You would never guess, to look at the rambling wooden _konak_ or the simple church beside it, that you were looking at the Vatican of the Greek world. Neither would you suspect that the long alley skirting the water, hemmed in between dark old stone houses with heavily barred windows and upper stories jutting out toward each other on massive stone brackets, was once the Corso of Constantinople. That was when the great Greek families that furnished princes to Moldavia and Wallachia and dragomans to the European embassies and to the Porte maintained the splendour of a court around the Patriarchate. The ambassadors of the tributary principalities lived there, too, and a house is still pointed out as the Venetian embassy. A very different air blows in the Phanar to-day. Many of the Phanariotes emigrated to Greece or otherwise disappeared at the time of the Greek revolution, while those of their descendants who still remain in Constantinople prefer the heights of Pera. None but the poorest, together with Armenians and Jews not a few, now live in those old stone houses. They are worth looking at, however—and I hope prefectures bursting with modernity and the zeal of street-widening will remember it. None of them, I believe, dates from before the fifteenth century, but after the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus they are all that is left to give an idea what a Byzantine house may have looked like. They also suggest how the old wooden house of Stamboul may have come by its curving bracket. If none of them are very decorative on the outside, we must remember that the house of a mediæval Greek in Stamboul was very literally his castle. Some of the houses originally contained no stairs at all, unless secret ones. Beside the stone house stood a wooden one which contained the stairs, and each floor of the two houses communicated by a narrow passage and two or three heavy iron doors. In case of fire or massacre the inmates betook themselves to the top floor of their stone house and barricaded their iron doors until the coast was clear. Occasionally it was so clear that no wooden house and no stairs were left them. But you would never suspect from outside what pillars and arches, what monumental fireplaces, what plaster mouldings, what marquetry of mother-of-pearl, what details of painting and gilding and carving those top floors hide. And under many of them gardens still run green to the water’s edge. [Illustration: The outer court of Eyoub]