It smells of the nobility of old wood
Or of a humiliated beast. And surely
I must have been here somewhere so briefly
That it dawns, and I find you again.
OdysseasElytis,
The Elegies of Oxopetra
For the past decade, I have followed the precious distillations of memory and ink from my dear friend Andreas Georgiadis, just as Hansel followed the breadcrumbs in the dark forest. The palimpsest of his personal mythology led him from the still lagoons and shadowy recesses of his beloved Venice to the enchanted literary realm of Durrell’s Alexandria. His writing and reading gradually transformed this into a lived historical and imaginative labyrinth of a city with Western metaphysics and Levantine destiny, inhabited anew to its very depths and core. And then? What other city could possibly contain the insatiable yearning of this intellectual and artist to explore, to revive, to preserve, to narrate? What other city but Constantinople could complete his trilogy of the Inescapable Cities of his heart and mind?
The new works of Andreas Georgiadis, stemming from the depths of his sketched subconscious and the fleeting atmosphere of an intensely original image, a captivating historical excerpt, or a literary locale, are interconnected in the emblematic and condensed way that the geographical memories of indelible destinations are themselves interconnected.
With the same devoted focus and meticulousness with which he turned Durrell’s Quartet into visual autonomy—composing in the landscape of the mind the holistic space of the stage, preserving the purity of emotion, and eliminating the distance between reading and painting—Andreas Georgiadis now, as a persistent explorer, exhausts every on-site possibility of time while simultaneously utilizing rare historical sources and rare design or photographic materials to reconstruct in this fascinating collection the precious fragments of historical Byzantine Constantinople.
His exploration, depicted on handmade paper with dense artistry and vivid coloring (for the first time, he felt compelled to use color extensively), unfolds starting with the emblematic Column of the Goths (the city's oldest surviving monument, dated to 220 AD) and reaches up to the 1920s and the "new" Galata Bridge, narrating 1700 years of history. The Column of Constantine, the Aqueduct of Valens with its ivy of oblivion, the Basilica Cistern with the inverted heads of Medusa, the renowned Monastery of St. John of Studius, Hagia Sophia then and always, the inaccessible Panagia Mouhliotissa in the uphill neighborhood of Fener, the heroic Maiden's Tower, the Church of the Savior, the splendid Bucoleon Palace, the Pantokrator Monastery with its hanging laundry, the iconic Galata Tower with its spirits, the Bosphorus Castle with its ruins, the magical Valide Han with its tales, Ortaköy and the magnificent Great School of the Nation, the intricate swirling stairs of Camondo, and the Grand Rue de Péra with its trams and bustling tribes and peoples, are methodically and joyfully recorded, incorporated into the present, and preserved in the timeless continuum of the City.
Once again, avoiding "the sweet ingredients of nostalgia," yet capturing with precise artistic skill and vivid empathy the traces of the City's glorious architectural and human dusty memory, Andreas Georgiadis encounters in his wanderings the shadows and narratives of Konstantinos Manassis, Giannis Pappas, Alexandros Massavetas, John Freely, Raymond Janin, Steven Runciman, and Pierre Loti, who writes what we all feel when we have lived and listened in precious but borrowed time to Constantinople: when we walk upon those stones and steal glimpses among the ruined marble screens of Byzantine churches and the thresholds of imperial palaces, in his Ghosts of the East:
"…Beyond my own sorrow, which today makes the living seem dead, what other sorrow eternally dwells there, lurking in the image of Constantinople? I had tried to express it in one of my earlier books but had failed, and now, in every stone, in every tomb I recognize on my path, the unspeakable impressions of the past return, with that inner dizziness which has been one of the most enduring of my life, finding me again unable to depict and define with words what I see and feel, what I suffer..."
The Constantinople of Andreas Georgiadis is also mine. A pleasant memory of family educational trips, an ideal destination for the meticulous verification of my Byzantine studies, a landscape of revelation and eternal love from the first time I bent beneath the sheet of time’s dust, living there periodically and leaving behind moments, acts, and relationships, images, whispers, and painful promises of return.
On the occasion of this collection, Andreas and I walked again together through the City of cities, and the "thank you" for this stroll is far too little.
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