Public Lecture

On Thursday 29 May 2025 the Very Rev’d Father Anastasios Bozikis, Church History Lecturer at St Andrew’s, presented a talk to the University of Sydney Orthodox Student Fellowship – SOFIA on the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. The Lecture entitled, “Better the Turkish Turban than the Papal Tiara: The Fall of Constantinople and the Preservation of Orthodoxy”, traced the desperate attempts of the Byzantines in the two decades leading up to the Ottoman conquest of the City to negotiate a union between the Orthodox Church and the Pope in the hope of securing Western political and military support against the Turks. This culminated in the union of the Council of Florence 1438-39 where the Byzantine Emperor John VIII and his delegation traded away basic Orthodox doctrine for this assistance and submitted the Eastern Church to Papal rule. The subsequent adverse reception of this Union by the clergy and monastics of Constantinople, led by St Mark of Ephesus and George Scholarios, (later Ecumenical Patriarch Gennadios), frustrated any attempt for its implementation as the people of the City chose rather to preserve their Orthodoxy in the face of the Empire’s impending demise.