29 May 1453: How Turkey and Greece Remember the Fall of Constantinople

A modern composite image of the 1453 siege, with the walls of Constantinople and a statue of Constantine XI Palaiologos.

On 29 May 1453 the Ottoman army of Sultan Mehmed II broke into Constantinople after a siege of 53 days, ending the Byzantine Empire, the eastern continuation of Rome. The last emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, is believed to have died in the fighting, and the great church of Hagia Sophia was turned into a mosque. Today the same date is a festival in Turkey and a day of mourning for many Greeks.

This piece looks at the anniversary from a Greek point of view, starting with the large state ceremony Istanbul staged in May 2016 for the 563rd anniversary. It sets out what happened in 1453, how the conquest is celebrated, why Hagia Sophia sits at the centre of the argument, and why the way a country remembers a conquest still matters.

What happened in the spring of 1453

By the fifteenth century the Byzantine state had shrunk to little more than its capital and a few scattered territories, including the Despotate of the Morea in the Peloponnese. Its capital, however, still had the strongest land walls in Europe. Mehmed II, only 21 years old, made taking the city his first great project.

The siege began on 6 April 1453. Estimates of the attacking force vary widely: modern historians usually put it somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 men, while Western eyewitnesses claimed far more. Behind the walls stood perhaps 7,000 to 8,000 defenders, around 2,000 of them foreigners, among them Genoese and Venetians. Ottoman cannon pounded the Theodosian walls for weeks, and Mehmed had ships dragged overland into the Golden Horn to get around the chain that guarded the harbour.

The final assault came before dawn on Tuesday 29 May. Once the walls were breached, the city was sacked. Many civilians who had sought refuge in Hagia Sophia were taken captive and sold into slavery. Constantine XI was never seen again; most accounts say he died fighting near the walls, although contemporary sources disagree on the details. A few days later the first Friday prayer was held in Hagia Sophia, now a mosque.

Some Greeks still consider Tuesday an unlucky day because the city fell on a Tuesday, a small sign of how deeply the date lives on in Greek memory.

How Turkey marks the date: the 2016 ceremony at Yenikapı

In Turkey, 29 May is celebrated as the anniversary of the conquest of Istanbul (Fetih), and Mehmed is honoured as Fatih, "the Conqueror". The modern republic has always treated the event as part of its national story, but under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the anniversary grew into a mass political rally.

President Erdoğan and his wife at the 2016 anniversary, among performers dressed as Ottoman soldiers.

In 2016 the main event was held on the reclaimed coastal square at Yenikapı. According to Hürriyet Daily News, organisers expected around one million people. Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım, who had taken office only days earlier, spoke first, followed by Erdoğan. The programme included a 563-member Ottoman military band (the mehter, one musician for each year since 1453), a 3D projection of the siege on what was billed as the world's largest mapping stage, a flypast by the Turkish Stars aerobatic team and fireworks.

A giant Turkish flag is passed over the crowd at Yenikapı.

The logistics were on a national scale too. About 9,000 police officers were on duty, supported by helicopters, a frigate, a submarine and coast guard boats. Thousands of free buses and more than a hundred ferries brought people to the square, roads were closed for the morning, and the ceremony was broadcast in Turkish, English, Spanish, Arabic, French, Russian and sign language.

Flag-waving supporters, some holding Erdoğan's portrait, at the 2016 celebration.

The speeches went beyond history. Turkish Minute reported that Erdoğan used the occasion to attack the Syrian government and Western allies, and that he said the "getting even" that began with the conquest "has still not ended". For Greeks, and for many observers elsewhere, words like these turned a historical anniversary into a message about the present.

Re-enactments, costumes and the image of the conqueror

Alongside the speeches, the anniversary relies on spectacle. Every year actors in Janissary costume parade near the land walls, horsemen ride through the old gates, and bands play the martial music of the mehter. Districts such as Eyüp add their own events, from races along the Golden Horn to the handing out of "conquest rice".

A costumed procession recreating the Ottoman army near the old walls.

These shows present 1453 as a clean triumph. What they leave out is the side of the story told in Greek chronicles and in the accounts of Venetian and Genoese survivors: the killing and enslavement of civilians during the sack, the end of a Christian capital that had stood for more than eleven centuries, and the slow shrinking of the city's Greek community over the following centuries, especially after the pogrom of 1955.

Riders in Ottoman dress at a restored section of the city's fortifications during the celebrations.

Hagia Sophia: from street protest to mosque again

The anniversary has long been tied to Hagia Sophia. Justinian I built the present church between 532 and 537, and for more than 900 years it was the cathedral of Orthodox Christianity. Mehmed converted it into a mosque in 1453. In the 1930s, under Atatürk's secular republic, it became a museum, and it was listed by UNESCO in 1985 as part of the Historic Areas of Istanbul.

Worshippers pray in the square outside Hagia Sophia, demanding that the building be opened for Muslim prayer.

In 2016, on the eve of the anniversary, hundreds of people gathered outside the building to pray and demand that it be opened again as a mosque. The demonstration was organised by the Anatolia Youth Association, whose president, Salih Turhan, held a similar protest every year around 29 May.

Four years later the demand became reality. On 10 July 2020 Turkey's Council of State annulled the decision that had made Hagia Sophia a museum, and Erdoğan signed a decree turning it back into a mosque. UNESCO criticised the move, and Greece and many Orthodox churches condemned it. The building remains open to visitors outside prayer times, but its status as a shared monument of world heritage, rather than a symbol of one side's victory, was lost. For many Greeks the 2016 protest now reads as a warning that went unheeded.

Why the anniversary hurts in Greece

For Greeks, Constantinople is not a foreign city. It was the centre of Byzantine culture, the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which is still based in Istanbul, and the place where much of Orthodox Christian tradition took shape. Its fall is remembered in folk songs and legends, including the story of the "marble emperor" said to be sleeping until he can return.

The flight of scholars after 1453 is also part of that memory. Greek teachers had been bringing ancient texts to Italy for decades before the conquest, with Manuel Chrysoloras teaching Greek in Florence from 1397, but the fall of the city sent many more westward. Scholars such as John Argyropoulos and Constantine Lascaris taught in Italy and helped the Renaissance recover Greek learning.

Official commemoration in Greece is modest compared with the celebrations in Istanbul. Churches hold memorial services, and in 2021 the Greek president laid a wreath at the statue of Constantine XI in Mystras, near the city where he had been crowned. Seen from Athens or Thessaloniki, a million-strong rally cheering the conquest feels less like history and more like a celebration of a people's loss.

Reading the celebrations with a clear head

None of this means that people in Turkey should not remember their own history, or that every Turk who attends a concert on 29 May shares the politics of the speeches. Conquests are commemorated all over the world, and nations rarely tell those stories from the point of view of the defeated.

The concern is how the memory is used. When an anniversary is staged as a show of state power, linked to a religious message and followed a few years later by the conversion of the world's most famous Byzantine church, neighbours are entitled to ask what is being celebrated. That question carries extra weight for Greeks, given the long record of violence against Greeks, Armenians and Assyrians in the late Ottoman period and Turkey's continuing occupation of northern Cyprus since 1974.

A fairer way to remember 1453 would recognise both stories at once: the achievement of a young sultan and his army, and the suffering of the people inside the walls. Until that happens, 29 May will remain two different days, depending on which side of the Aegean you stand.

Sources: Hürriyet Daily News: Istanbul marks 1453 Ottoman conquest with grandiose ceremony (May 2016); Turkish Minute (May 2016); Hürriyet Daily News: Nation marks 571st anniversary (May 2024); Wikipedia: Fall of Constantinople; Wikipedia: Hagia Sophia. Original report by Greek Reporter.

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