Istanbul: The Imperial City

by John Freely

come secretly and honour it with perfumes and incense. Hearing of this that abomination [Leo] threw it into the sea … and the next day held an unholy selention [synod], wagging his tongue against the saint, and saying ‘Go and see yourself the error of those who say the relic of Euphemia is preserved whole, and that myrrh flows from it.’ So they went and found no flesh on the dry bones – the bones he had thrown into the larnax – and cried out in their folly that the cures were all deceptions and frauds, and they destroyed the larnax and the altar with it, and made of the church a dwelling for unbaptized and uneducated men, unloading here prisoners of war given as booty to the capital. And others, armour-makers and coarse workmen, set up their forges here. So they turned the church into a worldly building, and as the bema [the elevated area containing the altar and the seats of the clergy] was a sacred place, they put the lavatory there.