Church of Saint Mary of the Spring

Listen first. Somewhere below your feet, water is moving. It is a small, steady sound, easy to miss beneath the traffic of the city beyond the walls. Cypress trees stand quietly over old marble gravestones. The air in the courtyard is cooler than the street outside. You are standing at one of the oldest sacred springs of Istanbul, a place that people have visited for healing for well over a thousand years.

In Greek, this church is called Zoodochos Pege, which means the Life-Giving Spring. In Turkish, the neighbourhood and the shrine are known as Balıklı, which means simply "with fish". Both names point to the same thing: the water. The church was built around a spring, and the spring is still the heart of the place. Everything else here, the buildings, the graves and the stories, grew up around it.

Notice where you are in relation to the city. This shrine sits just outside the great land walls of old Constantinople, the double line of towers and fortifications built in the fifth century. The nearby gate was once called the Selymbria Gate, and today it is known as Silivrikapı. In Byzantine times, the emperor and his court sometimes travelled out through these walls to visit the spring. A trip here was both a pilgrimage and a small royal outing into the green country beyond the city.

Who founded the first shrine? The traditions do not agree. One account credits Emperor Leo the First, who ruled in the fifth century. Another credits Justinian, the sixth-century emperor who also built Hagia Sophia. According to one popular tale, Leo was still an ordinary soldier when he met a blind man here who was thirsty. A voice guided Leo to the hidden spring. The water restored the man's sight, and Leo later built a church on the spot. This is legend, not documented history, but it shaped how people saw this water for centuries.

Now for the story that gives the shrine its Turkish name. Locals say that on the day Constantinople fell in 1453, a monk here was frying fish in a pan. Someone ran in with the news that the city had fallen to the Ottomans. The monk refused to believe it. He said he would believe it only if the fish in his pan jumped back into the water. And so, the story goes, the fish leapt from the pan into the spring, half cooked on one side. It is a folk tale, of course. But it has lasted more than five centuries.

That tale is why you will still find fish swimming in the basin of the spring today. Visitors often lean over the water to look for them. Some people say the fish carry dark marks on one side, the trace of the frying pan. Whether you see those marks may depend on the light, and perhaps on how much you want to believe. Either way, the fish are a living link between the legend and the place in front of you.

The building you see now is not Byzantine. The older church went through centuries of damage, decay and rebuilding. In 1821, during the violence in Istanbul that followed the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence, the shrine was destroyed. The Greek Orthodox community rebuilt it in the 1830s, under a more tolerant period of Ottoman rule. So this is a nineteenth-century church standing on a very old sacred site. The ground is ancient, while the walls are relatively young.

Here is something many visitors miss. To reach the spring itself, you go down. A flight of steps leads below the main church into a small underground chamber. Here the water collects in a stone basin, and people fill small bottles to take home. The space is low, damp and lit by candles. It feels very different from the open courtyard above. If you go down, move slowly and quietly, because people often come here to pray.

Back in the courtyard, look closely at the gravestones set into the ground and along the walls. Some carry inscriptions that look Greek at first glance. Read them more carefully, however, and many are actually in Turkish, written with the Greek alphabet. This style is called Karamanli. It was used by Orthodox Christians from central Anatolia who spoke Turkish but kept the Greek script of their church. These stones are a quiet record of a community that lived between two languages.

This courtyard is also a resting place for several Ecumenical Patriarchs, the senior bishops of the Orthodox Church whose seat is still in Istanbul. Their tombs sit close to the church, marked with carved stone. For the Greek Orthodox community of the city, which is now very small, this is not only a historic site. It is a family cemetery, a place of memory, and a working parish all at once.

The twentieth century brought more hardship. During the anti-Greek riots in Istanbul in September 1955, the church and its cemetery were badly damaged. Graves were broken and the buildings were attacked. The community repaired what it could, and you may still notice signs of restoration in the stonework. The shrine survived again, as it has survived so many times before.

The church is busiest on one special day each year. On the Friday after Orthodox Easter, the Church celebrates the feast of the Life-Giving Spring. On that day, pilgrims come from across Istanbul and beyond. Candles burn in the courtyard, and long lines form for the holy water. On ordinary days, by contrast, the place is often almost empty. You may share it only with a caretaker and a few cats.

Before you leave, stand still for one more moment in the courtyard. Look at the cypress trees, the worn marble and the plain walls of the church. Behind you, the old city walls still rise in broken lines of brick and stone. Listen once more for the water. As you walk back toward the gate, you are following the same short road that emperors, monks and ordinary families have walked for centuries, all coming to the same small spring.