Gone Like Smoke or Mist – the Beauty and Wonders of Constantinople in Vernacular Laments on its Fall in 1453

Abstract

In this paper, I will focus on the images of Constantinople’s past glory in literary texts written between the fifteenth and seventeenth century in vernacular Greek to express the sorrow after the fall of the City in 1453. To depict the images of Constantinople in the collective memory of the Greeks, I am going to discuss the following anonymous vernacular laments: Ἀνακάλημα τῆς Κωνσταντινόπολης, Ἅλωσις Κωνσταντινουπόλεως, Θρήνος και κλαυθμός περί της Κωνσταντινουπόλεως and Θρῆνος τῆς Κωνσταντινουπόλεως. The four texts deserve attention not only for linguistic and literary reasons, but also for providing a number of interesting insights into the relationship between the East and West and the way the Greeks perceived the past glory of Byzantium. For further exemplification, I will also use some monodies written in a rhetorical style in classicizing Greek. The comparative analysis will reveal common patterns of perception of Constantinople’s past glory in the Greek world after the fall of the City, as well as common ways in which Constantinople was conceptualised in the post-Byzantine period, in various, sometimes distant regions of the Greek world, where the City had already been largely perceived in mythical terms.