Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/151

 Between the little Golden Horn and the great green Sea of Marmora, a bold peninsula curls out to Seraglio Point. Here, within the five-mile wall which encloses its landward side, lies Stamboul to which Galata and Pera bear the same cultural and historical relationship as Yonkers bears to New York. Indeed, one could ignore Galata and Pera as negligible suburbs of foreigners were it not that by the slow expansion of the Capitulations through the centuries, these small foreign suburbs have slowly turned the capital upside down until the Mudros armistice in 1918 finally ushered the Anglo-French command into Pera in possession of complete authority. Here in Stamboul was the seat of the Ottoman Government and here are the greatest monuments of Islam. The broad peninsula on which Stamboul lies is tipped with the great shrines of Islamic culture, its sky-line is pierced with the minarets of its mighty mosques, of Ayiah Sophia, Ahmedieh, Valideh, Bayazid, Suleimanieh and Mohammed II.

Here in Stamboul also, in the small Greek suburb of the Phanar at the head of the Golden Horn, was the Oecumenical Patriarchate, the head of the Rûm community in the old Empire. The old Byzantine Empire had lost its territorial basis in 1453, but it had remained in the political capital of Islam as an ecclesiastical, political and commercial force centering at the Phanar. The Patriarch himself had become an official of the Ministry of Justice in the Ottoman Government and was appointed by the Ottoman Minister from a list of three candidates proposed by the Holy Synod. Relations between the Caliph-Sultan and the Patriarch remained gen