The First Church: Constantine’s Tombs

This 1900 topographical map of Turkey and Istanbul shows the land's physical form prior to the city's foundation. The eventual area that would become Constantinople is highlighted in gray.

Development on the future site of the Fatih Camii stretches back to the earliest days of Constantinople. The first Church of the Holy Apostles was dedicated by the city’s founder, Constantine the Great, who would die prior to its completion. According to ancient historian Eusebius of Caesarea, this was in line with his original motivations: Constantine sought to create a “mausoleum to house his own remains” [1]. Subsequent emperors would also be interred at the church, in grand sarcophagi made of porphyry, green Thessalian stone, and other materials [2].

In this mosaic depiction at the Hagia Sophia's southwestern entrance, Constantine is depicted presenting a model of the city of Istanbul to the Virgin Mary.

By interring themselves within this site of religious authority, Constantine and his successors were actively participating in the creation of memory—they sought to memorialize themselves as inextricably tied to the divine. Historian Glanville Downey notes that “the presence of these tombs, as a visible record of the greatness of Byzantium, was one reason why the Church of the Holy Apostles enjoyed a celebrity only second to that of St. Sophia” [3]. From its earliest days, then, the site has served as a lieu de memoire for the power of the city’s ruling elite. Its religious significance is both co-opted and accompanied by the secular authority of the emperors. Today, most of these sarcophagi have either been stolen, broken, or relocated, but their original resting place remains inextricably associated with them—as Nora puts it, “the defense, by certain minorities, of a privileged memory that has retreated to jealously protected enclaves” [4].