拜占庭-失落的帝国

(一) “The eye of all the world”， the ancients called it, the heart of a lost empire that had lasted for a thousand years and more. Saint Sophia, the church of the divine wisdom, this was their crowning glory---the glory of Byzantium. The vanished empire of Byzantium born of pagan Rome. Byzantium, the dream of a Christian Roman empire that stretched from Spain to Syria. Byzantium, whose influence ran from Northern Russia down to Nubia upon the upper Nile. Byzantium, gateway to a lost chapter of our past. The Orient Express, I first traveled this line in the 60s. I bought a ticket at Waterloo station in London for a ride to Istanbul in Turkey in a life-long fascination. It took three days to get there with hell on wheels really, goats in the corridor and communism out of the window. Then all of a sudden the trains run around a bend and bang, the orient hit me in the face, the great golden city by the sea set between the east and west, you could see it had been the center of the world. It was astonishing. I come to Istanbul, and underneath, the magic ruins of the lost empire of Byzantium. The Orient Express stopped here in the heart of the old city. I got off it in clouds of smoke and steam, haunted by the ghost of Greta Garbo and Agatha Christie by a thousand spies and archaeologists, by the kings and courtesans, the prewar Europe. 【Saint Sophia】圣索非亚大教堂 建于东罗马皇帝Justinian统治时期(公元532年—— 公元537年)，当时拜占庭帝国正处于鼎盛阶段。作为世界上十大令人向往的教堂之一—圣索非亚大教堂与蓝色清真寺隔街相望 【Nubia】努比亚(非洲东北部一地区,历史上曾为一古国) 注：作者坐的是大名鼎鼎的“东方快车”号 Greta Garbo 30年代的电影巨星葛丽泰·嘉宝 她演过《茶花女》，所以才有后面的courtesans Agatha Christie 阿嘉莎．克莉丝蒂(1890-1976)英格兰侦探小说家，她是东方快车谋杀案小说的作者 （二） Istanbul, one of the very greatest of Islamic cities, the monuments of the conquering Turkish Sultans who’d ruled here since 1453, dominating its skyline. Underneath there are much older ghosts, brushed each day by people of the living city, the ruins of Constantinople, the capital city of the empire of Byzantium. Istanbul, Constantinople, two names, new and old, for the same grand city. Sixteen centuries ago, in the year of 330, the Emperor Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor chose the city, then a small Greek town, to be his capital. No one quite knows why. One thing sure though, the great warrior emperors had left Rome and cities of the west for ever. This mosque, the mosque of the Turkish Sultan who conquered the city, is built straight on the foundations in the most ancient burial church of the mysterious emperors of old Byzantium. What then was this most ancient half-forgotten empire—— the Empire of Byzantium? Byzantium! That magic, spicy word! Now, imagine that the empires of Greece and Rome had never died, but had been fused together in a single empire set between East and West. And imagine that the emperors of this kingdom, the sacred emperors could be torn into pieces by the mobs in the street, emperors who could mutilate their courtiers and children, could kill their priests and blind whole armies of invaders, yet emperors whose artists made some of the most finest, the most exquisite images the world has ever seen——visions of heaven and earth, sublime architectures, copied by everybody from the caliphs of Bagdad to the Popes of Rome, the Kings of Germany and the tribes of Nubia, visions of heaven’s order and earthly power, that still lie deep within the modern world. Just as this mosque, the conquerors’ mosque, stands on the ruins of Byzantium, so do you! This is where the Empire of Byzantium began, beside this ancient column here on main street. （三） A lonely ancient relic in a modern city. In the year of our Lord 330, on a lovely May morning, A great procession came down this road which’s the highway of an ancient city called Byzantium, and the procession was led by the great Roman Emperor Constantine. He brought with him a bunch of priests, pagan and Christian ones, and they were all holding an incredible collection of relics. There were twelve baskets filled with crumbs, the residue, it was said: “of our Lord’s miracle of the loves and fishes". There was the very axe that now we've made the art with. There was a statue that the emperor himself had brought secretly from Rome, a statue of the Greek God Palace. And at the exact moment prescribed by astrologists, they buried their relics, just over there, at the foot of the column, seven drums of pottery, brought from the Egyptian deserts, and Constantine renamed the city Constantinople, and claimed it as the capital of his grand new empire. And over the years, the column itself became to be seen as a relic, the Byzantines, that’s the people who lived in the city, called it Christ’s Nail, because the thought the great golden statue of Constantine upon the top had something of one of the nails in Christ Crucifixion built into it. And every year on the New Year’s Day, that’s the first of September, the Byzantines turned up at the bottom of this column, and sang him as the saint Constantine, the founder of their city and the mighty empire called Byzantium. Constantinople was designed to be the center of the Christian world, the center of Christ’s government on Earth. These great cups were made to hold the mystery of Christ’s blood inside the city’s churches, church’s glowing with Roman gold and ancient holy images. Images that for a thousand years flooded right though Europe and the East. This saint is Byzantium’s first story, the story of how in two short centuries a dream was made. The dream that was Byzantium. Constantine, the Christian emperor, the man who took the faith of Jesus and the God of Abraham, and created the beginning of the governments and churches in which the West still trusts. He was crowned they say at York in England in 306. For 40 years he’d killed foes and family alike and when he died, people were so frightened of him that no one touched his body for a week. （四） This was the extent of Constantine’s ambition, the late Roman Empire, with Constantinople, not Rome, as its capital, and in the far north, in Germany, the city of Trier, a great imperial garrison. It still shows something of what ancient Constantinople used to look like. The city gate, still guarding the main road into town, a great grim gate. Like the rest of the northern frontier, Trier was continuously threatened by Huns and Goths and Vandals and a dozen other warrior nations. Constantine the Great, the emperor himself would have walked down the same passage 1,600 years ago. These vaults and arches are the architecture of his time. Once you’re through the gate, most Roman towns are almost the same, they were if you like, a sort of an abstract idea of a city, and they were stamped on every landscape from Yorkshire to Syria. You can still sense their design in a thousand old world cities, and in the new world too. From Washington to San Francisco, planners still use parts of the same old patterns. All Roman towns had roads like this one, wide thoroughfares that took you from the country to the heart of the city. This one is at Palmyra, in the Syrian Desert. In Constantinople it was called, quite simply, the Main Road. "Now what you gotta see, is that behind all these columns, there were little rows of shops running down the sides of the street, butchers, bakers, candle-maker(s), all sorts of people. In Constantinople, it would have the goods of the known world, Africa, China, the boutique, everything was for sale. Just imagine, the emperor, is coming in in triumph, he’s won a war, he’s coming through the gate. The shopkeepers have been told to dust down the street, flowers have been strewed all over the pavement, roses are raining down upon him, there are rugs and silks flattering in the breezes all around him, the whole town has been sucked out to come and see him. Behind the course, behind the main street, full of town houses, servants, soldiers, all the people, there were taverns, brothels, everything in the city, in among stoas, started in among stoas with those huge buildings that Constantine had to build, before his city could really be called a Roman metropolis. （五） It’s only a little building, but it was actually the heart of ancient Palmyra. It’s the senate, the Oval Office where government was conducted, where the town elders met, where plots were hatched, all that sort of thing. Of course, in Constantine's great imperial cities, this would have been a vast long hall. And quite often in the central hall of government, Great Constantine himself would have sat where now the altars of Christian churches stand, because this is basically the same building. In the year 360, Constantine's son built a magnificent church in Constantinople, specially for the drama of Imperial Communion. Next-door, those same pious emperors built a giant racetrack, a hippodrome. You can still see part of its outline in streets. And here at last, around this old Egyptian obelisk, you can discover something of an atmosphere of ancient Constantinople, the heart of old Byzantium. This stone is like a giant mirror, reflecting all the life that once went on around it. There’s the emperor and his family, Constantine’s successors come to the royal box to start a chariot race. There’s the obelisk in the middle of the racetrack and the chariots too, eight of them running all at once. You need a lot of luck to win. This place wasn’t just a racetrack though. This is a place where people met their emperor and his court. It’s the air, the space of Byzantium, a hundred thousand people roaring, new emperors are presented to them, as captives of foreign wars are brought and thrown at the feet of the emperor. The old Parliament, it’s the real heart of Byzantium and that scene there maybe you've seen it before. Look at it carefully, the emperor's in the middle with his family, just like God. Around them stand the army and the court, just like the saints. Beneath them, begging mercy are Byzantium’s enemies, the damned. It’s a grand last judgment right here on earth with the emperor playing God. So that’s it, really. The emperor brings happiness and harmony, the theater brings luck and victory .This is the center of the world, an image, you might say, of heaven on earth. So if we’d pushed open the gates of the imperial palace, the one stood beside the hippodrome, we’d have really been opening the earthly gates of paradise. Arcades of gold and marble, silver boats on pools of mercury, silk carpets, golden thrones in halls of porphyry bowls, all have gone, only echoes of them still remain in Syria and Italy. （六） Once though, Constantinople held the palace of all palaces, the palace of the Christian empire. Church, hippodrome and palace, Constantine had made a sacred engine that would power Byzantium for ever. To protect the holy city of Constantinople, the emperors of Byzantium built the largest city walls in all the world. Armies that controlled the lives of millions rode from these gates, and through them passed the producer of an empire. “The whole history of this city is in this gate, the great golden gate of Imperial Byzantium. You see that great high span at the top. That was once open to the skies. For 600 years emperors and armies rode through that gate in triumph, coming back from wars against the Persians, the Arabs, the Bulgarians, the Russians. Then there was an earthquake, the gate was blocked, and that final gate at the bottom, that even a cavalryman couldn’t come through on a horse, that gate was built in the final years of Byzantium. So this is a magic gate, it’s a gate of legends; they say its wooden doors were covered with sheets of gold to give the gate its name. They say that the very last emperor killed fighting on these walls is buried beneath these stones, waiting for a call to take the city once again. So it’s a gate of legend, but above all it speaks of imperial Byzantine power. “Power has controlled innumerable lives. You know there are thousands of blocks in this gate, and each one of them, each tiny mark upon them, made by an individual human hand, endless lives absorbed in making millions of these blocks, enough to build the whole city of Constantinople. Now this snowy marble, strange grey lines running through, is found all over the Byzantium Empire, from Spain, to Syria and back to Constantinople. But it comes from one island only, one tiny island in the sea. （七） Southwest of Istanbul, three days’ sailing on an ancient slave ship, is the Isle of Marmara, its very name in stone. In the first centuries of Byzantium, slaves in their tens of thousands worked in these marble hills. How the Byzantines love marble! In marbles, says a priest, God trapped fields of flowers and mountain forests, and fish and fruit, and melting snows. The ancient blocks still strew across the kies, hint at the frantic energy that was once used to move their precious stone. Still inside the modern quarries, a ancient stone that weighs around a hundred tons, part of an enormous column, to memorialize the military victories of Byzantium. If it were finished, we'd have had a spiral staircase cutting in, and roses sculpture of soldiers on its turning surface. Still here though, it cracked as it was quarried. In ancient times, these quarries were called the quarries of the mother of God. They might just as well being called the quarries of the mother of Constantinople. The whole city was made here, and it was prefab city. Wasn’t just sent off in blocks, every thing was finished, these have been finished, and gone to Constantinople, each one had been lettered. They had exact place in every one of the ancient buildings of the city. This, for example, is the very tip of a building that would have looked like a Roman temple. Modern quarry masters tell me that they found the best new scenes of marble in the hills, beside the ancient stones. This is a bare good spot then, a giant lonely column shaft. I’ve seen that same shape, so-called peacock’s feather pattern, cut on a broken column lying right on the main streets of old Istanbul. 【Marmara】 马尔马拉海：土耳其西北部的一个海，位于亚洲和欧洲之间。通过博斯普鲁斯海峡与黑海相连，通过达达尼尔海峡与爱琴海相连 【Name】adj.非正式用语 Well-known by a name:著名的：颇有名气的名字的： a name performer.著名的表演家 【kies】 黄铁矿 【frantic】adj hurried and excited but disorganized; frenzied; desperate慌乱不安的; 狂乱的; 疯狂的; 令人绝望的; 不顾一切的: a frantic dash, rush, search, etc 疯狂的撞击﹑ 冲击﹑ 搜查等 * frantic activity 不顾一切的行动. spiral staircase 螺旋梯 a set of stairs arranged in a circular pattern so that they go around a central point as they get higher prefab adj.（形容词） Prefabricated. 预制的 n (infml 口) prefabricated house 预制房屋. letter [vt] to write, draw, paint etc letters or words on something 　The card was neatly lettered P.A. DUFFY. letter sth in sth 　Several pages are lettered in gold. column shaft 柱身 （八） This was once a marble square on a highway at the middle of Constantinople. I didn’t suppose the Turks on modern Istanbul think much about ancient Byzantine victories. Yet, there’re still some fragments here of that great memorial column that made it all the way from Marmara, the ghosts of the imperial armies, still lining the routes of their processions through the city. Just as all the ancient roads and sea lanes ran through the empire to Constantinople, so did the rivers of the region. Channeled into great aqueducts, bringing treasured water to a thirsty city. Underneath the town, cut deep into its hilltop, an eerie underworld, some 15 centuries’ old. Fresh water systems, so that the Byzantines could bathe just like the Romans do in marble halls, and every thing made with the dazzling technology of ancient Rome, father of Byzantium. Marble columns, high brick vaults, the dark forests of Byzantium, beneath modern Istanbul. Those Greek letters, hammered into the column with a chisel point, the marks of one of Marmara’s quarrymen. Food, too, flooded into the enlarging city. What a vast logistic exercise, and an earthly miracle, supporting Constantinople’s half a million people, Europe’s biggest city, and every thing cause, by hand. There was no food industry. Everything was carried here in boats and carts. The finest fish, the Byzantines believed, were caught beside the emperor’s palace, between the rising of the Pleiades and the settings of a blood red star of Arcturus. Colors, smells and textures of the ancient everyday, the raw ingredients of Byzantine experience, the world of the ancient Mediterranean. pleiades in ancient Greek mythology, the seven daughters of Atlas, who were changed into stars by Zeus 【希腊神话】 普勒阿得斯：变成星星的阿特拉斯的七个女儿（迈亚、伊莱克特拉、塞拉伊诺、泰来塔、梅罗普、亚克安娜和斯泰罗普） Arcturus 大角星，牧夫座：天空中第四亮的星星，是牧夫星座最亮的星，距地球约36光年 （九） Just like the people of modern Istanbul, the Byzantines loved fresh bread and fresh vegetables. While the bread，at least the grain for it, they brought from their province of Egypt, the vegetables they grew themselves, in little plots beside their houses in the city, in fields in the great green swathe that ran for mile upon mile down the walls of the city, and here’s still a little bit of it today, growing more or less the same crops. Look at the garlic, the onions, the dill, the dill they used to flavor fish especially those heavy, yellow fish soups they so loved. And this frolic ecological Byzantine delight here, there’s three or four different sorts of crops, there is rocket for salad, there is chard and cabbage again, all sorts of these mint, all growing together in a great profusion. At the end of it all, lettuce to calm your stomach. So and the peasants in the fields, they stopped there for a moment, straightened their backs to watch the lords of Byzantium, those great history makers riding by, they too could think, well, we’re not in such a bad time either. The Byzantine economy was based on the classic Mediterranean diet: wine, grain, cheese, and vegetables and olives. Olive oil was a staple. It was Byzantium’s fuel. It lit streets, and homes and lighthouses, it oiled carts and cured baldness （治愈秃头）①, and it was used for cooking. In its first centuries, Constantinople’s oil came mostly from northern Syria. This is a wonderful thing. It’s a piece of Byzantine industrial archeology. It’s a factory for making olive oil. This is a marvelous little place. I’ll show you how it works, it’s very sensible very logical. The olives were picked from the trees, they came down that little street in wagons, they were tipped down through a window, and they fell into that trough down there, they were then scooped out of the trough and put into this mill, this is a great oil press for the berries. You see this drum, there were two of those, they fitted on end in here side by side, a bar went between them, and four or five men pushed around the outside and reduced the olives to skin and the stone into a sort of horrible messy pulp. That then, was taken out of there, and laid in these circles here. Now this thing in the wall here, held a great beam that ran through the air. And hanging above this was a huge cylinder of stone and that then was slowly dropped onto the massive olive paste and the oil dripped down into these tanks. Not the end, because this, after all, although is cold pressed 冷榨, is actually a very impure oil at this moment. So they take it out of here. swathe swath的变体 The width of a scythe stroke or a mowing-machine blade. 刈幅：镰刀或割草机刃一刈的宽度 dill An aromatic herb(Anethum graveolens) native to Eurasia, having finely dissected leaves and small yellow flowers clustered in umbels. 莳萝：产于欧亚的一种芳香型草本植物（莳萝） ，长有纤细分裂的叶子和成伞形花序的小黄花簇 rocket 芝麻菜，紫花南芥：一种生长于地中海的植物（芝麻菜属 芝麻菜 亚种 绵果芝麻菜） ，它的花有紫色的叶脉和黄白色的花萼，叶子有时用在沙拉里 也作 arugula,rocket salad,roquette chard 【植】牛皮菜; 菜(一种可供食用的甜菜) trough 槽, 水槽 1​ 治疗落发的秘方：在洗澡前用热橄榄油,加一大匙蜂蜜及一匙肉桂粉在头发上停留约15分钟后再洗头 （十） And they put it into this tank here. Now this tank has already got water in it. So as they pour the olive oil in, it flows to the surface, all of the impurities go down to the bottom. And see this little trench here? A vital piece of gourmet equipment, because this is where the very finest oil ran from that impurity tank down into this tank to make fine, cl