ZLATYU BOYAJIEV’ PERMANENT EXHIBITION

(Stoyan Chomakov House), 18 Saborna Street

The exhibition displaying the work of the great artist Zlatyu Boyadjiev (1903 – 1976) was opened in 1980 in this representative period-house. The multitude of canvases, some of imposing size, is displayed in all rooms of the big two-storey house. In the courtyard in front of the house there is monument to the honoured artist .

The noble Revival house, where the exhibition has been set out, was built for Dr. Stoyan Chomakov in 1860. It was a very modern-looking house for its time although it was a solid sym-metrically designed building with facades decorated in the classical style widely spread in Europe at the time. Dr.Chomakov was one of the first academically trained physicians in Plovdiv and was a champion for an autonomous Bulgarian church in the Revival bulgaria private tours.

After the Liberation the heirs gave the house as a present to King Ferdinand. In the 50s of the 20th c. it housed a branch of the Ivan Vazov Public Library until the time it was entirely renovated and given over for the setting up of the exhibition of the works by Zlatyu Boyadjiev.

‘GEORGI BOJILOV – SLONA’ PERMANENT EXHIBITION

(Skobelev House), 1 Knyaz Tseretelev Street

This Revival house is adjacent to the Hippocrates Pharmacy. Kostadin Kaftanjiyata, a Bulgarian from the town of Stara Zagora, built it in the 60s of the 19th century. In the years after the Liberation and until her death here lived Olga Sko- beleva (1823 -1880), mother of the Russian General Skobelev. She became known for her charity work in aid of the victims of the Turkish atrocities in South Bulgaria during the April Rising and the Liberation War. In gratitude for her concern for the orphaned children in Thrace, the Bulgarians have called her ‘Mother Skobeleva’. A memorial park has been dedicated to her off the Istanbul highway in the outskirts of Plovdiv.

At present the house is occupied by the Plovdiv branch of the ‘Future for Bulgaria’ Foundation. It was with the contribution of the foundation that in 2003 a permanent exhibition of the work of the prominent artist Georgi Bojilov-Slona was arranged. The end-wall of the house, facing Saborna Street is decorated with a commemorative panel dedicated to the artist and executed in paintings and mosaics to the design of Dimiter Kirov.

Apart from the period houses of great artistic and architectural value, Old Plovdiv possesses some buildings of lesser architectural merit but associated with significant events in the past. These are historic places marked with commemorative inscriptions. On Saborna Street opposite the Holy Virgin Cathedral stands the house of Dr. Rashko Petrov, a physician with a medical degree and a prominent revolutionary, who participated in the First Bulgarian Legion in Belgrade in 1862.

There he became friends with Vasil Levski – the ‘Apostle of Liberty’, who often stayed at Dr. Petrov’s house when in Plovdiv. Right after the Liberation War in 1878 the house was the seat of the interim Russian representation headed by the Imperial Commissioner Prince Alexander Dondukov-Korsakov. Next-door to Dr Rashko’s place is the house where Dr Konstantin Stoilov, an eminent Bulgarian politician and statesman, Prime Minister of Bulgaria from 1894 to 1899, was born.

Greek colonizers

Balchik is one of the oldest and most beautiful coastal towns with a population of 11,861. It was founded in the 6th century B.C. by Greek colonizers. Its first name was Cruni, meaning spring, owing to the numerous springs around. Balchik existed in Roman times as a seaport and had its own mint. Later it became the possession of the Boyar Balik and bears his name, After the Balkan War of 1912-1913 it came within the boundaries of Romania and was returned to Bulgaria by the Craiova Treaty of September 21, 1940.

The most interesting sight in Balchik is the park belonging to the Palace of Queen Maria of Romania, It is now a botanical garden with 3,000 species of plants, among them a unique collection of cactuses. The Palace rises above the shore and the small church was transferred from the island of Crete, stone by stone. Ancient amphorae, Turkish tombstones and fountains can be seen scattered about in the park,

Hotels: Balchik, three stars, with 68 beds sightseeing turkey; Raketa, two stars, with 36 beds. There is also the Bisser camp site, two stars, with a restaurant, the Tihiya Kut.

Eight kilometres from Balchik towards Varna is Albena, the newest and most picturesque seaside resort on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. The sea here is clean and shallow and the beach is six kilometres long. There are 40 hotels with a total of 12,750 beds, as well as the camp sites Albena, Ekzotika and International many restaurants and entertainment spots with 10,000 seats, most of these being situated at some distance from the hotels.

There are good sports facilities: volleyball, basketball and tennis courts, golf links, croquet greens, bowling alleys, horse riding, cycling, a yachting club and go-carts. Next to Kardam Hotel is a men’s and women’s tailor, shoemaker’s, watchmaker’s and a dry-cleaning and pressing shop. At the entrance to the resort is the post office, open from 6 a.m. to 10 pm.

Varna, Zlatni Pyassatsi, Drouzhba, Tolbukhin and Balchik

A regular bus service connects it with Varna, Zlatni Pyassatsi, Drouzhba, Tolbukhin and Balchik and a six-seater cutter makes regular trips to Balchik, Kavarna and Kaliakra.

Exhibitions of the works of leading Bulgarian painters, cartoonists and graphic artists are organized in the hotel lobbies. The Miss Albena and the Miss Cherno More beauty contests are held in July and August.

There are several places of entertainment offering interesting programmes and excellent cuisine.

The Zlaten Klass Taverna, next to the Orlov Hotel is open from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m.

The Dobroudja Taverna in the shopping centre, is open from 11.00 a.m. to 12.00 p.m.

The Old House Restaurant in national style, with folk orchestra (near the Dobrich restaurant) is open from 6.00 p.m. to 12.00 pm.

Alberta

Hotels; 1. Gergana 2. Slavourta 3. Moura 4. Elitsa 5. Nona 6. Boryana 11. Ralitsa 13, Kiev 14. Vihren 16. Kom 17. Leipzig 18. Dnepr 19. Neptun 20. Bratislava 21. Karvouna 22. Balik 23. Tervel 24. Kaliopa 25. Orlov 27, Slavyanka 29. Drouzhba 30. Praga 31. Kompas 32 Shabla 33. Orhidea 34. Warshava 35. Kamelia 36, 36. Dorostol 37. Kardam 40. Zvezda 41. Avrora 42. Dobroudja 43, Ka)iakra44. Lovech 45. Zdravets 46. Zomitsa

Gorski Tsar Night Club has a nightly concert programme. Open from 9.00 p.m. to 4.00 a.m.

Arabella Night Club, close to the beach, is open from 9,00 p.m. to 4.00 a m.

Batova Picnic — 18 kilometres from the resort with delicious food and a floor show. Open from 11,00 am fo 12.00 p.m,

Robinson — a picnic ground near Baichik. Interesting programme every day from 10.00 a.m. to 12.00 p.m.

National Revival period

During Ottoman domination and particularly during the National Revival period, the town was active in the struggles of the Bulgarian people. In 1840 the first secular girl’s school was opened, and in 1869 Vassil Levski founded the first local revolutionary committee. The Church of St Nicholas, built in

1834 is a remarkable monument to the architecture of the National Revival,, directly linked with the struggle for independence of the church, Pleven became particularly prominent during the Russo-Turkish War of Liberation of 1877-1878 which terminated Ottoman bondage. Russian and Romanian troops besieged the town over more than five months and liberated it on December 10,1877. They captured the entire Turkish army and its commander Osman Pasha.

Under the monarchy the town was the centre of revolutionary movement. During the Second World War (1941-1944) the town had five detachments comprising over 550 partisans.

LOVETSCH

Pleven today is a large-scale industrial centre and has 6 research institutes, a large district library school, technical colleges, secondary7 music school, college, theatre, symphony orchestra and an opera. The traditional Katya Popova Laureate Days are held in Pleven every year.

Sights in the city and its surroundings

Over 100 monuments were built by the Bulgarian people for the Russian soldiers who liberated Bulgaria. Most prominent being the Mausoleum of the Russian and Romanian Troops, in the main square sofia daily tours, 9th September Square;Pleven Liberation Museum (1877) situated in a picturesque park, was opened in 1907 in the same house where Osman Pasha delivered up his sword to the Russian Emperor Alexander II. Other monuments include the Totleben Rampart, in Kailuka park, separating the waters of two dams. The walls of small dam is on the remains of a dam built by General Totleben in 1877, meant to put the mills on the Touchenitsa river out of action and cause difficulties for the Turkish army besieged in Pleven. One of the original guns has been placed on the ramparts with a bronze figure of General Totleben beside it. The Skobelev park Museum is a large park where in 1877 a detach-ment led by General Skobelev waged heroic battles.

There are ruins of an ancient Roman Fortress, Storgozia (l-6th century’ in the Kailuka locality.

The District History Museum is in the old barracks built in 1884-1888 by an Italian architect and since restored. The museum exhibits are mainly arranged chronologically — antiquity, National Revival, Russo-Turkish War of Liberation 1877-1878, history of capitalism, workers’ revolutionary movement and socialist construction.

The River Roussenski Lorn

The manifestations of this Renaissance, the penetration and revival of interest in antiquity, the striving to bring contemporary art closer to it, are plainly visible in the murals of one of the rupestral churches near the village of Ivanovo, Rousse district. The River Roussenski Lorn, cutting deep into the soft limestone rocks, has formed a wide canyon here, sunoundcd by walls up to 50 m. in height. Many caves were foimed in these almost perpendicular rocks, and in the 13th and 14th centuries entire colonies of monks and hermits lock refuge in them, enlarging the natural caves, and adapting them to use as cells or churches. In these rock cells, chapels and churches inhabited by Hezychasts and mystics who had given up life, far from the centres of cultural life, an art made its way, the votaries of which had a totally different attitude to the reality around them.

They sought this reality, they tried to attain it and recreate it in their work. This was the art of people who knew how to enjoy life, all that nature, and man in the first place, has created. So man appears in these murals not only in the person of biblical characters with their garments and poses painted according to the strict canons of church painting, but chiefly as a living natural form with his specific dynamics, with his free characteristic and expressive movements city tour istanbul. Man’s living body appears for the foist time partly naked here (some of the servants in the scene of Christ’s betrayal), and quite naked in the presentation of the two Atlantes.

Roussenski Lorn

The bodies are instinct with life and strength. They are not the withered, tortured and powerless bodies we have known so far. The artist who painted the Ivanovo murals was a great artist, and life on earth was closer to his heart than life in paradise after death, the life of which the inhabitants of the rupestral hermitage above the banks of the Roussenski Lorn dreamt and preached. This well-schooled artist was acquainted with classicism and entirely taken up with its new trends in Bulgarian art; he gave full expression to them in his work on the rupestral church of Ivanovo, where the attempt to return to the aesthetics of antique art are clearly apparent.

Art in West Bulgaria was of a totally different character at that time. Here the influence of the Turnovo school was comparatively slight. It was chiefly masters from the western regions of Bulgaria, from Macedonia, who worked here. Under the influence of their art a local school came into being, which was based on the traditions of a folk art with the linear and mainly decorative style typical of it, inbued with a sound and fresh, though often naive and primitive, realism. The mmals of the Zemen Monastery, 70 km. to the south of Sofia on the road to Radomir, are typical examples of this art. The church is a small cruciform- cupolaed one, with a square foundation, three apses to the east and a cupola on a high drum. Theouter walls are divided into sec – ticns by three recessed arches, the central one of which is higher, and they stress the inner structure of the church.

The wallpaintings in the church are well preserved. Of thesix portraits of laymen those of Despot Deyan of Kyustendil and Despotitsa Doya are the best preserved. The church was decorated with these frescoes in their day, a little after 1354. They are real individual portraits. Doya has the fire features of a refined bolyar beauty. Many details in her costume, of an ethnographic nature, complete the realistic image of this Despotitsa, or Princess.

THE IRON AGE IN THE BULGARIAN LANDS

Persons captured during such clashes were also put to work in production. Domestic slavery also appeared. Important changes took place in the structure and essence of the clan community. The man now acquired the mastery and the matriarchate soon made way for the patriarchate. Private ownership, mainly of movable property, also appeared, and cattle acquired great importance. The clan community began to disintegrate. Individual families now began to appear,at the head of which stood the father with his unlimited authority over the remaining members of the family. The family community thus came into being.

The Thracians and Greek Colonization

The Bronze Age in the Bulgarian lands is considered to have ended at the beginning of the first millenium B. C. Profound and complicated changes took place in the economy and history of these lands in this millenium. About the 8th and 7th centuries iron became known in production. The introduction of iron implements of labour gave a new impetus to the further development of society’s productive forces. About the end of the 6th century B. C., the potter’s wheel also appeared — a clear sign that pottery had detached itself as an independent craft tours bulgaria, and that commodity production now existed. In the meanwhile the Greek colonization of the Black Sea and Aegean coasts had begun at the end of the 7th century B. C. In the course of two centuries a whole series of Hellenic colonies appeared here, and the eastern half of the Balkan Peninsula was already closely linked with the economic and cultural sphere of the Mediterranean world.

The name of the Thracians now appears for the first time, being more and more frequently mentioned by ancient Hellenic historians. The Thracians were a numerous people of Indo-European origin, divided into numerous tribes, which were never able to achieve full union and create lasting power as a state. To this day science can give no final answer to the questions of when the Thracians first appeared in the peninsula, and where they came from. Only one thing is certain — that at the beginning of the first millenium they were already settled in the greater part of the peninsula, leading a settled life as stockbreeders and farmers; that iron was known to them, that they engaged successfully in many crafts, and that the southern tribes along the shores of the Aegean were coming into contact with the Greek Mediterranean world.

Many distant memories of these oldest ties of the Greeks with the Thracians have found expression in ancient Greek mythology, and in ancient Greek epics. On their way to Colchis, the Argonauts stopped to see the blind Thracian King Phineus on the Black Sea coast. He amicably showed them the way to the distant land they sought. In the tenth song of the Iliad, the tragic fate of the Thracian tribal chieftain Rhesus is related, who went to the aid of Troy against the Achaeans with his Thracians. Rhesus appears in all the splendour of his accoutrements — his chariot is wrought with silver and gold, and his weapons, big and golden, as the poet puts it, are worthy only of the immortal gods. The images of Thracian heroes are found in many places in Homer’s poems; they are armed like the Greeks, fight like them, and do not yield pride of place to them in any way. Thracian swords are frequently mentioned. Every day ships carried jars of the famous Thracian wine to I lion. The Thracians were known in epics as horesbreeders, and their land had fertile soil, called by the poet «mother of flocks.

Buyuk Djarniya

From the Turkish BuyukDjarniya (15th century) — at the corner of Legue and Alexander Stamboliiski Blvd; Banya Bashi Djamiya (16th century), opposite the Central Supermarket; the Black Mosque (16th century), now the Seven Saints’ Church – at the comer of Graf Ignatiev and Tsar Shishman streets.

Small churches with interesting mural paintings: St Nikolai – Tsar Kaloyan St.; St Petka – in the courtyard of the building on the corner of Stamboliiski Blvd and Tsar Kaloyan Street; St Petka Samardjiiska — in the pedestrian sub-way on Lenin Square.

More recent monuments: Monument to the Liberators, Narodno Subranie Square, to the memory of the Russian liberators of Bulgaria from Ottoman mle, the work of the Italian sculptor Arnoldo Zocchi; Alexander Nevsky Memorial Church, on the square of the same name (in its basement the Crypt houses an original exhibition of icons); Monument to the Soviet Army — in the park between Rousski Blvd, Tolbukhin Blvd and Evlogi Georgiev Blvd; the Obelisk to those who fell in the antifascist struggle – on the common grave in Freedom Park; the Georgi Dimitrov Mausoleum – on the Ninth of September Square; Lenin’s Monument – on Lenin Square.

Museums: Archaeological Museum – Alexander Stamboliiski Blvd; Ethnographic Museum – The Ninth of September Square (in the former royal palace); Natural Science Museum, 1 Rousski Blvd; Museum of the Revolutionary Movement in Bulgaria, 14 Rousski Blvd; National Military History Museum, 23 Skobelev Blvd; Church History and Archaeological Museum, 19 Lenin Square; Museum of Bulgaro-Soviet Friendship, 4 Klement Gottwald Blvd; Museum of the History of Sofia, 27 Exarch Yossif Street ephesus sightseeing; Dimiter Blagoev Museum- House, Lajos Cossuth Street; Georgi Dimitrov Museum-House, 66 Opulchenska Street; Alexander Stamboliiski Museum- House, 44 Souhodol Street; Ivan Vazov Museum-House, 10 Ivan Vazov Street; Petko and Pencho Slaveikov Museum- House, 138 Rakovski Street; Peyo Yavorov Museum-House, 136 Rakovski Street; Hristo Smyrnenski Museum-House, 116 Emil Shekerdjiiski Street; Nikola Vaptsarov Museum-House, 37′ Angel Kunchev Street

National Art Gallery — Ninth of September Square, in the former royal palace.

The National Assembly

Interesting buildings: The National Assembly, the University of Sofia, the National Theatre, the Palace of Justice, the Central Home of the People’s Army, the Ministry of Defence, the Holy Synod Building, the Bulgarian National Bank, Universiade Hall, the Central Supermarket, etc.

Parks: Freedom Park, Hristo Smyrnenski Park (Western Park), Vladimir Zaimov Park, Park of the Doctors’ Monument, etc.

Major hotels: Park Hotel Moskva – tel. 45-51-21; Sofia, 4-Narodno Subranie Square — tel. 87-88-21; Balkan, 2 Lenin Square – tel. 87-65-43; Bulgaria, 4 Rousski Blvd —tel. 87-19-77; Pliska, 87 Lenin Blvd — tel. 72-37-21; Hemus, 31 Georgi Traikov Blvd – tel. 66-14-15; Slavia, Hippodrouma Housing Estate – tel. 52-55-51; Serdika, 2 Vladimir Zaimov Blvd – tel. 44-34-11; Slavyanska Besseda, 127 Rakovski Street tel. 88-36-91; Vitosha, 9 Isker Street- tel. 88-01-12; Sevastopol, 116 Rakovski Street – tel. 87-59-41; Preslav, 3 Triaditsa Street – tel. 87-65-86; Lyulin, 2 Triaditsa Street, tel. 88-56-42.

Well, the time has now come to get away from it all and go back to Mother Nature to take a breath of fresh air and mull over your impressions. Sofia is blessed in this respect, too, for its surroundings are of unique scenic beauty.So get your car ready and let’s go! The first place to go to, of course, is Mount Vitosha, the capital’s outstanding landmark and an integral part of its landscape. Moreover, on the way there is a little gem that you simply can’t afford to miss.

You’d hardly suspect that the little unassuming Boyana Church in a village in the foothills of Mount Vitosha, a mere six miles from the city centre, is one of Bulgaria’s foremost monuments of medieval art. But just go inside and you’ll have another ‘think’ coming for there you will find 13th-century murals that are veritable masterpieces of medieval art.

After leaving this little art treasure, you’ll be in the very heart of the mountain in less than half an hour. There you may visit Kopitoto (The Hoof),a modern hotel with restaurant built on a big rock projecting out into space, offering you a wonderful panoramic view of Sofia and the whole surrounding plain. If you drive on for another ten minutes, you will reach the famous Zlat- ni Mostove (Golden Bridges), a picturesque spot with a veritable

river of stones washed by the waters of a real river, and where you will find a very cosy Tyrolese-style restaurant.

The Musie Dupuytren

This Conciergerie, with the hall of the Cordelier Club, the Musie Dupuytren, is the only extant building in Paris, which is closely associated with great scenes of the Revo-lution. The Bastille is gone, the Tuileries, the Hotel de Ville, the Hall of the Convention in the R. de Rivoli, the Jacobin Club, the prisons, the Temple, Abbaye, La Force, Chatelet, and the rest. So, too, the tombs of Mirabeau, Voltaire, Rousseau, Marat, Louis xvi., and Marie Antoinette no longer hold their bones, and cenotaphs record the spot where they were laid. Etiam periere sepulchra. New Haussmannic streets cover the soil, wherein the ashes of Danton and Vergniaud, Charlotte Corday and Madame Roland, moulder unknown. Of the Revolution no buildings remain but only sites; and the only edifices, which survive to speak to us of the September massacres and the Terror, are the dining-hall of the followers of St. Francis and the palace of St. Louis, the knight and crusader.

In spite of destruction and reconstruction, the history pf the great edifices of old Paris is wonderfully instructive, even that of the buildings which have wholly disappeared. But they must be studied in the learned and elaborate works, such as those of Dulaure, Piganiol, Viollet-le-Duc, Lacroix, Lenoir, Guilhermy, Fournier, Hoffbauer, Fergus- son, Hamerton, in the Histoire Generale, and in Paris a travers les Ages, in the splendid series of etchings and engravings of old Paris, which may be found in the library of the Carnavalet Museum, and in our British Museum. Bastille, Louvre, Hdtel de Ville, Tuileries, Luxembourg, the Citd, St. Germain, St. Genevilve, would each require an essay, or a volume with maps and plans and restorations, to make them intelligible private tours istanbul. But those who seek to know what Paris has been in the long succession of ages may still revive it in their minds, with the aid of the mass of literature that is open to them, and if they will study not only the extant churches, but such works of domestic art as the Hotel Cluny, and Hotel de Sens, Hotel la Valette, the house in the Corn’s la Reine, and the Hotel Carnavalet.

Ducerceau and M6ryon

A careful study of Silvestre, Ducerceau, and M6ryon will give some idea of old Paris, with its vast walls, gates, towers, castles, its crowded churches, its immense abbeys, its narrow winding streets, its fetid cemeteries, gloomy courts and impasses, its filthy lanes, and its bridges loaded with houses. We may linger about the old remnants of churches, the flotsam and jetsam of the Mediaeval Catholicism, such bits as the tower of St. Jacques, and the portals of the two St. Germains and of St. Nicolas des Champs, the old churches of St. Jnlien le Pauvre, and St. Martin des Champs, the church of St. Sdverin, and the chapel of the Chdteau de Vincennes.

Then let us study the tombs in St. Germain des Pris, of St. Denis, St. Etienne du Mont: and then we may go on to the tomb that all Englishmen visit — the tomb which I always feel to be the grandest of all sepulchral conceptions (to be set beside the tomb of Theod- oric at Ravenna, and the tomb of Cecilia Metella on the Appian way), almost the one work of modern art, which is at once colossal, noble, and pathetic — I mean the mighty vault beneath the dome of the Invalidcs, where the greatest soldier and the worst ruler of our age sleeps at last in peace, guarded by the veterans of France.

We need not deny to modern Paris the gift of charm; we may admit that her museums and libraries, her collections, and her treasures are inexhaustible to the fit student; but far more impressive is the history of this memorable city, with its vast range of time, of variety, of association — with its record of the dawn of Western civilisation, of Catholicism and Feudalism, of the Renascence, and the modern world, of the Revolution of the last century, and the Imperialism of this century — with its dust enriched with the bones of those who in things of the soul and in things of war, in the love of beauty, and in the passion for new life, have dared and done memorable deeds, from the days of Genevieve and Clotilda, the Louis and the Henrys, down to the two Napoleons, and the three Republics.

Propontis and the Hellespont

If it issued south through the Propontis and the Hellespont, a few days would carry its armies to the teeming shores of Bithynia, or to the rich coasts and islands of the Aegean Sea, or to Greece, or to any point on the western or the southern coast of Asia Minor. And a few days more would bring its fleets to the coast of Syria, or of Egypt, or to Italy, Spain, Africa, and the Western Mediterranean. Thus, the largest army could be safely transported in a few days, so as to descend at will upon the vast plains of Southern Russia, or into the heart of Central Asia, within a short march of the head waters of the Euphrates — or they might descend southwards to the gates of Syria, near Issus, or else to the mouths of the Nile, or to the islands and bays of Greece or Italy.

And these wide alternatives in objective point could be kept for ultimate decision unknown to an enemy up to the last moment. When the great Heraclius, in 622, opened his memorable war with Chosroes, which ended in the ruin of the Persian dynasty, no man in either host knew till the hour of his sailing whether the Byzantine hero intended to descend upon Armenia by the Euxine, or upon Syria by the Gulf of Issus. And until they issued from the Hellespont into the Aegean, the Emperor’s army and fleet were absolutely protected not only from molestation, but even from observation local ephesus tour guides. To a power which commanded the sea and had ample supplies of troopships, Constantinople combined the maximum power of defence with the maximum range of attack. And this extraordinary combination she will retain in the future in competent hands.

That wonderfully rapid and mobile force, which an eminent American expert has named the ‘ Sea Power,’ the power discovered by Cromwell and Blake, of which England is still the great example and mistress, was placed by the founders of Byzantium in that spot of earth which, at any rate in its anciently-peopled districts, combined the greatest resources.

Persian and the Peloponnesian wars

Byzantium, from the days of the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars, had always been a prize to be coveted by a naval power. From the time of Constantine down to the Crusades, or for nearly eight centuries, the rulers of Constantinople could usually command large and well-manned fleets. And this was enough to account for her imperial place in history. As an imperial city she must rise, decline, or fall, by her naval strength. She fell before the Crusaders in a naval attack; and she was crippled to a great extent by the naval attack of Mohammed the Conqueror. During the zenith of the Moslem Conquest, she was great by sea. Her decline in this century has been far greater on sea than on land. When her fleet was shattered at Sinope, in 1853, the end was not far off. And when to-day we see in the Golden Horn the hulls of her ironclads moored motionless, and they say, unable to move, men know that Stamboul is no longer the queen of the Levant.

As a maritime city, also, Constantinople presents this striking problem. For fifteen centuries, with moderate intervals, this city of the Bosphorus and the Propontis has held imperial rule. No other seaport city, either in the ancient or in the modern world, has ever maintained an empire for a period approaching to this in length. Tyre, Carthage, Athens, Alexandria, Venice, Genoa, Amsterdam, have held proud dependencies by their fleets for a space, but for rarely more than a few generations or centuries. The supremacy of the seas, of which Englishmen boast, can hardly be said to have had more than two centuries of trial.

In the Revival

In the Revival, the Pantheon became the type of all the domed buildings of Europe — first as the parent of the dome of Florence, thence of the dome of St. Peter’s, through St. Peter’s of our own St. Paul’s, and so the parent of all the spherical domes of the Old and the New World. As such a type, it was the especial study of the humanist artists of the Revival, and so perhaps it was chosen for the tomb of Raphael. There, amidst a company of painters, scholars, and artists, his sacred ashes lie in perfect preservation; and but lately he has been joined in death by the first king of United Italy, who lies in a noble monument, round which Catholic and Liberals are still glaring at each other in hate. Plundered by Christian emperors, plundered by popes and cardinals, the Pantheon still remains, to my eyes, the most impressive, original, and most perfect building extant.

Imagine the Pantheon in its glory, before it was stripped of its gold, its bronze, marbles, and statues by emperors and popes. Conceive that vast, solid dome, still the largest span in the world — nearly one half more than the diameter of St. Paul’s — the first great dome ever raised by man, the grand invention of Romans, of which the Greeks in all their art never dreamed. The dome, with the round arch out of which it sprang, is the most fertile conception in the whole history of building. The Pantheonbecame the parent of all subsequent domes, and so of that of The Holy Wisdom at Constantinople, which was the parent of the Byzantine oblate domes of Europe and of Asia mystical bulgaria tours.

Moulded and plated within

We can recall to the mind’s eye its roof of solid concrete, moulded and plated within, and covered with gilt bronze plates without; with its statues, the enormous columns of rare marbles and granite, its upper story of porphyry and serpentine, lit only by one great circle thirty feet in diameter, through which the open sky by day and the stars by night look down on the marble pavement. To this wonderful building, the one relic of the ancient world in its entirety, the builders of all after ages turned. For five centuries the Roman world turned to it; till out of it arose a new art in Constantinople.

Then in the fifteenth century at the Revival the humanist artists turned again to this same great work; it gave rise first to the dome of Florence, and then one hundred and fifty years later, to the dome of St. Peter’s; from St. Peter’s the dome spread over the world — the Pantheon and the Invalides at Paris, St. Paul’s in London, the Capitol at Washington, the Isaac Church at St. Petersburg are mere imitations of St. Peter’s. And thus from the Pantheon has sprung the architecture which from Chile to Chicago, from the British Islands to the Turkish Empire, from St. Petersburg to Sicily, is seen in a thousand varieties, and in ten thousand examples.