The Red Castle & St Mary of the Mongols
Why is it significant?
Catch your breath on the slope and look up at the enormous red-brick building with towers and a dome on top, the kind of thing that should be guarding a border, not teaching Greek grammar. Locals call it the Red Castle. It is the Phanar Greek Orthodox College, and it is a school.
Key Facts
| Place | The Red Castle & St Mary of the Mongols |
|---|---|
| Address | Tevkii Cafer Mektebi Sokak, Fener, 34087 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.02970, 28.94890 |
| Part of Walk | Neighbours of the Golden Horn: Fener, Balat and Istanbul's Greek, Jewish, Armenian and Bulgarian Quarters |
| Generated | Generated |
Catch your breath on the slope and look up at the enormous red-brick building with towers and a dome on top, the kind of thing that should be guarding a border, not teaching Greek grammar. Locals call it the Red Castle. It is the Phanar Greek Orthodox College, and it is a school.
The school traces its history back to 1454, a year after the conquest, when the patriarchate reopened a school for the Orthodox community. That makes it one of the oldest Greek schools still working anywhere. Princes, patriarchs, translators and ministers of the Ottoman Greek world sat in its classrooms. The building in front of you was finished in 1883 to a design by the architect Konstantinos Dimadis. Today it has only a few dozen pupils, and the corridors built for hundreds echo.
Now look just below the school at the small church with an uneven dome behind its wall. In 1265 the Byzantine emperor Michael the Eighth sent his daughter Maria to marry the Mongol ruler of Persia, Hulagu. Hulagu died before she arrived, so she married his son Abaqa instead. After some seventeen years at the Mongol court, widowed, she came home and refounded this convent, where she lived as a nun. That is why it is called St Mary of the Mongols.
And here is the remarkable part. This is the only Byzantine church in Istanbul that has never been converted into a mosque. The story goes that Mehmed the Conqueror granted it to the family of Christodoulos, the Greek architect of his own mosque, and that when officials later tried to take it, the community produced the sultan's decree. Its Turkish name, Kanlı Kilise, means the Bloody Church, after the fighting said to have raged on this slope in 1453.
In the early 1950s the Greeks of Istanbul still numbered many tens of thousands. Then came the pogrom of September 1955, when mobs attacked Greek homes, shops and churches across the city, and in 1964 the expulsion of Greek citizens. The empty desks of the Red Castle are where that history ends up. From here, follow the lane west along the hillside towards a Byzantine church that wears a minaret.