Galata has always been famous for its fires, to say nothing of its earthquakes. These, and changes of population, with the street-widening and rebuilding of our day, have left us very little idea of the architecture of the Genoese colony. In the steep alleys on either side of the Rue Voïvoda are a number of stone buildings, with corbelled upper stories and heavily grated windows, which are popularly called Genoese. They bear too close a resemblance to Turkish structures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and to the old houses of the Phanar, to be so named without more study than any one has taken the trouble to give them. But they are certainly mediæval and they suggest how Galata may once have looked. The façade of one of them, in the Rue Perchembé Bazaar, is decorated with a Byzantine marble panel. This was the fashionable quarter of Genoese Galata. The palace of the Podestà was there, at the northeast corner of the place where Perchembé Bazaar crosses Voïvoda. Indeed, this Ducal Palace, much transformed, still survives as an office building and rejoices in the name of Bereket Han—the House of Plenty. Such slender honours of antiquity as Galata may boast cluster chiefly about certain churches and missions. The story of these is a picturesque chapter in the history of the mediæval orders. The Franciscans were the first to come to Constantinople, opening a mission on Seraglio Point in 1219, during the lifetime of St. Francis, and establishing themselves in Galata as early as 1227. No trace of them now remains in either place, each of the various branches into which the order divided having eventually removed to Pera. The church of San Francesco d’Assisi, belonging to the Conventuals, was the cathedral of the colony, and one worthy of Genoa the Superb. Partially destroyed by fire in 1696, it was seized by the mother of Sultans Moustafa II and Ahmed III, who built on its site—below the Imperial Ottoman Bank—the existing Yeni Valideh mosque. The church of Sant’ Antonio, on the Grande Rue de Pera, is the direct descendant of the cathedral of San Francesco and the missionaries of 1219.