The Saint Who Was a Noun

Every visitor to Hagia Sophia arrives, sooner or later, at the same question, usually asked aloud: who exactly was Saint Sophia? The guide answers briskly and correctly: nobody. Ἁγία Σοφία means “Holy Wisdom”—an attribute of God, not a lady of that name. The building is dedicated to an abstract noun.

Which would be a charming exception, were there only one such noun. There are three. The third, admittedly, takes some digging; but the digging turns out to be the best part of the story.

Peace, Kept in an Armoury

A few minutes’ walk away, in the outer courtyard of Topkapı, stands Hagia Eirene—Ἁγία Εἰρήνη, “Holy Peace.” Not peace as in the cosmos, which is κόσμος, but peace as quiet and concord: εἰρήνη, which gives us the word irenic and the name Irenaeus, “the peaceable.” Martyrs called Irene do exist, several of them; but the church is not named for any of them. It is dedicated to the peace of God, precisely as its neighbour is dedicated to His wisdom.

What followed deserves a paragraph of its own. Hagia Eirene is reckoned the oldest church in the city, older than Hagia Sophia; it burned in the Nika riots, was rebuilt by Justinian in 548, and after the earthquake of 740 was restored by Constantine V—whence the celebrated iconoclastic cross in the apse. The Ottomans never converted it into a mosque. They used it as an armoury instead. A church dedicated to Peace, filled for five centuries with weapons: an irony of such purity that one feels vulgar pointing it out. I have written about the building, and about how an armoury grew into a museum, elsewhere.

…And Holy Power

Of the third church, guidebooks and the English Wikipedia speak briefly and with one voice: the emperors built three churches in Constantinople dedicated to attributes of God—Wisdom, Peace and Power. Ἁγία Δύναμις, Holy Power. And then nothing further. The building simply drops out of the sentence, as though struck through.

In a sense it has. Not a stone of it survives. But the footnote to that sentence is a respectable one: Raymond Janin, Les églises et les monastères de Constantinople, the standard catalogue which since 1953 has superseded everything written before it. If one is going to check, one checks there.

So we open it. The entry Δύναμις (Ἁγία) is indeed present, on page 101, and it begins exactly as advertised:

This church is said to have been built by Constantine himself and dedicated to the Power of God (Δύναμις), as Hagia Sophia was to His Wisdom (Σοφία) and Hagia Eirene to His Peace (Εἰρήνη).

And then comes the sentence that never survives the retelling:

These late testimonies cannot be accepted.

Janin explains why. Every source stands six to nine centuries downstream of Constantine, and all belong to that genial tradition which credits Constantine with roughly half the city. The building itself he dates with confidence, though on quite other grounds: no later than the early sixth century, because it was a basilica, and after Justinian nobody built them.

The mechanism is a small masterpiece. A Byzantine legend assigns an emperor three churches that fall into a pleasing theological triptych. A twentieth-century scholar reports the legend and dismisses it in the next breath. The popular retelling drops precisely one sentence—the one beginning “cannot be accepted”—and the legend rolls on as fact, footnoted to the man who demolished it. Remember this; a few paragraphs from now the same thing will happen to an entire family of saints.

A Line in the Service Book

The church, however, was real. In the Synaxarion of Constantinople, under 16 May, one reads:

Καὶ μνήμη τῆς ἁγίας μάρτυρος Εὐφημίας πλησίον τοῦ Νεωρίου λιμένος εἰς τὴν ἁγίαν Δύναμιν.
“And the commemoration of the holy martyr Euphemia, near the harbour of the Neorion, at Holy Power.”

What exactly was celebrated that day, Janin declines to settle: it may have been the dedication of a separate church of Euphemia, it may have been a chapel within the precinct of Holy Power, or the phrase εἰς τὴν ἁγίαν Δύναμιν may mean no more than that the two sanctuaries stood side by side. Saint Euphemia of the Neorion is otherwise entirely unknown.

Holy Power lasted into the early thirteenth century. In the treaty of 13 November 1202, by which Alexios III Angelos granted the Genoese their rights along the Golden Horn, the church appears as a boundary marker—the last we hear of it. After that, not a single document: a little over a year later the crusaders were in the city.

So the church of Holy Power is not a legend. It stood, it held services, it got into a service book and into an international treaty. The legend is the only thing anyone repeats about it.

Under the Spice Bazaar

Its site is known, and turns out to be among the busiest ground in Istanbul.

The Neorion harbour lay on the southern shore of the Golden Horn, east of the present Galata Bridge, in what is now the quarter of Bahçekapı, between the Eminönü ferry piers and Sirkeci station. The sea gate that served it the Byzantines called Πόρτα Νεωρίου, after the shipyard behind it. The name did not hold: the same gate later went by Çifutkapı, “the Jews’ gate,” after the quarter’s inhabitants, and later still Bahçekapı, “the garden gate,” after the palace gardens running down to the water to the east.

There is nothing to look for there, and not only because of the buildings. The early Byzantine shoreline ran along what is now the eight-metre contour—when the Grand Post Office went up in 1905, the builders struck the remains of a Byzantine quay. The inlet silted up over centuries, the walls were pushed ever further into the water, and the Ottomans filled in the rest. Where Byzantine ships were once built, the Yeni Cami and the Spice Bazaar now stand.

The harbour’s name repays a moment’s attention. Νεώριον comes from ναῦς, “ship”: a ship-place, a shipyard. Not a harbour in any neutral sense but a working yard, with covered slipways where vessels were hauled up to be built and mended; one part of the quarter was known as ἡ παλαιὰ ἐξάρτυσις, “the old rigging.” The root is Indo-European: that same ναῦς gives Latin navis, and from it the navy and navigation, along with ναυσία, “ship-sickness,” which reached English as nausea. But the best of the family is this. From navis comes the nave of a church—the Germans still call it plainly Schiff, “ship.” Janin dates Holy Power by its architecture: a basilica. And a basilica is a church with a nave. On a shipyard, among the ships being built there, stood one more ship, in stone.

The trade outlived both the language and the empire; it merely crossed the water. Mehmed II founded the imperial shipyard on the northern shore, in Galata, probably on the site of the Genoese vetus tersana, “the old shipyard”; by 1515, under Selim I, it had a hundred and sixty docks and had eclipsed Gallipoli. Its name was no longer Greek: Tersâne-i Âmire, from Italian darsena, itself from Arabic dār aṣ-ṣināʿa, “house of industry”—the same phrase that reached Venice as arzanà and English as arsenal, a shipyard before it was ever a store of weapons. Which returns us, neatly, to the Ottoman guns in the church of Holy Peace. I have written about the imperial shipyard, and the museum that now occupies its oldest shed, elsewhere. And the Genoese again: the same Genoese who, two and a half centuries earlier, had bargained a stretch of the Golden Horn out of Alexios III and measured their boundary by the church of Holy Power.

It is fifteen minutes uphill from here to Hagia Eirene. The whole triptych fits into a single walk: Wisdom and Peace on the hill, Power down at the water among the shipwrights. Which may explain why the legend was so easy to believe. It is a good legend.

The One That Survived

One Holy Power does survive—though not here.

In Athens, on Mitropoleos Street, stands Agia Dynami, a tiny single-naved chapel of the sixteenth century. In the 1950s an entire block was cleared for the Ministry of Education, but the Church refused to give the chapel up, so the ministry was built around it. The building is now a five-star hotel, and the chapel still juts out by the entrance, wedged between concrete piers: the only church in Athens entirely surrounded by a modern block. One Holy Power buried under a bazaar, the other under a hotel.

Its dedication, as it happens, is not to the Power of God but to the Nativity of the Virgin, and it is called Holy Power for quite another reason: expectant Athenian mothers came here to pray for strong children and for strength in the hour itself. The abstraction that meant the might of the Creator in Constantinople became, in Athens, a promise of an easy delivery.

And a final detail, too good to have been invented: the excavations indicate that the chapel stands on the site of an ancient altar of Heracles. Herodotus notes that the most scrupulous of the Greeks sacrificed to Heracles twice over, once as an immortal god and once as a hero. Holy Power, built on the foundations of a pagan strongman.

Dynamite, Dynasty, Dynamo

Δύναμις comes from δύναμαι, “I can.” Out of it came the lot: dynamics; the dynamo; the dyne, which served honourably as a unit of force until the newton retired it; dynasty, δυναστεία, “lordship,” literally a can-ness; and dynamite, which Nobel named in 1867 and for which, thirty years later, he endowed a set of prizes including—of course—the one for Peace. Peace and power in the same bottle again. And the football clubs, from Kyiv to Dresden, all named after a Greek abstract noun by way of a Soviet sports society.

In the Greek Bible the range of δύναμις is wider still. It is force in the physical sense, and authority, and—in the plural—miracles: what the English versions render as “mighty works” means, quite literally, displays of what one can do. And in Pseudo-Dionysius—who was, in the manner of this entire article, not the man whose name he wrote under—the δυνάμεις become an order of angels; the Latin translators made them virtutes, and so in English they are the Virtues, fifth of the nine choirs, ranked between the Dominions and the Powers. (I have laid out the whole nine-fold hierarchy, cherubim, seraphim and the rest of that improbable civil service, elsewhere.) Note what has happened there: a common noun meaning “ability” has become first a divine attribute, then a rank of angel, then—in English—a word we use for moral excellence. Hold on to the Virtues; they are about to reappear with human faces.

How Grammar Makes Saints

The question remains: why does all this read so insistently as a set of women’s names?

Because ἁγία is a feminine adjective, and Sophia, Eirene and Dynamis are feminine nouns. “Holy Wisdom” and “Saint Theodora” are built identically. Nothing in the formula tells you whether you are looking at an attribute or a person; you have to know beforehand. And if you do not, the language obligingly supplies the missing person, because next to the word “Saint” a person feels more natural than an abstraction.

Which is exactly what happened to Sophia. By the sixth century there is a Life: a Roman matron, Sophia, and her three daughters, Pistis, Elpis and Agape, martyred under Hadrian. The daughters’ names are simply the list from 1 Corinthians 13:13; the mother is the Wisdom of Proverbs 9, who also, incidentally, kept a house with seven pillars. Hippolyte Delehaye—the Bollandist who edited the very Synaxarion quoted above—treated such narratives as literature rather than evidence, and the modern Roman Martyrology has dropped the four of them altogether. The allegory had acquired a biography, ages for the daughters (twelve, ten and nine) and a feast day.

The same mechanism as the Constantinian triptych, then, only started a thousand years earlier and carried through to the end: tradition, then a scholar’s caveat, then the caveat mislaid—and fact once more.

And here the English reader has the advantage over me, because English performed the last step of the conversion in its own right. Pistis, Elpis and Agape were not transliterated but translated—through Latin fides, spes, caritas—and in the seventeenth century the Puritans took the words straight off the page and christened their daughters with them. Faith, Hope and Charity; and after them Prudence, Patience, Grace, Mercy, Constance, Temperance. The virtues walked out of the epistle and into the parish register, where several of them are still living. (Russian did the identical thing at a different date: Pistis, Elpis and Agape were Englished, so to speak, into Vera, Nadezhda and Lyubov, which remain thoroughly ordinary names for women in Russia. Sophia, meanwhile, escaped translation in both languages and simply stayed Sophia.)

So the abstractions got their faces after all—not in the apse, where the grammar first suggested them, but in the christening register, which is the one place nobody thinks to check for etymology.

Though I will say, having spent a week in its company, that Holy Power has rather a ring to it. As a name for a daughter it is admittedly ambitious. As a name for a church it was apparently entirely respectable, and for some eight hundred years it stood at the water’s edge, minding the ships.