07 Works, Today, April 10th, is Gregory V of Constantinople's day, With Footnotes - #97

Patriarch Gregory V of Constantinople

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Gregory V (Georgios Angelopoulos), (1746 – 22 April 1821) was Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople from 1797 to 1798, from 1806 to 1808 and from 1818 to 1821. He was responsible for much restoration work to the Patriarchal Cathedral of St George, which had been badly damaged by fire in 1738.

Sultan Mehmed II and the Patriarch Gennadios II. Mehmed II allowed the Ecumenical Patriarchate to remain active after the fall of Constantinople in 1453

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The Patriarch was not only the head of the Greek churches but the secular ruler of the Greek people, bound by oath to respect the authority of the Sultan. 

Nicolas Louis François Gosse 

Greek war of independence/ The Battle of the Acropolis, c. 1827

Oil on canvas

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Nicolas Louis François Gosse (2 October 1787 – 9 February 1878) was a French historical painter.

Gosse was born in Paris, where he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and under Vincent, and became a skilled representative of the academic style prevailing in his earlier period. His principal works include: Napoleon I and Queen Louise at Tilsit, Meeting of Napoleon and Alexander of Russia at Erfurt, and “Louis Philippe Declining the Crown of Belgium Offered to His Son,” all now housed in the Historical Museum at Versailles; and “Entry of the Duke of Angoulême into Madrid,” a wall painting in the Hôtel de Ville, Paris. More on Nicolas Louis François Gosse

At the onset of the Greek War of Independence, as Ethnarch of the Orthodox Millet, or court of law, Gregory V was blamed by Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II for his inability to suppress the Greek uprising.

After the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453, all Orthodox Christians were treated as a lower class of people. The Rum millet was instituted by Sultan Mehmet II who set himself to reorganise the state as the conscious heir of the East Roman Empire.

Henri Guillaume Schlesinger, (1814-1893)

A Portrait of the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II (R. 1808-1839), c. 1836

Oil painting on paper

40.2 by 32.5cm

Private collection

Henri-Guillaume Schlesinger, originally Wilhelm Heinrich Schlesinger (6 August 1814, Frankfurt am Main - 21 February 1893, Neuilly-sur-Seine) was a French portrait and genre painter of German birth. He was especially known for his lively and sensitive depictions of young women.

He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, and was originally active in that city. He then moved to Paris, where he participated in the Salon from 1840 to 1889 and received two medals.

During a visit to Istanbul in 1837, he was commissioned to do several official paintings of Sultan Mahmud II.

His painting "The Five Senses" was purchased by Empress Eugénie in 1865. The following year, he was named a Chevalier in the Legion of Honor and became a French citizen in 1870, just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. During the war and the subsequent Commune, he lived in London.

In addition to oil paintings, he was a watercolorist and painted miniatures on ivory. More on Henri-Guillaume Schlesinger

This was in spite of the fact that Gregory had condemned the Greek revolutionary activities in order to protect the Greeks of Constantinople from such reprisals by the Ottoman Turks. After the Greek rebels scored several successes against the Ottoman forces in the Peloponnese, these reprisals came.

Nikiphoros Lytras (1832–1904)

Execution of the Patriarch of Constantinople Gregory V

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Nikiforos Lytras (Tinos – June 13, 1904, Athens) was a nineteenth-century Greek painter. He was born in Tinos, and trained in Athens at the School of Arts. In 1860 he won a scholarship to Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Munich. After completing these studies, he became a professor at the School of Arts in 1866, a position he held for the rest of his life. He remained faithful to the precepts and principles of the Munich School, while paying greatest attention both to ethographic themes and portraiture. His most famous portrait was of the royal couple, Otto and Amalia, and his most well-known landscape a depiction of the region of Lavrio.

For four years, starting in 1873, he travelled to Smyrna and Asia Minor, Munich and Egypt with Gyzis during which he produced a number of Orientalist works. 

In later life he founded the 'Art Group', which many years later in 1919 exhibited in Paris, with participants including the engraver Demetrios Galanis, a friend of Derain, Braque and Picasso and a member of the French Academy. 

Nikiforos Lytras died at the age of 72 in 1904, after a short illness that is believed to have been caused by his colours’ chemical substances. More on Nikiforos Lytras

During Holy Week in April 1821, Gregory was taken out of the Patriarchal Cathedral on 22 April 1821, Easter Sunday, directly after celebrating the solemn Easter Liturgy, Gregory was accosted by the Ottomans. He was taken out of the cathedral, still in full Patriarchal vestments, and hanged. 

An eyewitness, a British clergyman visiting Constantinople, wrote: 'His body, attenuated by abstinence and emaciated by age, had not sufficient weight to cause immediate death. He continued for a long time in pain which no friendly hand dared abridge, and the darkness of night came on before his final convulsions were over.' 

Peter von Hess

The hanging of Patriarch Gregory V from the gate of the Patriarchate, on Easter Sunday April 10th, 1821

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Peter Heinrich Lambert von Hess (29 July 1792 – 4 April 1871) was a German painter, known for historic paintings, especially of the Napoleonic Wars and the Greek War of Independence.

Hess initially received training from his father Carl Ernst Christoph Hess. He accompanied his younger brother Heinrich Maria to Munich in 1806, and enrolled at the Munich Academy at the age of sixteen. 

During the Napoleonic Wars, he was allowed to join the staff of General Wrede, who commanded the Bavarians in the military operations which led to the abdication of Napoleon. During this time, von Hess painted his first battle pieces. In 1818 he spent some time in Italy where he painted landscapes and various Italian scenes.

In 1833, at Ludwig's request, he accompanied Otto of Greece to the newly formed Kingdom of Greece, where at Athens he gathered materials for pictures of the war of liberation. The sketches which he then made were placed, forty in number, in the Pinakothek, after being copied in wax on a large scale. More on Peter von Hess

His body was left hanging for three days

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His body was left hanging for three days, then sold by the Turkish authorities to a Jewish mob, who mutilated the body, then weighted it about the neck with a stone and threw it into the sea. Despite this, the body was found floating at sea by a Greek merchant ship captain. 

When the body was identified as that of the martyred Patriarch, it was secretly taken to Odessa, where Orthodox church leaders took it under their care. Tsar Alexander I ordered a state funeral for the holy hierarch, which was celebrated on June 17 1821 in Odessa.

The Patriarch's body was eventually interred in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Athens. He is commemorated by the Greek Orthodox Church as an Ethnomartyr. In his memory, the Saint Peter Gate, once the main gate of the Patriarchate compound, was welded shut in 1821 and has remained shut ever since. More on Gregory V of Constantinople

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