There are lots of joys of history. One is the power of seeing hidden things. Often they aren’t trying to hide – quite the reverse. They are hidden because the things they were meant to communicate have been forgotten.
I had one of those moments this weekend. My partner and I were out and about doing something, well… historical, but not the kind of historical that this is about!
We were out and about visiting a heritage steam railway. I might write about these at some point – they are very fun to think with about history, memory, nostalgia and a bunch of other things –, but it would be fair to say that I usually go to them as a delighted bystander. My partner is the train enthusiast.
This weekend took us to the East Lancashire Railway, which has its railhead (technical vocab: the end of a branch line that connects with the wider rail network) at Bury, a town in the area of greater Manchester in northwest England. We travelled there, rather fittingly, by train (and bus) and this involved passing through Rochdale Station. Rochdale is another town in the greater Manchester area.
This whole area, like my own native place (Wolverhampton in the English West Midlands), grew wealthy from industry from the late eighteenth century and hit hard times in the mid-twentieth century when that industrial foundation substantially collapsed. (In the specific case of the northwest, the underpinning industry was mainly textiles. Where I’m from, it was mainly coal and metalwork.)
Now, somehow, on the way out, I didn’t notice this...
I definitely noticed it on the way back though. Specifically, I got down from a lovely yellow bus, looked around and thought, ‘Blimey – somebody saw the Aya Sofya!’:
(Fun note: Aya Sofya can also be spelled Hagia Sophia. One is the Turkish spelling, since the building is now in Turkey and spent around 600 years as a mosque in Istanbul, at the heart of the Ottoman Empire. The other is the Greek spelling, since the building spent around 900 years as a Christian church, at the heart of the medieval Roman/Byzantine Empire. In both cases, its name means ‘Holy Wisdom’. You will sometimes also see it written St/Saint Sophia. This is wrong, although quite easy to find even in good books. The Great Church, which it is also sometimes called, was dedicated to the quality of holy/divine wisdom, not to a woman called Sophia who became a saint…)
Immediately, I whipped out my trusty smartphone and consulted Wikipedia (yes, historians use Wikipedia, all the time). It turns out that…
St John the Baptist Church is a Roman Catholic Parish church in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, England. It was founded in 1830, and built in 1927. It is situated on the corner of Maclure Road and Dowling Street, opposite the Greater Manchester Fire Service Museum in the centre of the town. It was built in the Byzantine Revival style and is a Grade II* listed building… Canon Chipp sought the construction of a new, larger church to replace the one made of brick. He wanted a church to resemble the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.1
So, somebody had seen the Aya Sofya! It’s always nice to be right and it is always great to see the echoes of the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire out in the world.
The Aya Sofya is perhaps one of the most moving buildings I have ever stood in, and some of the reason for that is because, by the time I saw it, in my twenties, I was already a Byzantinist and could almost feel the reverberations of that history as I stood beneath its dome.
To say that it was heavy would be an understatement: to stand in the space where Justinian I in the 6th century probably listened to Procopius telling him how beautiful his new church was (before writing behind his back that Justinian was a literal demon whose disembodied head wandered the corridors of his palace spreading evil. Procopius: a very difficult man), where Heraclius in the 7th century probably went for a blessing before leaving the city behind to launch a daring attack on the Persian Empire, where Constantine XI prayed the night before going out to defend his city on 28th May 1453 and where Mehmet Fatih days later declared an end to the sack of the city and his own status as Sultan of Rum…
The Church of Saint John the Baptist in Rochdale, however, is also part of a different set of reverberations: the above-mentioned ‘Byzantine revival style’. This is something I came across several years ago via the work of a friend researching neo-Byzantine architecture commissioned by 19th- and 20th-century Jewish communities in the Balkans. Now, here I was looking at another example of it, this time by a Christian community in northwest England.
The ‘Byzantine revival’ was an architectural movement detectable right across western Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. What echoes were these architects evoking and why? There seem to have been a few key threads.
The style emerged from around 1840, which marked about three generations since the beginning of the so-called ‘Grand Tour’. Wealthy men (and more rarely women) would travel on what became an increasingly canonical itinerary, taking in Rome, but also the Ottoman Empire, including of course, Istanbul, and other areas of former Byzantine territory. They brought back souvenirs, pictures, memories and ideas.
By 1840, the cause of Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire had also begun to gain prominence in western European civil society.
On top of that, in the 19th century, various Protestant groups, often referred to as non-conformists, became prominent in industrial urban centres. I’m thinking here of movements like Methodism, Primitive Methodism, various Baptist churches, the Society of Friends (often called Quakers), and I could go on. Wandering around my native town, you could build quite the list of such groups just from the inscriptions on 19th-century church buildings. One of the core aims of most of these groups was to ‘get back to’ an ‘original’ Christianity.
I have put both of those ideas in inverted commas because they are big and complicated and not what I want to talk about here, but for now, it matters that this was what people felt they were trying to do. Some did this by looking at the Orthodox churches of the East Mediterranean. They were seen as a source of ideas, practices and inspiration that was separate from the Roman Catholic church, which these non-conformist groups most obviously saw themselves as being different from.
But aren’t we talking about a Catholic church in Rochdale, you might reasonably ask? We are, indeed! The thing about resistance and reform movements is that they are always in conversation with whatever they are resisting or trying to reform. Thus, in the 19th and early 20th century, the Roman Catholic church also showed a renewed interest in the early church and its relationship with the Orthodox churches.
A final important factor was undoubtedly fashion. The style spread just as architectural features from the East Mediterranean spread around Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, right after the first European crusades, because people had seen something new, and (I think, anyway) beautiful. Then other people saw these copies and wanted copies of their own. That’s how fashion goes.
Each individual Byzantine revival building might have been the result of any or all of these forces and we will never know exactly which ones and in which combination, but it can be fun to imagine and to guess, which are also things historians do all the time. They are just quite informed fantasies and speculations.
This can get out of hand, of course. It is important to remember that we know more and less than the people who made the historical things we study. We know (or at least have access to knowledge of) more than any of the actors in the design and building of the Church of St John the Baptist in Rochdale about the history and architecture of the East Roman Empire or about the spread of Byzantine revival architecture across Europe. And, of course, we always have the advantage of knowing what happened next.
At the same time, what we can know as historians about any single person or situation or community is always a small, thin and threadbare fragment of a whole cloth that is lost forever. We should never mistake the enormous ability to know (thank you, Wikipedia, among other things!) for omniscience, or assume that the people we study were any less complex than us.
The joy of history is often not, I think, knowing what really happened. It is creating webs of meaning that connect us to the past, and make connections across the past itself. We can draw together themes across centuries and continents.
Perhaps just as importantly, it’s fun!
If I had never seen or studied the Aya Sofya, perhaps I would not have noticed the Church of St John the Baptist in Rochdale and my day would have been poorer. If I had never heard of the Byzantine revival movement, I would not have been able to connect it with a wider European phenomenon that a community in Rochdale was participating in.
And I am absolutely certain that, as I learn more, I will see more. Maybe when I next go back to Rochdale (there are some mosaics in that church, Wikipedia tells me…) I will see something that will make sense to me then that meant nothing to me this weekend.
On which note, I said I was not a trains person, but that’s no longer strictly true, because looking for the echoes and interactions is compulsive and because history is how I make sense of the world.
So, if you’re in Britain, look out for some of these:
Oh yes. I have often had that feeling…
Thank you for this fascinating post, Rebecca. I am a sucker for anything that contains the words ‘Aya Sofya’. Got me thinking about Westminster Cathedral, a building that is in a similar style and one which I pass often. I am up there today and instead of just rushing past like I normally would I will make a point of stopping for a bit and channeling your post. And for the train people there are plenty in nearby Victoria station!