“You go west from St. Daniel, out of Constantinople, into the country where the monastery named Pege is. In this monastery there is holy water and holy fishes. The sick wash themselves with this water and drink it, and healing comes.”
- Russian Anonymous, a 14th C. Russian pilgrim to Constantinople
According to a late legend, the day of the conquest of Constantinople, a monk was frying fishes in a pan near the spring. When a colleague announced to him the fall of the city, he replied that he would believe him only if the fishes in the pan came back to life. After his words they all jumped into the spring and began swimming.
-story recounted by Ernest Mamboury, Swiss scholar of Istanbul’s History
There was a Greek icon in my mother’s living room I knew nothing about until I saw the same image, the Virgin in the topmost basin of a multi-tiered fountain, in a book which identified it as the Spring of Ever Giving Life, the Zoodochos Pege, in Constantinople. The legend of the spring is associated, they say, with Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt, childbirth, and wild animals.
When I was in Istanbul I visited the spring, now with gold fish swimming, in the basement of a 19th C. Greek church, built on the site of an earlier church destroyed by the Ottomans. Its cemetery has headstones inscribed in Karamanli Turkish, Ottoman Turkish written in Greek letters, with objects depicting the trade of the deceased- wine barrels for tavern keepers, scissors for tailors, pens for scribes. You can buy vials of holy water from the spring but not fish.
