THE small chapel at the spring was rebuilt on grander lines by the Emperor Justinian a century later,* but was badly damaged when the Turks besieged Constantinople in 1422. And by that hangs an even stranger tale.
On May 23rd, 1453, a monk was busy cooking in the precincts of the ruined church with the Turks once again at the gates. He had just laid some fish in a frying pan, when a man rushed in to warn him that Sultan Mehmet had broken through.*
The monk, however, refused to believe that the City favoured of God could fall to the heathen.* ‘Nonsense!’ he said, prodding the sizzling fish. ‘I’d sooner believe these fish could leap alive from the pan, and swim in the spring.’ At that instant, the fish leapt into the air, landed in the spring, and began swimming about.
Fish swim in the pool to this day, giving rise to the Turkish name for the locality, Balikli.*
It is Nikephoros Kallistos (?1256-?1335) who tells us the backstory of Leo. Procopius of Caesarea (fl. 500-565) says only that Justinian was out hunting when he came across a tumbledown chapel on this spot, and learnt that it marked a miraculous healing spring discovered long before.
See The Fall of Constantinople.
But it happened to Jerusalem on many occasions. See Psalm 79, and The Jerusalem Temple. The Biblical authors put that down to Israel trying to solve her problems with conventional political wisdom rather than by trusting in God, and the Greeks after 1453 likewise connected the Fall of Constantinople with the adoption of the heretical Filioque in the fool’s hope of military assistance from the governments of Western Europe.
Balıklı in Turkish, Balukli (Μπαλουκλί) in Greek. The Turkish word means ‘with fish’.