Turban vs biretta
From Osman Streater
Sir: ‘This doesn’t pretend to be more than a useful focus exhibition,’ writes Andrew Lambirth of the ‘Bellini and the East’ exhibition at the National Gallery (Arts, 6 May). A pity, then, that his apparently automatic antiTurkish and pro-Venetian bias makes his review so unfocused.
Of the conquest of Constantinople in May 1453, he writes that ‘Istanbul, as it was henceforth known, was swiftly de-Christianised and rendered unambiguously Muslim’. Really? Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror attended the installation of Gennadius as Orthodox Patriarch in January 1454, personally handing him his pectoral cross. How ‘unambiguously Muslim’ was that? The Patriarchate, the worldwide headquarters of the Greek Orthodox Church, remains in Istanbul to this day.
Art historians assume that because Venice produced wonderful painters, it must also have produced wonderfully civilised colonial rulers. Not so. The Orthodox had ample cause to associate Venice with brutally intolerant Catholic rule. As the Byzantine Megadux or Commander-in-Chief Lucas Notaras put it when he resigned himself to defeat in May 1453, ‘Better the Sultan’s turban than the Cardinal’s biretta.’ Oh, and the official Turkish name for the city remained Constantinople until 1914. Check any Ottoman coin for proof.
Osman Streater London NW3
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