THE LAST BYZANTINE

The Byzantine heritage was wiped out between 1915 - 1922 by the slaughter of 3.5 million Christians by the Turks. The first great genocide of the C20.

My love didn’t come from nowhere.

My father was a bastard, a sailor on the seas,

My mother just a peasant

Spent her life upon her knees.

The noblesse oblige:

The drinking and the drugs,

Was countered 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,

When we heard Mehmed’s order to make

St Sophia’s cathedral, a mosque,

Constantinople has been forced upon its knees:

At oh! such an unrecoverable cost