The Church of the Holy Saviour Pantepoptes, the All Seeing

THE CHURCH OF ST. SAVIOUR PANTEPOPTES

If we turn left beyond the mosque and then right at the next corner into Küçük Mektep Sokağı, we see a Byzantine church at the end of the street. This is Eski Imaret Camii, identiied with virtual certainty as the church of St. Saviour Pantepoptes, Christ the All-Seeing. This church was founded about 1085 to 1090 by the Empress Anna Delassena, mother of the Emperor Alexius I Comnenus and founder of the illustrious Comneni dynasty which ruled so brilliantly over Byzantium in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Anna ruled as co-emperor with her son for nearly 20 years and during that time exerted a powerful inluence on the affairs of the Byzantine state. In the year 1100 the Empress retired to the convent of the Pantepoptes and spent the remainder of her life in retirement there. She died in 1105 and was buried in the church which she had founded. The church was converted into a mosque almost immediately after the Conquest. For a time it served as the imaret of the nearby Fatih Camii, and thus it came to be known as Eski Imaret Camii.

The building is a quite perfect example of an eleventh-century church of the four-column type, with three apses and a double narthex, many of the doors of which retain their magnificent frames of red marble. Over the inner narthex is a gallery which opens onto the nave by a charming triple arcade on two rose-coloured marble columns.

The church itself has retained most of its original characteristics, though the four columns have as usual been replaced by piers, and the windows of the central apse have been altered. The side apses, however, preserve their windows and their beautiful marble cornice.

The dome too, with 12 windows between which 12 deep ribs taper out towards the crown, rests on a cornice with a meander pattern of palmettes and flowers. The exterior, though closely hemmed in by the surrounding houses, is very characteristic and charming, with its 12-sided dome and its decorative brickwork in the form of blind niches and bands of Greek-key and swastika motifs and rose-like medallions.