The platform for the Mihrab, facing towards Mecca, remains aslant the apse; although a tiny altar at its northern end claims the church back for its Christian builders—an altar so small and poor, adorned by such dim, feeble lights, I hardly noticed it at first the day I found my way in there. Here were no crowds, no pomp of a church militant, only the begging children who trotted in my wake. The place appeared empty except for a solitary peasant woman, bowed in prayer before the icon on the little shrine, praying, no doubt, for a safe return to her distant home in Syria—her dress proclaimed how far the wars had driven her. She stood there, a strange impassive figure in her full dark purple trousers and dull red veil, silhouetted sharply against the cream plaster walls and the cipollino columns brown with age and dirt. A faint blue smoke curled from under the unseen cooking-pots in the gallery behind her, blurring the light from the large windows and drifting out across the wide open space. Through it, the arches of the nave and triforium gleamed with the rose and gold and green of their splendid floral mosaics. Two more great churches the minarets pointed out. St. Demetrius, dedicated to the City’s patron saint, is a basilica not unlike that of the refugees. The mosaics here have a curious silvery sheen, but the marbles are the church’s special glory. By some piece of good fortune the original Byzantine casing of the walls is almost intact. Remembering how this much coveted city has suffered, how, time after time, it has been besieged, burnt, sacked—for it stands where two famous highways cross, from Rome to Byzantium, from Vienna to the Aegean and the East—it is little short of marvellous that any fine old buildings are left; still more so that these treasures should have escaped the general doom of such things. A wonderful mellow tone pervades the great interior, where the one spot of brilliant colour is the gold flag of the Double Empire, which holds the eagles of the East and West aloft. Alas, that modern Greece should have St. Demetrius in its clutches! The Turks at least left the marbles much as they found them. The Greeks have written their recent triumph in huge black letters right across the apse; October 1912—there is no escaping that or the monstrous Austrian stove—another claimant for the double eagles, which stretches its ugly arms over the nave.