Fountains and Creatures

It is always exciting to see a book come together, and a key point in that process is receiving the first rough version of the dust jacket. Fountains and Water Culture in Byzantium will be published early next year by Cambridge University Press, rather too long after the wonderful event in Istanbul at which most of the papers were presented. The image on the cover is the top of a finial, perhaps the only surviving, functioning strobilion of the Middle Byzantine period, which can be found at the Great Lavra on Mount Athos. This comprises an eagle with outstretched wings, the uppermost figure – although it is possibly a later addition, and probably was once surmounted by a cross – a middle tier of eight creatures (zodia) – four serpents (or dragons) alternating with two winged lions and two griffins – projecting from a pomegranate or pine-cone, and a third, lower tier of four serpents (or dragons), each with a bull or ram in its mouth. The basin beneath the finial has been dated by an inscription to 1060. Another fountain with zodia is described by Manuel Philes in a poem that was formerly but incorrectly understood to describe the finial of the Lavra fountain:

A Fountain in the Martyrium with the Cenotaph of Sts Florus and Laurus
A soulful serpent and an artful lion
Nature finds formed freely from stone
For if not yoked by the stiffness of stone
One would have seen the snakes before now slither
Supposing them alive and desiring to stir
But scared to death and in rigor mortis
Perhaps from fear of slipping
For the bold lions standing below
Have gaping mouths hurrying to feed.

An eagle-topped finial also graced an imperial fountain of the tenth century, as described by Theophanes Continuatus:

[Constantine VII] constructed a porphyry guardhouse in front of his bedchamber [in the Great Palace], creating a water receptacle that he encircled with marble columns of glistening smoothness. And what else did his noble-minded soul contrive? He set an eagle of silver on top of the water pipe, looking not straight ahead but off to the side, proudly rearing its neck after having caught its prey, and stifling the snake that was coiled around its feet.

Theophanes Continuatus records a further bronze fountain that stood in the middle of the Sigma, a semi-circular porticoed courtyard of the imperial palace. This, the so-called Mystic Fountain of the Triconch, was built for Theophilos in around 840, and it was to here that the factions were directed when their own fountains were moved. The Sigma fountain was, in fact, three fountains and a basin which was on the occasion of receptions ‘filled with pistachios, almonds and pine nuts, while spiced wine flowed from its [gilded] pine cone [finial] for the enjoyment of those attending’ including organists and performers in acrobatic displays staged for the emperor. The description of the waterworks continues,

Next to the fountain are set up steps of white Proconnesian marble and in the middle of the said steps is a marble arch supported on two columns as slender as reeds. There too, next to the long side of the Sigma have been erected two bronze lions with gaping mouths. These spouted water and flooded the entire hollow area of the Sigma, thus providing no small amount of pleasure.

The roar of the lions was now the roar of the water gushing through gaping mouths, while the hissing of serpents was the sound of water spraying through narrow jets.

 

The Necessary Water

Lincoln Arboretum fountain formed from the bores extracted at Elksley, Notts.

Water is fundamental to the history of Lincoln. The city is named for the natural pool in the river, now called the Brayford Pool, where settlement began, and next to which the University now sits. However, the River Witham has never provided a good supply of potable water. In 2011, Lincoln celebrated the centenary of the arrival of its fresh water supply, from Elksley in Nottinghamshire. Stone cores extracted from the boreholes now form the columns of fountain in the Arboretum, which spouted for the first time in 1911, and again in 2011. The need for a new water supply was linked to a devastating outbreak of typhoid in the city of Lincoln. Water from Hartsholme Reservoir was believed to be to blame, although it has since been proven that this was not the case. As well as being an interesting local episode in the global histories of water, sanitation and epidemiology, this is a wonderful case study in the enduring value of monuments and the power of public memory. The arrival of the necessary water also offers another opportunity, perhaps too frequently taken in this blog, to turn to Byzantium for comparanda.

Constantinople, like Lincoln, did not have an adequate local supply of potable water. its only river, the Lykos, did not run into the ancient city of Byzantion, which was refounded as Constantinople. As the city expanded, the Lykos was adequate to supply some industry and market gardens before discharging into the Sea of Marmara. The populated centre of Byzantion, or least those parts of it below an elevation of 30 metres, was supplied with potable water by an aqueduct named after Hadrian, the Roman emperor who probably had it built. Constantine chose the city of Byzantion to refound in his own honour despite this lack of a natural source for drinking water, and one suspects that he never imagined his city would grow so large, and make such use of water, that it required up to half a million cubic metres per day to supply its citizens and their needs. The additional water was supplied by a second higher water line, a new aqueduct that entered the city in AD 373, during the reign of Valens. Flowing from Thrace, the water passed through channels and across bridges that crossed the countryside circuitously, terminating in the famous viaduct of the Aqueduct of Valens, today’s Bozdoğan Kemeri, which surmounts the valley between the city’s fourth and third hills. The waters flowed from there into a new Great Public Fountain (nymphaeum maius, hydreion megiston) at the Forum Tauri, where the Forum of Theodosios would shortly afterwards be built. The completion of the high water line, able to supply locations at an elevation of c. 56 metres or lower, was reported upon succinctly by Jerome (Chronicle s.a. 373): ‘Klearchos, eparch of the city of Constantinople, is well known, by whom the necessary water which was daily awaited with vows is brought to the community.’ The orator Themistios (Oratio 11.151c) was on hand to praise the undertaking more lavishly, referring to the arrival of water nymphs, whose ‘names are Thracian and manly, but their beauty and splendour are extremely delicate’, thus alluding to the high quality of the water. Eventually this high line comprised almost 500 kilometres of channels, with expansions at the supply end and extension, certainly before AD 450, from the Forum of Theodosios to the Forum of Constantine.

Aqueduct of Valens, from the back of a moving taxi, Istanbul 2010

Constantinople’s water lines supplied several large outdoor reservoirs and many more underground cisterns, of which more than 150 have been identified. The oldest large cistern, named Modestos for the Eparch of Constantinople who oversaw its construction in 363-9, pre-dated the Valens line. The three vast open-air reservoirs, those of Aetios (420/1), Aspar (459) and Mokios (499/500, or 514/15) that supplied the majority of the city’s inhabitants were constructed outside the walls established by Constantine but within those added by Theodosios II in AD 413. Water stored in the open-air cisterns was topped off with rainwater and was generally far less clean. Therefore, in normal circumstances it was probably destined for agricultural or industrial uses, or for baths and display purposes. Fresher water suitable for drinking would be stored underground, where it could be kept cooler and sufficiently aerated. Emperor Anastasios, who had the Mokios reservoir built, also had a cold cistern installed in the vaults of the hippodrome, beneath the so-called Sphendone. In the sixth century, the city’s most famous surviving cisterns were built, the so-called Binbirdirek, ‘A thousand and one columns’, which received water from the Valens line, and the Basilica Cistern, today’s Yerebatan Sarayı (Yerebatan Sarnıcı), which was at a low enough elevation to be supplied by the Hadrianic line. This popular tourist destination might now be regarded as Constantinople’s most famous monument to water and sanitation, although from the time of its construction until last century very few ever saw it. This tends to be the case with water infrastructure, which we consumers ignore until it breaks.

The Arboretum and other gardens

Lincoln Arboretum, February 2015

Lincoln’s Arboretum is only a short walk from the Cathedral but generally is missed by visitors to the city, who would need to walk through Minster Yard away from the tea shops of Steep Hill and across the busy A15. A local historian provides a typically insightful history of the Arboretum, noting at the end of his account that more than £3 million was spent in 2003 to restore the park, which had been designed and landscaped between September 1870 and August 1872 for £500. These figures are provided by the City of Lincoln Council, which paid both bills, so one must imagine they are accurate. They raise a familiar, fascinating historical question: How much is that £500 ‘worth‘ today. MeasuringWorth.com, a site developed and maintained by academic economists, suggests that £500 spent on labour costs in 1870 would be worth £199,100 in 2003 (and £265,800 today). A better measure, the site suggests, is the total economic cost of the same £500, which measures the pounds spent against the total value of the UK economy in 1870. This suggests that the Arboretum was ‘worth’ £535,500 in 2003 pounds (and £744,300 today). This is still rather less than the £3 million-plus spent in 2003, and the difference in cost cannot be explained simply by the replacement of a hedge maze removed between the wars. In fact, the Arboretum is today rather larger than it was in 1872, with additions and improvements made in stages, most significantly an expansion to the northwest in 1894, and the addition in 1953 of Coronation Gardens, formerly the grounds of Cold Bath House, Lincoln’s smallest parish. The true value of the Arboretum, of course, can be measured by other metrics.

Edward Milner, Landscaper

Edward Milner was the Arboretum’s designer. The son of a sawyer, Milner grew up at Chatsworth, the estate of the Duke of Devonshire, who was a great patron of horticulture. The duke’s gardener, Joseph Paxton, took Milner as an apprentice, sent him to Paris to study at the Jardin du Plantes, then took his back as his assistant, entrusting him with the execution and maintenance of the design for Prince’s Park, Liverpool, and then for the construction of the park at Sydenham, London, where Paxton’s Crystal Palace was translated in 1852, following the Great Exhibition. Milner established a successful business that catered to the horticultural desires of Victorian industrialists across the United Kingdom, and which was continued by one of his twelve children, his eldest son Henry Ernest Milner (1845-1906).

In the same summer that the Arboretum opened – drawing 25,000 people who were entertained by brass bands, performing dogs, and a famous balloonist, Derby’s Emanuel Jackson (d. 1883) – another famous landscape gardener was born. Beatrix Farrand of New York City was chosen, when aged 27, to plan the planting of her country’s National Cathedral, in Washington, D.C. However, her greatest achievement in that city was Dumbarton Oaks, a 53-acre estate in Georgetown belonging to Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, a laxative heiress and her diplomat husband, who were passionate collectors of Byzantine art. Conveyed to the Trustees for Harvard University in 1942, Dumbarton Oaks has since become the world’s premier centre for the study of landscape architecture and Byzantine studies. This quirk of history is oddly appropriate, as the Byzantines loved landscaped gardens.

Fountain, Lincoln Arboretum

The Mesokepion (‘Middle Garden’), a small urban garden with porticoes, was a feature of the imperial palace in Constantinople, sitting next to the imperial polo field (Tzykanisterion). The Life of Basil I, the emperor who established it, notes that it abounded in every type of plant and water flowed freely there. A far larger, suburban, imperial garden, the Aretai (‘Virtues’), lay just beyond the Theodosian walls of the city at what is today the Yedikule (‘Seven Towers’). The Aretai also abounded in water, featuring both natural springs and created fountains. John Geometres, writing in the late tenth century, praised both the Aretai and, in two florid letters, his own walled urban garden in the centre of the city, close to the end of the Aqueduct of Valens. Michael Psellos, in the middle of the eleventh century, observed that Constantine IX supplied the gardens of the monastery church of St George of Mangana with water channels and basins, such that people were amazed by the ‘streams of water’ and the dew grass of the lawns, ‘always sprinkled with moisture’. Lincoln’s Arboretum was supplied with its fountains in 1911, and these sprang to life when the city’s new water supply from Elkesley, Nottinghamshire, was turned on.

Landscaping the Mind

The Lawn, Lincoln, built in 1820

The BBC has been reporting this week on a new study published in The Lancet that connects cannabis use with episodes of psychosis. As frequently happens, the researchers proved their predicate (based on their own earlier study), that elevated rates of psychosis in patients reporting to a single NHS Trust in South London have an obvious and observable cause, namely increased use of strong cannabis. The reporting on the study is rather more excitable, stating that a quarter of all new psychosis cases are linked to ‘skunk’. Listening to this I was reminded of the media discussion of cannabis use in the late 1990s, and the claim that Queen Victoria used cannabis for period pains. This claim has been contextualized and debunked (Berridge 2003), but was still reported in 2008 as a ‘fact‘ by The Guardian. The selective use of history, and the manner in which academic research is reported, are too often entangled with politics.

The physiological effects of coffee are also frequently in the news. According to a 2009 study, imbibing caffeine can cause psychosis. Further study is needed and it may be undertaken by future visitors to The Lawn, a Lincoln landmark adjacent to the castle, which was sold recently to a local purveyor of coffee and tea. The Lawn was a purpose-built hospital for the mentally ill, constructed as the Lincoln Lunatic Asylum. Originated with a donation of £100 by Paul Parnell, surgeon, in 1803, it opened for the reception of patients in 1820, and in 1885 was renamed The Lawn Hospital for the Insane. Hospitals for the treatment of mental illness are a modern creation, although institutions for the confinement of those considered demonically possessed have existed for far longer. The most famous institution in Britain, the Royal Bethlem Hospital, better known as Bedlam, was founded in the thirteenth century. It claims a six-hundred-year history of treating psychiatric problems, although mental health became its forte only in the seventeenth century. (With a delightful circularity, it is now administered by the same NHS trust that participated in the aforementioned cannabis-psychosis study.) As a religious foundation, the Royal Bethlem can be placed in the tradition of an institution, perhaps more a prison, for the mentally ill established in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine empire, in the ninth century. Several figures recognized as Holy Fools were confined in chains at the Church of St Anastasia, which is mentioned in the lives of several saints, including St Niphon, St Basil the Younger, and St Andrew the Fool.

Sir Joseph Banks Conservatory, glasshouse at The Lawn

The nineteenth century saw the construction of many magnificent asylums and mental hospitals, even before the passage of the 1845 Lunatics Act, which obliged counties to provide treatment for ‘pauper lunatics’. This led to the foundation in 1852, following the purchase of land in 1846, of the Lincolnshire Pauper Lunatic Asylum (later the County Lunatic Asylum) at Bracebridge Heath. Until this time, both rich and destitute had been admitted to the Lincoln Lunatic Asylum, which was one of several Victorian hospitals making great strides in mental health. A sensitive portrait of a hospital in Putney – briefly back to South London – perhaps modelled on The Priory, can be found in Sebastian Faulk’s A Possible Life. Landscaped gardens were integral to the design of the Lawn, following a park and gardens model established for the estates of rich industrialists. Landscapers applied their skills  to the grounds of asylums, which were provided with high walls, ornamented drives, and glass houses. The Lawn’s own glasshouse came to be known as the Sir Joseph Banks Conservatory, a paradise for botanists, the removal of which may pave the way to the next chapter in this monument’s cultural biography. Don’t it always seem to go? Lincoln’s third nineteenth-century facility was established by a surgeon who worked also at Lincoln Lunatic Asylum. Robert Gardiner Hill set up a smaller, private hospital at his home, Eastgate House, now a boarding house of Lincoln Minster School.