Gilbert’s friend William Miller was in the process of writing Trebizond, the Last Greek Empire, published in 1926 but, since there is no section of acknowledgements in Miller’s book, Gilbert’s precise contribution to it is unclear though very likely.
The Roman Emperor Hadrian had built a harbour at Trebizond because the city was situated at the northern end of the Zigana Pass descending through the east-west mountain range and also was naturally defended on a fortifiable acropolis surrounded by deep ravines. For centuries camel caravans brought Persian spices to be exported by Genoese merchants in Trebizond. On his return from the far East in 1294, the Venetian traveler Marco Polo passed through Trebizond just as the Genoese were entrenching themselves in their monopolistic hold on the city’s overseas trade, and he would have been staying in the seaward commercial district of Daphnous when he and his father and uncle were robbed of much of the treasure they had brought back with them from the East.
From 1204 until 1461, Trebizond was an independent Byzantine Empire ruled by the great Komneni family, the longest family reign in Greek history, but they surrendered the city and its empire to the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, the Conqueror of Constantinople, without a battle in 1461. Trebizond’s most famous son was the theologian Bessarion, who studied Platonism under Gemisthos Pletho at Mistra, argued for church unity at the Florence Conference of 1438/9, and became a Catholic Cardinal, even a candidate for pope. When Nicholas V, the first pope trained in the new humanist tradition, founded the Vatican Library, he asked Bessarion to oversee the project of assembling and translating all ancient Greek literature, both Classical and Christian. As one of the most influential Greek humanists in Renaissance Italy, Bessarion gave to the Library of St. Mark’s in Venice his collection of six hundred Greek manuscripts, including his own ‘Encomium on Trebizond.’ His mathematical and astronomical manuscripts were still bearing fruit long after the Renaissance.
Cardinal Bessarion vividly described the terraces and marble halls of the old palace of the Trapezuntine emperors in the upper Citadel ending with its chapel ‘decorated with beautiful paintings and adorned with sacred offerings which, if not very numerous, are of outstanding beauty. What the church lacks in size it makes up in comeliness.’ (Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire 312-1453, 1972, p. 254) The Byzantine palace was used by their Ottoman successors until the 19th century but had fallen into ruin since then. Wall paintings of Constantine and his mother Helena with the True Cross were still visible until the tower with the chapel in it was destroyed in 1932.
During the brief occupation of Trebizond by the Russians from 1916 to 1918, a Russian archaeologist excavated the only visible tomb at the former Metropolitan Cathedral of the Chrysokephalos Panagia, where the Trapezuntine emperors had been buried. From a broken sarcophagus he extracted a decapitated skeleton, which he gave to the Greek Metropolitan Chrysanthos, who sent it to the Byzantine Museum in Athens in 1923. By the time that Gilbert Bagnani visited the Chrysokephalos cathedral in 1924, however, the tomb had been destroyed.
Gilbert admired the Byzantine church of Ayia Sophia to the west of the city. Founded by the emperor Manuel I (1238-63), the church reflects a diversity of influences appropriate to its time and place: porches inspired from Georgia, unusual relief sculptures of Adam and Eve from Armenia, and interior paintings of the Apostles thematically from Constantinople but rendered in a local style. Here was an eastern version of the Pantanassa at Mistra, revealing in its own way western, in this case Constantinopolitan, influences in the East. Gilbert managed to take several photos of the church, although the Turks did not like the taking of photographs in the region. “The Church of St Sophia is very interesting but it is far from easy to take photos, the Turks do not like it” (Thursday,19 June 1924)