The Monastery of Mangana

The Monastery of St. George of the Mangana was a monastery founded on the easternmost extremity of the Constantinopolitan peninsula on the acropolis of ancient Byzantium in the vicinity of a formal Arsenal for siege weapons (Mangana), by Constantine IX Monomachos in the eleventh century, as part of a complex which included an imperial palace, a hospital, a law school, and various hostels for the indigent and the infirm, as well as extensive gardens. Michael Psellos, in his description of the Mangana complex which is incorporated into his famous Chronographia, describes a complex of elegant and richly ornamented buildings decorated with gilded motifs of stars and set on a level terrace amid verdant parkland and water features. The future ecumenical patriarch, Constantine Leichoudes, was given the pronoia of Mangana, though the exact nature of this grant is difficult to ascertain. Needless to say, it was following a swim in one of these ornamental ponds at the complex that the founder and builder of the complex, Constantine IX Monomachos, would die of pleurisy and be buried in the complex alongside his mistress Skleraina. Following an interval of more than a hundred years, during which the richly endowed complex presumably continued to prosper, during the reign of Isaac II Angelos at the end of the twelfth century, it seems that much of the complex save the monastery itself was demolished to provide building material for the Church of the Archangel Michael at Anaplous further along the Bosporus. Following an occupation by Latin monks following the Fourth Crusade, the monastery went on to play an important role in Byzantine ecclesiastical politics in the Palaiologan era, serving as the location of a Synod in 1279, and as the place of retirement of John VI Kantakouzenos in the 1350's. After the Ottoman Conquest of Constantinople, the building was repurposed as a dervish convent, before being leveled to accommodate the construction of the Topkapi Palace in the 1460's. In 1871 a portion of its ruins were destroyed during the construction of a railway. In the early 1920's during the occupation of Istanbul in the aftermath of World War I, the substructures of the building were excavated by the French military and their contours recorded by archaeologists, the findings of whom suggested a cross-in-square church of sizable dimensions with an adjoining portico and perhaps a freestanding octagonal chapel beside it. These remains still exist in some form, though inaccessible to the public in a closed off area of the Topkapi Palace.