Byzantine London is having a moment. On Saturday 7 November the V&A opens a major exhibition on Constantinople, the city every Greek grandmother still calls Poli, and it is the first time a UK museum has told that 1,600 year story in one show. If you have ever stood under the dome of a Greek church and wondered where all that gold came from, this is your month.
We read the V&A exhibition page and the Londonist listings for the week and built a Greek route around the show: the new exhibition, the one Byzantine church in London you can walk into for free, the icons hiding in the British Museum, and the Greek restaurants next to each stop, all of them Greek List members.
You can do this Byzantine London route in a weekend or spread it over November. Three of the four stops are free, and every stop has a Greek table waiting at the end of it.
Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires opens on Saturday 7 November in Galleries 38 and 39 of the V&A in South Kensington. It follows the city from Byzantium to the Ottoman capital and the highlights read like a Greek school textbook: the Veroli Casket, a tenth century ivory box carved with scenes from Greek mythology, a gold enkolpion that belonged to a Byzantine official called Constantinos, a Greek monastic typikon lent by an Oxford college, a medal of Emperor John Palaiologos made by Pisanello, an 1809 watercolour of the city by an unnamed Greek painter, and Fossati’s famous 1852 lithograph of Agia Sofia.
Tickets are £25 on weekdays and £27 at weekends, with concessions, and V&A members go in free. Book ahead for the opening weekend. The rest of the museum is free, and the medieval galleries on the ground floor make a good warm up.
Getting there: V&A South Kensington, Cromwell Road SW7 2RL. South Kensington station (Piccadilly, Circle, District). Open daily 10.00 to 17.45, Fridays until 22.00.
Greek stop nearby: the V&A sits in a museum district with no Greek kitchen of its own, so do what we do: take the Circle line three stops from South Kensington to Bayswater for stop two, where Halepi on Leinster Terrace has been feeding Greeks and Cypriots since the 1960s. Kleftiko after Constantinople is the correct order of things.
If the V&A shows you Byzantium behind glass, St Sophia on Moscow Road lets you stand inside it. The Greek Orthodox Cathedral of Agia Sofia was built between 1877 and 1879 to a Byzantine design by John Oldrid Scott, paid for by the Greek merchant families of Victorian London, and it has been Grade I listed since 2010. Look up: the dome mosaic of Christ Pantocrator was laid in the 1890s, the sanctuary mosaics are by Boris Anrep, the same artist who did the floors of the National Gallery, and the iconostasis is a 7.6 metre wall of Canadian walnut inlaid with mother of pearl.
The cathedral is open to visitors from 10am to 2pm on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, and the Sunday Liturgy starts at 9.15am. On Saturday 7 November, the same day the V&A opens, there is a Liturgy in English at 10am, which is a lovely way in for a British partner or friend. The small Treasury Museum under the sanctuary opens by appointment.
Getting there: Moscow Road W2 4LQ. Bayswater (Circle, District) or Queensway (Central). Dress respectfully and keep voices low during services.
Greek stop nearby: Halepi on Leinster Terrace is a five minute walk from the cathedral and does the Greek Cypriot classics properly, kleftiko, moussaka and a long Sunday lunch. Ten minutes further up towards Paddington, It’s All Greek To Me on Praed Street is the souvlaki and gyros stop, open until late every night.
Most Greeks go to the British Museum for one reason and leave angry about the Parthenon Marbles. Fair enough. But upstairs, in the medieval galleries (Rooms 40 and 41), there is a quieter Greek story. The Triumph of Orthodoxy icon, painted in Constantinople around 1400, shows the moment in 843 when icons were restored to the churches, the feast we still celebrate on the first Sunday of Lent. Around it sit Byzantine ivories, silver, seals and jewellery from the same world as the V&A show, and entry is free.
On Thursday 5 November at 5.30pm the museum also runs an online talk, The Other Harold (£6, on Zoom), about Harald Hardrada, the Norwegian who served the emperors in Constantinople before he tried to take England in 1066. Byzantine London is not a stretch: Vikings, Normans and Greeks were all in the same story.
Getting there: Great Russell Street WC1B 3DG. Tottenham Court Road, Holborn or Russell Square. Free entry, open daily 10.00 to 17.00, Fridays until 20.30.
Greek stop nearby: Elysée on Percy Street, Fitzrovia, is eight minutes on foot from the museum gates. It has been a Greek restaurant since 1936, it has a roof terrace, and if you stay late on a weekend you get live Greek music and the plate smashing the British came for in the first place.
The fourth stop is where the Greek community actually talks about all this. The Hellenic Centre at 16 to 18 Paddington Street is the living room of Greek London, with a library on Greek and Cypriot history (open by appointment) and a bar that opens an hour before every event. Right now it has two free exhibitions: Fernweh, or Nostalgia for Unknown Lands until Saturday 7 November and A Different Kind of Pop, the 1960s and 70s works of Giorgos Ioannou, until 19 November. On Thursday 5 November photographer Georgia Metaxas is in conversation with the V&A’s Marta Weiss (£5), and on 3 December there is a talk on Greek newspapers in the Ottoman Empire, the perfect footnote to the V&A show.
Getting there: 16 to 18 Paddington Street W1U 5AS. Baker Street (five lines) or Regent’s Park. Paddington Street Gardens opposite is a good place to sit with a coffee.
Lost Worlds by Luxmuralis takes over the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich from 6 to 15 November, a light and sound show that walks you through Atlantis and Troy, so the ancient Greek world gets its own night out as well. One detail from the V&A show says it all: a velvet covering woven in Bursa and labelled Athens, which is how tangled the Greek and Ottoman story really is.
For a family day, pair stop two with the playground in Kensington Gardens and finish with a souvlaki on Praed Street. For a date, do stops one and four: the V&A at opening time, lunch in Marylebone, the Hellenic Centre in the afternoon. Byzantine London, done properly, is a full day and not an expensive one.
The Greek List events page is the most complete list of Greek events in the UK, and the next ten days are busy. Listing an event is free.
Every restaurant and cafe in this guide is a Greek List member. More than 100,000 Greeks and Cypriots in the UK read Greek List every month on the site, through the newsletter and in the Ellines sto Londino Facebook group, and Greek List listings rank first on Google. If you want your business in the next Byzantine London guide, get listed.
Been to St Sophia or booked the V&A? Tell us what you thought in the Facebook group Ellines sto Londino, and tag a friend who still calls it Poli.
