Appendices - Strolling Through Istanbul: The Classic Guide to the City - page 479

represented and where the pictures should be placed in the church
building. Then came the iconoclastic age (711 to 843) when all these
pictural mosaics were ruthlessly destroyed, so that none survive in
Istanbul before the mid-ninth century. From then onward there was
a revival of the pictorial art, still in the highly stylized and formal
tradition of the earlier period, and all the great churches were again
filled with holy pictures. A good idea of the stylistic types in vogue
from the ninth to the twelfth centuries can be seen in the examples
that have been uncovered in Haghia Sophia.
But in Istanbul the most extensive and splendid mosaics date from
the last great flowering of Byzantine culture before the fall. At the
beginning of the fourteenth century were executed the long cycles of
the life of the Blessed Virgin and of Christ in St. Saviour in Chora,
which have been so brilliantly restored in recent years to their pristine
splendour by the Byzantine Institute. To this date also belong the
glorious frescoes in the side chapel of that church and another series
of mosaics, less extensive but hardly less impressive in the side chapel
of St. Mary Pammakaristos (Fethiye Camii). The art of these pictures
shows a decisive break away from the hieratic formalism of the earlier
tradition and breathes the very spirit of the Renaissance as it was
beginning to appear at the same date in Italy. In Byzantium it had all
too short a life.
GLOSSARY OF TURKISH ARCHITECTURAL TERMS
avlu: courtyard of a mosque
cami: mosque; mescit, from which the European word mosque is
derived, means a small mosque
dershane: the lecture hall of a medrese
dar-ül hadis: school for learning sacred tradition
dar-ül kura: school for learning the Kuran
dar-üş şifa: hospital
hamam: Turkish bath