Crimean Memorial Church Rebuilt by Plucky Congregation
Built to honor the fallen of a nearly forgotten imperial war, Christ Church Istanbul’s thin Gothic spire cuts a striking figure amid the domes and minarets that dominate the skyline of Europe’s largest city. Over the last 30 years, a small but plucky congregation has reclaimed its historic building, filled it with art and music, and made it a center of care for refugees from across Asia and Africa.
Despite legal restrictions and rising hostility to religious minorities in Turkish society, Christ Church continues a nearly 500-year legacy of Anglican witness, under the leadership of the Rev. Canon Ian Sherwood, a self-deprecating Irishman who has served as chaplain since 1989.
Though it’s officially known as Christ Church, Istanbul, Turks call the building Kirim Kilisesi, the Crimean Church, as it is one of the few remaining symbols of the geopolitical complexities of what many historians regard as the first modern war.
A Symbol of Religious Freedom
Anglican worship has been held in Istanbul since the 16th century (when it was Constantinople), with an original charter granted by Queen Elizabeth I. Chaplains attached to trading companies and the British Embassy conducted services at a site now known as St. Helena’s Chapel, on the grounds of today’s British Consulate. St. Helena’s is in the heart of “the Hill of Pera,” a district of the city north of the famed Golden Horn, which had been the home of Istanbul’s foreign residents, especially Jews and Western Christians, since the Middle Ages.
Britain was the Ottoman Empire’s primary supporter and protector for much of the 18th and 19th centuries, and Stratford Canning presided in Pera as British ambassador for 20 years. Known to the Turks as “the Great Ambassador,” Canning spurred dramatic growth in trade and encouraged religious freedom and gradual reform of the archaic sultanate and its notorious bureaucratic system. The Ottoman Empire, Canning believed, was an essential bulwark against the expansion of Russia, which considered itself the champion of the empire’s Orthodox Christian minority.
War broke out between Russia and the Ottomans in 1853, after Russia seized territory mostly inhabited by Orthodox Christians in what is now Eastern Romania. After a series of Turkish setbacks, Britain, France, and Sardinia sent warships into the Black Sea. The heavily fortified Crimean Peninsula, which had been annexed by Russia 70 years earlier and served as a primary base for her military operations in Eastern Europe, became the conflict’s battleground.
The Crimean War is primarily remembered today for a series of bloody and inconclusive land battles, especially the Battle of Balaclava, whose Charge of the Light Brigade was immortalized by Tennyson in a contemporary narrative poem. During this first major war since the invention of the telegraph, news from the front was quickly relayed home, sometimes followed by gruesome photographic images. Leo Tolstoy wrote dispatches from besieged Sevastopol, as history’s first war correspondent, and Florence Nightingale’s revolutionary methods of caring for the fallen created modern nursing.
The fall of Sevastopol to the Western allies in September 1855, and the subsequent destruction of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, led to peace negotiations. The 1856 Treaty of Paris ordered Russia to withdraw forces from Crimea, a major humiliation. The Ottoman empire was formally incorporated into the Concert of Europe, a strategic alliance that aimed to preserve the balance of power across the continent. In exchange for Russia’s pledge to withdraw its claim to be the protector of the empire’s Christian subjects, the Turks pledged religious freedom for its Christians.
The war had been Britain’s first in 40 years, and though it was widely condemned as costly and poorly planned, there was great public sympathy for its 22,182 British casualties. During the war, when Constantinople was swarming with British soldiers, sailors, and merchants, many expressed concern about the inadequacies of St. Helena’s Chapel.
The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel launched a campaign for collections to build a memorial church in 1856, and more than 2,000 congregations contributed to the effort. Sultan Abdulmecid I donated a Greek Orthodox cemetery, on a prominent spot in Pera facing the Golden Horn, to serve as a construction site. William Burges won the prize for the building’s design with a large and colorful North Italian Gothic church and a tall minaret-like tower.
Stratford Canning’s final public act as ambassador was to lay the church’s foundation stone on October 19, 1858. His biographer, Stanley Lane Pool, described the scene:
Lord Stratford stood before the multitude and spoke solemn last words to the people; he dwelt on the changes which had made such a ceremony possible in Turkey and he bade them consider how henceforward every Christian who sailed to the Golden Horn would see the Memorial Church commanding the slope of the hill, and would think of the victory of free religious worship, while he remembered the successes of the battlefield, and the deeds of those who had fallen in the fight over there to the eastward amid the Crimean hills.
Memorial and Ecumenical
In 1863, the commission was canceled by the selection committee for being too expensive and insufficiently English in style. The commission turned instead to George Edmund Street, a prominent neo-Gothic architect best known today for his design of the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand in London, as well as Rome’s two Anglican churches and the American Cathedral in Paris.
Street’s tall church is in the Early English Gothic style, with a large rose window on the East Wall, horizonal fretwork banding, and ornamental columns in a dark stone resembling the Purbeck marble used in so many medieval English churches. The church was consecrated by the Bishop of Gibraltar, who had taken the highly unusual step of inviting the Ecumenical Patriarch, who sent several senior clerics as his representatives.
The Rev. Canon Charles Curtis, an S.P.G. missionary who had been serving in the city since the Crimean War ended, was appointed as the church’s first chaplain. Curtis designed the stained glass for the rose window and the church’s remarkable pulpit. Its central panel, of porphyry, had been found by one of his friends in the ruins of a Byzantine church on an island in the Sea of Marmara, while each of its seven columns was constructed of stone taken from one of the ancient cities whose churches are addressed by Christ in Revelation 2-3.
The canon’s ecumenical aims are evident in the pulpit’s three carved mottos: the Greek monogram of Christ surrounded by words from Constantine’s vision of the cross, en toutoi nika (in this sign, conquer); the definition of Catholic truth by Vincent of Lerins: quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnes ([that believed] always, everywhere, and by all); and the Protestant watchword, “We preach Christ crucified.”
“In the 1860s, things were greatly liberalized here, hence we have a font,” Sherwood noted. “Most people being baptized then were Muslims, three of whom were ordained priests in Canterbury Cathedral, came back here, worked with the Church Missionary Society and others. And eventually they were arrested, sent into exile, and never heard from again.”
The Rev. R.F. Borough, who followed Curtis as chaplain and then resigned his post to serve as chaplain to the forces during World War I, had long intended to complete the church’s decoration with a rood screen. Funds were raised in Australia and New Zealand, as well as in England and Turkey, for the construction of an oak screen in memory of those who died in the horrific Battle of Gallipoli, 200 kilometers southwest of Constantinople. The screen was constructed in England and installed in 1919, but plans to place paintings of saints on its panels, a common feature of late medieval English rood screens, had to be put on hold for lack of funds.
Decline and Renewal
Borough’s departure launched several challenging decades for the congregation. The partition of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the Greco-Turkish War that followed involved the relocation of at least a million Greek-speaking Christians out of the new Turkish republic, greatly reducing Constantinople’s Christian population.
While the new republic was officially secular, some legal arrangements brokered by the sultanate with minority religious groups were annulled. “We don’t exist in law,” Canon Sherwood quipped. “We can only have a bank account in the name of the consulate. But the ecumenical patriarchate knows us well. We’ve only been working with them for 200 years.”
For centuries, a large proportion of Istanbul’s Anglicans had been Levantines, wealthy trading families of English ancestry who had gradually become assimilated into Turkish life. The removal of their trading privileges and the imposition of heavy taxes on non-Muslims in the 1930s led to a mass exodus, and only about 100 Levantine families now remain in Istanbul. Sherwood says that no Levantine family is Anglican.
In the 1970s, the tiny Anglican congregation abandoned Christ Church, and services were conducted exclusively in the smaller St. Helena’s Chapel, safely ensconced in the embassy compound. Sherwood came to Istanbul as chaplain in 1989, recalled from his post in Bucharest just months before Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime was toppled.
Sherwood decided to reclaim the church, which the local council had decided to demolish to construct a multistory car park. Then living through what he now calls his “prophet phase,” Sherwood moved a bed into the church, and stayed in the church for 40 days, waiting until he had secured a commitment that the church and adjoining rectory would be returned to the congregation’s use.
“It was full of pigeons,” he recalled. “We got it all cleaned up with the help of refugees — they had all been builders in Kuwait. The U.N. recommended that they come here. The elegant mosaics that adorn the chancel wall, he remembered, had been completely covered in dirt and bird dung.
“We had one Sri Lankan standing up on that ledge with a tiny little ladder, a tiny stepladder, cleaning them. And those are the faces that appear. One of the crew was a Somalian refugee, whose whole family was slaughtered the day he was baptized, because he became a Christian. He built the altar.”
The original team were the first in a series of more than 2,000 refugees who have lived at Christ Church since then, mostly in a dormitory in the church crypt. Sherwood says that the city has teemed with refugees for decades, but that the government does little to support them.
The crypt is now home to two Pakistani refugees. One of them, Michael, an evangelical Christian from Sialkot, is the church’s caretaker. Sherwood said he has also sometimes given elderly homeless people a place to stay in his house. “We’ve put up all sorts,” Sherwood said. “We never turn anyone away.”
The workings of Christ Church’s impressive 1911 W. Hill & Son pipe organ had disintegrated during the decades of abandonment. One day several years ago, a Nigerian Anglican footballer, playing for Istanbul’s elite Besiktas J.K. team, came in to ask Sherwood if he could be useful around the church. “It turned out he had apprenticed under the English organ builder who built the organ in Lagos Cathedral,” Sherwood remembered. Several months later, the instrument was back in working order. Sherwood said the current musician is a refugee from the war in Ukraine (“A Crimean organist playing in the Crimean Church — a bit of irony there”).
The church’s chancel is filled with many colorful Turkish rugs. “I was friendly with this women’s cooperative, two of them, and every year they gave me a present at Christmas for letting them use the space. So we have the largest collection in the world of DOBAG carpets, because we have them here and in St. Helena’s,” Sherwood said, explaining that these rare textiles are hand-knotted, using traditional natural dyes.
Christ Church’s great artistic treasure, though, is a series of paintings done by Scottish artist Mungo McCosh, then a resident of Istanbul, to fill out the panels in the 1919 rood screen. From 1995 to 2005, McCosh filled the panels with images of saints, against golden backgrounds, giving the screen some resemblance to an Orthodox church’s iconostasis.
The figures, though, are in a strikingly naturalistic style, and the skyline of Istanbul is marked out across the gold paint. Local color is also reflected in some of the iconography: John the Baptist’s camel hair is an Anatolian shepherd’s cloak, and the infant Christ grasps a simit, the circular bread ring sold on hundreds of Istanbul street corners. In a device borrowed from the Old Masters, the faces of the saints are members of the congregation and other contemporary figures.
Andrew Finkel, an award-winning Istanbul journalist, appears as Moses, while his daughter Izzy’s face adorns one of the seraphim. A Sri Lankan refugee who lived at the church for several years is St. Thomas of India. He holds Father Sherwood’s pet rabbit in his hands. McCosh’s great-uncle, a British soldier who died at Gallipoli, kneels before the Madonna and Child, a single red rose protruding from his gun.
Archbishop Michael Ramsey is depicted as Augustine of Canterbury alongside his contemporary, Pope John XXIII, as Gregory the Great, who is commissioning him for his missionary work. A younger, bearded Sherwood even makes a cameo in the panel, as St. Patrick on an orphrey on John XXIII’s cope.
“God Was Working Through All of It”
Sherwood says that he and the congregation do face harassment from Muslim neighbors who resent their presence. “We put up posters for concerts at the gate and one person consistently goes and tears them down; or we have people pay 50 lira [$2.52] to come to the concert, and then four people come to the gate and say, ‘We’re not paying to come in.’ These are traditional Muslims, and when they call the police they say, ‘They’re charging to come into a church.’” The police have also been called when the congregation serves wine at social functions, with complainants suggesting the church is operating an illegal bar.
The call to prayer from the neighboring mosque’s minaret, he says, is extraordinarily loud. “There’s a new imam, and I’m quite sure it’s because they’re right beside a big, lofty-looking church building.” Sherwood’s later rejoinder has been to ring the Angelus during the muezzin’s call.
A brass plaque in the chancel memorializes Roger Short, a British High Commissioner for Istanbul who was killed in a terrorist attack on the embassy in 2003, which also badly damaged St. Helena’s Chapel. Short’s wife, Vicky, is still an active member of the congregation.
Asked if the congregation attracts much notice from local political officials, he said it tries to keep a low profile, but some people in the city government are clearly looking out for it. “Oddly enough — the mayor kindly sent six sacks of salt the other day, thinking there might be ice on the steps. And when the water was being turned off for some reason — we don’t know why — he sent someone with a chauffeur to drive me to the office to help me to stop that happening.”
Sherwood said the Sunday congregation at Christ Church is small, about 40 worshipers, with services also being held at St. Helena’s and at All Saints’ in Kadikoy, a suburb on the Eastern side of the Bosphorus (ancient Chalcedon). But about 1,000 people visit Christ Church a week, especially Russians and Ukrainian refugees, who burn dozens of candles in offering their prayers each day.
“My biggest challenge is trying to get together living salaries for the people we support, which is seven people. We all take equal salaries — we are sort of like communists, but we don’t accept the ideology,” Sherwood said.
Asked about the source of his resilience through so many struggles, Sherwood simply said, “I’m a believer. I believe in the things we preach. … I’ve been ordained for over 40 years, and have stuck to the traditional virtues of the Church.”
“I feel the church is a sort of hub of evangelism, actually, but at the same time it is here as a teacher of the apostolic faith, the catholic faith,” he added.
“I’ve felt that God was working through all of it.”
