Word: istanbul
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Istanbul's million and a half Moslems, Christians and Jews go about their business among ancient ruins, aqueducts, walls and cisterns that are dead relics of Byzantium's glory. But Istanbul's strongest link with the past is very much alive: looming (6 ft.-4 in.), white-bearded Athenagoras I, 67, the 268th Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church...
...Friends." "Now we have a nylon Patriarch," said the Turks when Athenagoras, just back from 18 years in the U.S.,' ascended the 1,000-year-old wooden throne in Istanbul's Phanari Cathedral (TIME, Nov. 15, 1948). Born a Turkish subject in a village near the Greek-Albanian border, Aristoklis Spyrou was appointed in 1919 to the Metropolitan Church of Athens. In 1930 the Orthodox population of the New World, a diocese of the Istanbul Patriarchate, needed a steady hand and a good brain to untangle a snarl of jealousy and intrigue into which the church had fallen...
What Athenagoras brought to Istanbul from the U.S. was a passion for intergroup harmony. He saw that the antique antagonism between Turk and Greek, Moslem and Christian was a menace to the City of God as well as the City of Man, and he dedicated himself to ending...
Polyglot See. The principal entrance to the grounds of Istanbul's patriarchate is a door that is never opened. Before it, in 1822 the Ecumenical Patriarch Gregorius V was hanged on the orders of Sultan Mahmoud II, who accused him of conspiring with the Greeks in a revolt against the Ottoman Empire. For generations, the Closed Door was an Orthodox shrine to the ancient enmity. Under Athenagoras, the door is still closed, but now, as an Orthodox official recently explained: "The Closed Door is a memorial for a dead Patriarch, not a reminder of the way he died...
Perhaps neither political know-how nor vision is enough to account for the power and popularity of this Patriarch. When he drives through the tortuous streets of old Istanbul in the black Cadillac presented him by his Hollywood friend, Filmagnate Spyros Skouras, policemen all along his route come to salute. A reporter once asked one of them whether this was an official order...