Phanariots
In one of the most interesting locations in the world, in the old city center of Istanbul, on the coast of the Golden Horn, there is a city quarter called Fanar in Greek, and Fener in Turks.
Since the Turkish conquest of Constantinople, that quarter has been inhabited by the Greek population, and immediately after the conquest, the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the first among equals in the world of Orthodox Christians, was moved to it. The inhabitants of that part of the city, known as Phanariots, for the next few centuries were the intellectual and economic elite, both of the Greek people and of the entire Ottoman Empire. The Phanariots had excellent education, knew several European languages, were skilled in administrative, commercial and banking affairs, and all this recommended them for influential positions in the Ottoman state administration and the Orthodox Church. Ecumenical patriarchs were most often chosen from the ranks of prominent Phanariot families, as well as key diplomatic personnel for relations with the Western great powers, on which the survival of the empire depended. As a reward, the most successful among them received from the sultan the right to trade monopolies and the management of large provinces, primarily in today’s Romania and Moldavia, which enabled them to become enormously rich.
The leading Phanariot families very often substantiated their great social influence, not always well-founded, by continuity with Byzantine noble families, and further into the past, with the tradition of the Roman Empire.
Nobility, wealth, education and political power – what a combination. The Phanariotes were very proud people, often arrogant. Their influence culminated in the 18th century, and later partially declined, under the indirect influence of the War of Greek National Liberation, although the Phanariots did not interfere in it, remaining loyal to the Empire.
The glorious history of the Great National School
A key factor in the Phanariots’ social success was their education, which they attached great importance to. Shortly after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the young Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror established cooperation with that wing of the Orthodox clergy which, in the previous critical years, persistently refused the offered union with the Catholic Church. So Gennadios Scholarios, the most persistent among them, became the new Patriarch, and his teacher, Mateos Kamariotis, took on the task of restoring Greek education in new circumstances. Already in 1454, he founded a school that the Greeks call the Great National School, and where the intellectual elite of the Greek people and the Ottoman Empire were educated for the next several centuries. For the Greeks, it was both Oxford and Cambridge.
At the end of the 19th century, when the centuries-old Empire was already in a crisis from which it would not recover, the rich Phanariots donated money for the construction of a new school building for their Great National School. The biggest donor was the extremely rich banker Georgios Zarifis, a personal friend and financial advisor of Sultan Abdulhamid. Zarifis’ job was to keep the hopelessly large national debt under control, in which he admittedly failed, but just at that time a lot of money flowed into his personal pocket. Zarifis gave part of the money he earned to charity, and he gave a particularly large sum to the Great National School, and thus construction could begin.
A dominant location was found for the school in Fanar, on top of a hill. The selected designer, the Ottoman-Greek architect Konstantinos Dimadis, with the choice of architectural style, extremely emphasized the importance and dominant position of the building. It is the most noticeable object in Phanar, which can be seen from a great distance, unlike the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which, to be honest, is not visible at all from that distance.
The school was built in the period 1881-1883 from bright red brick, with many complicated craft, primarily masonry decorative details, with complicated window moldings, with large floor heights, a pompous high entrance staircase, an entrance door of at least three and a half meters, and with a gate of a total height of about five meters. At the very top of the building rises an overemphasized dome, which is actually an observatory and which still houses an old telescope.
The people called the school the red castle, thus emphasizing its pomp and bizarre resemblance to medieval castles, inappropriate to the educational function of the building and its location in a densely populated urban environment.
But let’s be fair and defend the architect. He was just following the trends of his time. Just at that time, in Victorian England, which was leading in everything in the world at that time, especially in science and education, there was a trend of building similar capital school buildings in a style that in England was called Gothic Revival (or alternatively Victorian Gothic, i.e. Neo -Gothic). The architect Arthur Blomfield stood out, and his school facilities such as: Selwyn College, Cambridge from 1882; The Royal College of Music, London from 1882 and Keble College, Oxford, were likely inspirations for the architect Dimadis, the banker Zarifis and other donors. The ambition of the Phanariot families to make their school, of which they were so proud, equal to the best English colleges was evident.
The present of the school
The political reality, however, was getting worse and worse. The Greeks and Turks went from war to war, followed by expulsions of unfit populations. Finally, in 1923, as the crown of everything, came an agreement on mutual expulsion (the politically correct term is – population exchange). As a result of that agreement, the Greeks, in principle, had to leave the newly formed Turkish Republic. The Phanariots, as usual, were above such a fate and this obligation did not apply to them.
But social forces operate independently of your personal qualities, education and dignity. The golden times of the Phanarian Greeks have passed, the sultans are no more, and the current residents of Istanbul hardly remember the former great Phanariot contribution to state administration and diplomacy. Whenever relations with Greece soured, poorly educated, angry new residents of Istanbul, fresh from some Anatolian wasteland, would direct their anger at the Phanar Greeks, sometimes using violence and burning their shops.
And so, after several thousand years of continuous life in this place, of which five hundred years as a privileged class under the sultan’s rule, most of the Greeks of Phanar could no longer defend themselves from “fan justice” and had to leave their city and go to Greece.
Fanar is almost abandoned today. There are more abandoned houses than inhabited ones. Of course, the ancient quarter is even more colorful, if we really want to look at it from a more beautiful angle. The view of the rows of ancient houses with doxats is a real reward for those who have time to walk around Fanar. There is also a high probability that he will meet a film crew that uses those streets as free backdrops for shooting scenes of some of the popular Turkish TV soap operas.
The school on the hill still exists and operates according to the special grammar school program that applies to schools of national minorities. Most of the professors are ethnic Greeks, as is the director, but there are few students, barely more than the professors. The observatory in the dome at the top of the building is still used for teaching. When the professor leaves the observatory and leaves the students alone, they of course immediately lower the lens of the old telescope from the view of the planets, towards the much more interesting windows of Istanbul, of which they have a wonderful view considering the height of their position. But when they lower the lens a little further, they will see the empty, abandoned houses of Fanara. However, if they move it a little to the right, … a little more to the right, towards the plateau in front of the church where the expensive cars are parked, they may have the honor of seeing the last true Phanariots, people of undisturbed pride that the flow of time has not touched since the time of Mehmed, .. .or Justinian, … or even Constantine: high-ranking priests of the Ecumenical Patriarchate.
