. Its reopening has been raised by successive American and European governments and by the patriarchate itself, and remains unresolved, which leaves the senior see of Orthodoxy without a seminary in its own country.

The sea has a harder physical fact under it. The North Anatolian fault runs beneath the Marmara, and the earthquake of August 1999 on its eastern end killed more than seventeen thousand people; seismologists expect another large rupture beneath the sea within decades.