A number of months ago I read a book
about the creation of the Turkish republic after the First World War. It mentioned a flag that had been flying from the British military HQ during the allied forces occupation of Istanbul after WW1. The flag had been donated to the Crimea Memorial church in Istanbul when they left after Ataturk's Turkish forces had won their fight for independence. So began a wonderful journey that ended today with me and Serpil (with great help from Cyrus at the church) hopefully helping better preserve this flag and 4 others.
The journey like so many involved using what I had read and searching for information on t'interweb. Amazingly, and somewhat embarassingly given my fairly good knowledge of historic buildings and sites in Istanbul, I had never heard of this particular historic church. It was build in 1868 to commemorate the dead in the Crimean war on land gifted by the Ottoman Sultan using funds raised in England. The internet search led me to this full and excellent description of the church and it's contents: https://thecrimeanwar.com/yazi/crimean-memorial-church-christ-church.
And so I discovered that there wasn't just one but 5 flags held in the church as described in this web page:
- a union flag from the Crimean war
- the ensign flag from the British warship that took the last ever Ottoman Sultan into exile
- two flags from the British military HQ during their occupation of Istanbul (alongside the French and Italians) after World War One
- a church diocese flag.
This obviously merited some further investigation.
After a visit to the church and some inernet searching for a contact there, I was put in touch with Chaplain Ian Sherwood who was delighted to hear that some random Scottish eejit was interested in preserving the historic flags they held. The position of the British Military Museum, surprisingly to me but probably understandably given the volume of artefacts that must exist around the world, is that such things are the responsibility of the owners abroad and if they fall apart so much that there's only some material left, it should be put in a bag and labelled for safe keeping. Ideas for basic preservation were kindly given by the wonderful conservation team at the People’s History Museum in Manchester. This led to our purchase of some basic bed sheets in a sale in a typical Istanbul shopping centre, raiding Serpil's mum's collection of ribbons for ties and printing the flag information from the website above as information tags to attach to the wrapped flags.
And so today me, Serpil and Cyrus from the church could be found climbing up into the mezzanine organ area of the church to retrieve the flags, then on our knees wrapping each one in a bedsheet, tying it, attaching a description note and then putting them all together wrapped in a double bed duvet cover. Weird doesn't begin to describe it. The attached photos show what we did.
Lunch with Ian (the chaplain) followed to hear of his involvement with the Crimean Memorial Christ church. Tales of the land (and therefore buildings) nearly being given back to the Turkish state by the church organisation and ideas of the famous Turkish singer and actor Bariş Manco to buy it and make it into a pub were definitely worth hearing.
