Spiritual Contestation over the Stoudios Monastery

The Stoudios Monastery had long existed in a ruined state, neglected by the city.

If there can only be one characteristic that defines Istanbul, then it is transition, and the Stoudios Monastery complements this principle entirely. Its purpose has evolved in conjunction with each major cultural shift: In its founding, the Stoudios Monastery was an Orthodox Christian institution under the Byzantine Empire, became an Islamic mosque under the Ottoman Turks, and then a museum when the city of Istanbul began its campaign to westernize and create secular structures[1]. For almost the entirety of the last century, however, the Stoudios Monastery has been left unused and stands decaying.

The Turkish government has taken steps in recent years to refurbish the desolate monastery and re-convert it into a public mosque.

The interior garden of the Church of St. John the Baptist, the core building of the Stoudios Monastery and only one still intact from the destruction suffered in the twentieth century.

In recent years, the local government has moved to refurbish the landmark and re-convert it into a mosque, which has garnered controversy and protest from individuals across the city and around the world. Though Istanbul continues to host a mostly Muslim population, non-Muslim inhabitants and international urban historians fear that the restoration of the locale as a mosque, and thus revival of Islamic culture, which is so closely intertwined with Turkism, will distract from the cultural traces of Byzantine culture that thrived for centuries before the Ottomans entered the city[2]. The response such a decision provoked is certainly western in character; the promotion of secularization where religious factors that distract from raw reality are removed fits the trend that the rest of the world is headed in, as well. At the center of all this cultural reprioritization, perfectly reflective of the Istanbullu people’s reaction to it, is the Stoudios Monastery. When religion was closely associated with political rule, both in the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, the institution featured the respective faith, and when the nation of Turkey decided to modernize and draw influence from secular, Western authorities, the Monastery humbly doffed its religious affiliation. In the past century, however, the Stoudios Monastery has lost its way, and so, too, perhaps, have many of the Istanbullu people amidst the turbulence of tradition clashing with the drive to modernize. Orhan Pamuk, a native Istanbullu, once wrote:

A map of the city of Istanbul in 1882; the Stoudios Monastery is situated in the southwest region of the map in the neighborhood of Samatya, a short distance from the shore.

“After the Ottoman Empire collapsed the world almost forgot that Istanbul existed. The city into which I was born was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been before in its two-thousand-year history. For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I’ve spent my life either battling with this melancholy or (like all İstanbullus) making it my own.” [3]

To attain this position as a physical representation of popular sentiment, the Stoudios Monastery lived through many periods in Istanbul’s life. In its dignified history, the rationale behind the Stoudios Monastery as a lieu de mémoire can be found.