Community of Galata. The Church of Christos Soter
Not even the hand or pen of a painter, even of the most capable, could properly describe the vandalism, the religious pillaging and the complete destruction of this church. Nothing from the church has been left standing. All the holy vestaments and gospels were either stolen or destroyed and the sacred vessels have been scattered. The great icons and the chandeliers were thrown down, togather with the pews, candelabra, and lecterns. The holy pulpit and episcopal throne were torn down and destroyed. The glass of all the windows was smashed by rocks hurled from the outside. It was impossible to save anything of the holy objects. Such were the mania and madness of the barbarians that they came back twice and, despite the proclaimation of martial law, competed the labor of pillaging and destruction so that now there are in evidence only the bare columns of the holy church and nothing else....
The cruel fate of the cemetery at Sisli and of it's graves and tombs, as well as of the Church of the Metamorphosis and it's ossuary, constitutes one of the clearest reflections of the religious hatred of the pogromists and of the significant role this sentiment played in the events. Noel Barber witnessed the ruined state of the cemetery soon after and, in a secret telegram hidden in his shoe so that it could be smuggled out of Turkey, described his horror in very few words:
"Finally I went to the funeral at Sisli of an old friend who had been battered to death in her bed. At first I could not believe what I saw. Every single tombstone had been uprooted and smashed, every mausoleum pried open, the contents of every coffin spilled into the streets, where still they lay. Bulldozers could not have done a more thorough job. In the church itself the crosses had been torn down, the altar had been desecrated in a way I would prefer not to describe, and the priceless windows smashed"
Those who had attacked the cemetery, church and ossuary came from the nearby area of Mecidiyekoy; they destroyed 525 marble graves and burned the church. They removed the coffin of the recently deceased Nikolaos Eliaskos from it's mausoleum and pierced the corpse with a sharp iron that was later found still in the body, whereas the upper body bore knife wounds and lacerations. The body was not located for some days, but was finally found and reburied. The graves of the Negropontes, Kopases, Zarifes, Siderides and Skylitzes families were destroyed, and human excrement was found on many graves.
This happened in 1955
