Pera and Galata - Strolling Through Istanbul: The Classic Guide to the City - page 408

The first turning on the left beyond the Embassy brings us to the
Dutch Chapel, whose entrance is a short way down along the left.
Since 1857 this building has housed the Union Church of Istanbul,
an English-speaking congregation from many lands. The chapel dates
from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, although the
original chapel must go back to the founding of the Dutch Embassy.
The basement rooms of the chapel, now used as a Sunday school,
have in the past served as a prison. The building is basically a single
massive barrel vault of heavy masonry; the brickwork of the façade,
newly exposed to view, is especially fine.
A frequent visitor to the original Dutch Chapel in the early years of
its existence was Cyril Lucaris, six times Patriarch of Constantinople and
once of Alexandria. Influenced by his conversations with theologians
connected with the Dutch Chapel, Lucaris in 1629 published his
Declaration of Faith, in which he proclaimed his belief in the basic
principles of Calvinism. This caused a scandal in the Greek Orthodox
Church which eventually led to the Patriarch being denounced to
Murat IV as a Russian spy. On 25 June 1638, Lucaris was executed by
the Janissaries and his body thrown into the Marmara, thus bringing
to an end the remarkable career of the man whom Pope Urban had
called “the son of darkness and the athlete of hell.”
A little farther down the street we pass on our right the former
Spanish Embassy, now no longer functioning, with only the embassy
chapel remaining in use. This chapel, dedicated to Our Lady of the
Seven Sorrows, was originally founded in 1670; the present church
dates from 1871.
Still farther down the street we come to the handsome Palazzo
di Venezia, now the Italian Embassy. The present building dates
from about 1695, though the Embassy itself was established here
long before that. In the great old days this was the residence of the
Venetian bailo, the ambassador of the Serene Republic of Venice
and one of the most powerful of the foreign legates in the city. The
Palazzo is large and imposing, its garden as typically Italian as that
of the English Embassy is English. We learn from his Memoirs that
Giacomo Casanova was a guest here in the summer of 1744; in his