Member-only story
The Last Byzantine
Poetry
Image Source: Copyright: ©Sergii Figurnyi - stock.adobe.co
Between 1915–1922 more than 3.5 million Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrian Christians were murdered by the Turks so that now 99.8% of the population of Turkey are Muslim. This marked the ‘irrecoverable’ death of the Byzantine heritage mentioned in the poem
Her love didn’t come from anywhere.
Her father was a bastard, a sailor on the seas
A Byzantine, by birth, like me.
Her mother, an Anatolian peasant
Spent her life upon her knees.
A Christian, you see?.
The noblesse oblige,
The drinking and the drugs,
Were sponsored by Intelligence
And a tingling in the blood.
We were the late Romans
Much diminished and now, finally, gone.
For since the death-stroke of 1453,
With Mehmed’s order to make
St Sophia’s cathedral, a mosque
In a sea of Christian blood,
Repeated by Erdogan on 13 July 2020,
Constantinople forced upon its knees
Its conquerors celebrate its fall
Every year on May 29 in Istanbul:
At oh! such an unrecoverable cost.
