The surroundings of the Crimea Memorial Church in Istanbul are ‘little better than a dump’, wrote the British embassy chaplain in 1964. ‘It takes an intimate knowledge of the place to find it.’
Today, the street running north-west from the Galata tower on the far side of the Golden Horn is quite chic. Turn right at the end and, above fig trees and trumpets of bougainvillea, you glimpse the lead-roofed spirelet of the church. It is by G.E. Street, the architect of St James the Less in Vauxhall Bridge Road, which also has stripes across nave walls and chancel vaulting.
The competition to design the church in Istanbul demanded that the style should be ‘the recognised Ecclesiastical Architecture of Western Europe, known as Pointed or Gothic’, duly adapted for a hot climate. The opulent William Burges won, but was replaced by Street in 1863 on grounds of cost and resistance to the commissioning Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. That these foreign parts should have a memorial to the Crimean War in the first place came about from the alliance, surprising from a distant view, between Britain and Ottoman Turkey against Russia, the protector of Christian interests in the Muslim Middle East.
After eight decades or so, the church was little used, and by 1975 the Bishop of Fulham and Gibraltar (who counts both the Pope of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople among his flock) was writing to John Betjeman asking for his help to remedy its state of disrepair. It closed a year later, but reopened in 1993, doing good work with refugees.
Its original patrons had also stipulated that no figure of man or beast should be represented, out of deference to the Muslim population.
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