I have always liked Orthodox Church music and now find it is on the Internet in English.  This is a Hymn to Maria Theotokos, Mary Mother of God

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDPmHX-er4I&index=6&list=PL42090A646C430B91

Whilst this is stirring stuff

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7ysB50Pbv4&list=PL42090A646C430B91&index=9

The tune appears to be a Byzantine battle hymn, the sort of stuff the Excubitores and Scholae, the crack Imperial Guard units,  would have sung as they waded into the orc-hordes of Islam.  

I like the way they have photoshopped Haghia Sophia back to how it should be, the crescent stuck on top by the Turks taken down and the Cross replaced, and the tawdry and mismatched minarets stuck up around it removed. 

The Turks have shamefully neglected this great Church building, even after Kemal Ataturk to his credit booted out the imams, stopped its abuse as a mosque, and at least parked it in neutral as a museum, ordering the removal of the whitewash splattered over the sacred frescoes. Sadly the orc-scrawls from the Koran remain. As Islamism grows in Turkey the restoration work grows ever more half hearted and there is talk of making it a mosque again.

Even in its tawdry state of disrepair I think it is one of the finest things men have ever built.

The superb Virgin and Child above the High Altar (or where the High Altar was and should be!) was unveiled on Holy Saturday 867 by the Patriarch Photius.

Either side of the Great Door through which only the Emperor and the Patriarch could walk are dimples worn in the marble floor by guardsmen stamping their feet as they came to attention at least once a day for a thousand years. Many of them, for generations, would have been Englishmen serving in the Varangian Guard, which became highly popular amongst the English after the Norman Conquest. 

It seems likely to me that Constantinople, which for a thousand years mounted guard on Europe’s Asian flank against the Islamic hordes, was at least in part the inspiration for Tolkien’s Minas Tirith. I don’t recall if JRRT actually said this though. By, I suspect, no coincidence, Turkish sounds awfully liked the Black Speech of Mordor.  Indeed the Eastern and Western Roman Empires mirrored the fates of Gondor and Arnor –   the former held on but the latter fell apart.

Sadly, for our world’s Minas Tirith Gandalf and the Riders of Rohan never came, and on Tuesday 29th May 1453 the City fell after a heroic siege (in which at least one Briton, a Scot, joined the pathetic few who came from across Europe to help it in its final need). As the great Land Walls, which had stood for a thousand years, were breached by blasting fire, and the hordes of darkness came pouring in, the last of the Emperors, Michael XI Palaeologus, tore off his imperial regalia and leaped into the fray to die fighting. He was never seen again. 

The women and children of the City gathered in Haghia Sophia to pray for a miracle. None came to save them, but the story is still told among the Greeks, the heirs to the fallen Empire, that as the Turks burst into the church and started raping and killing the congregation the priests and deacons celebrating Mass at the altar lifted up the Host and the Holy Vessels, bowed once to the congregation being engulfed in chaos and slaughter, and walked into the walls. When/if one day the armies of Europe and Christendom return, as they enter the Church the priests etc will come back out of the walls to finish celebrating the Mass, and the Last Emperor Michael XI, miraculously snatched from the melee and preserved by the Lady Protector of the City, Maria Theotokos, Mary Mother of God, will stand before the altar to welcome back the Armies of the West. 

After the City fell, it was given over as Islamic Law prescribes to three days of sack, rapine, plunder and slaughter. Then the Turk Sultan, Mehmet II, called al-Fatih, the Conqueror, rode in like the Lord of the Ringwraiths to triumph over the ruined city. He rode his horse into the greatest Church of Christendom, dismounted and defiled the altar by salaaming to Allah before it, thus by their rules making the place forever a mosque. Many of the people of the City who had survived three days of slaughter and gang-rape were sold off into slavery.