came to it; also regular taxes from the clergy, the simoniacal purchase-money for all bishoprics and other benefices, heavy stole-fees, legacies, and the ordinary endowments of the See of Constantinople made up a very great income. On the other hand the disbursements, and especially the heavy bribe each patriarch had to pay to the Sultan for his appointment, and for the sake of which the Sultan took care to change the occupier of the see as often as possible, made a steadily growing debt. This debt, called the court-debt (τὰ αὐλικά), was met by an additional tax on the clergy; and so the Orthodox bishops and priests, who were free from taxes to the Porte, found that the payments they had to make to the Phanar left them on the whole in a worse case than laymen.
The patriarchate, having lost the cathedral of the Holy Wisdom, was first set up at the church of the Pammakaristos ("the All-blessed one," our Lady); Murad III (1574–1595) in 1586 turned this into a mosque, and the Patriarch moved to St. Demetrios's Church. In 1603 he moved again to St. George's Church, where he still remains. This church of St. George is the centre of the Greek quarter of Constantinople, the Phanar (so called from the old lighthouse), on the bank of the Golden Horn, behind the city. The Phanar has been ever since the centre of the Orthodox Church, and the name is used for its government, much as we speak of the Vatican. It has also been the centre of the Greek people under the Turk; the rich Phanariote merchants who live around the seat of the patriarchate have always been the leaders of their countrymen; they pride themselves on speaking the purest Greek, their strong national feeling has formed the nucleus of the hatred of Slav, Roumanian, and Bulgar, that is still the chief note of Greek policy, and even now that part of their people are independent, Greeks all over the world look, not to Athens and the Danish Protestant who reigns there, but to the Phanar as the centre, and to the Œcumenical Patriarch as the chief of their race.[1]
We shall come back to the Phanar and the organization of
- ↑ A Greek said to Professor Gelzer in 1898: Le chef de notre nation n'est pas ce petit roitelet à Athènes, mais le patriarche œcouménique" (Gelzer: Geistliches u. Weltliches aus dem Türk-Griech. Orient, p. 24).
