© Richard Miles
When my friends Richard and Janet returned from their first trip to Turkey they had, as usual, lots of travellers’ tales and a couple of phones full of images.
One building they described attracted my attention particularly – the Bulgarian St Stephen’s Church, a magnificently Baroque confection looking out over the Golden Horn, the river estuary that makes the shape of a horn as it drains into the Bosphorus.
St Stephen’s is fallaciously described in tourist literature as “the world’s only iron church”, when it may be the only iron and steel prefabricated Orthodox church in the world, an epithet which in no way diminishes its charm or significance.
Under the Ottoman Empire Christian congregations were classified as Greek or Armenian, and the Bulgarian congregation of Constantinople was administered by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchy. The Bulgarians persistently asserted their separate identity, objecting to the imposition of the Greek language in their schools and churches.
The Bulgarian-born Ottoman statesman Stefan Bogoridi (1775- or 1780-1859) gave a wooden house in the district of Balat for use as a church in 1849. Replacing it with a purpose-built stone structure proved impossible because of the unstable ground, so when it eventually burnt down it was replaced by a lightweight steel-framed iron church.
Iron churches had been manufactured from the early nineteenth century. The Liverpool ironmaster John Cragg (1767-1854) used designs by the architect Thomas Rickman (1776-1841) to market architectural components for prefabricated churches from 1812 onwards: in Liverpool St George’s, Everton and St Michael-in-the-Hamlet, Aigburth remain, and a third, St Philip’s, Hardman Street, came to light when the building that had enveloped it was demolished.
Architectural iron and steel technology was revolutionised during the nineteenth century. Even after Bessemer steel became available in the 1850s, wrought iron remained the dominant material in building construction. Sir Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851) and the Eiffel Tower (1889) were both built of iron. The first major steel structure in the world was the Forth Bridge (1890).
There was a short period when iron was employed to clad lightweight steel structures, before the steel-frame construction developed by the Chicago School of architects meant that buildings of any height were not dependent on the weight-bearing capacity of the walls, so the exterior could be clad in any weather-proof material.
The Bulgarian Church in Istanbul is arguably the most beautiful of the nineteenth-century iron churches. It was designed by the Ottoman-Armenian architect Hovsep Aznavur (1854-1935) and the highly detailed exterior was manufactured by the Viennese Rudolph Philip Waagner Company, which was responsible a century later for the Reichstag Dome (1999) and the Great Court of the British Museum (2000).
Only the iconostasis, the screen that partitions the east end of the interior, is wooden: it was the work of the painter Klavdy Lebedev (1852-1916). The 131-feet-high tower contains six bells cast in the Russian city of Yaroslavi.
St Stephen’s was inaugurated on September 8th 1898.
Its contemporaries include the San Sebastian Church, Manila, (1891) built primarily to resist earthquakes, and St Louis’ Cathedral, Fort-de-France, Martinique (1895) built to resist also to survive hurricanes and fires like that which destroyed its predecessor.
All these buildings are beautiful and fascinating, and Istanbul’s Bulgarian Church deserves a visit alongside the city’s first-order experiences of seeing Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque.