Halki, the Islands and the Modern Sea

After 1453 the sea remained the capital's front, and the islands kept their Greek Orthodox monasteries and villages under Ottoman rule, joined over time by Armenian and Jewish communities, so that a short ferry ride from the city led to a set of small places where three or four religious communities lived side by side. Several of the island churches and the Armenian and Jewish institutions there are still in use.

The most consequential of them is the theological school of Halki, founded in 1844 on the island of Heybeliada as the seminary of the ecumenical patriarchate. It trained the great majority of the patriarchate's clergy and many of its hierarchs. In 1971 a Turkish law brought private higher education under state control and the school was closed; the buildings and the library are maintained and the chapel is used, but no students have been admitted for more than half a century. Its reopening has been raised by successive American and European governments and by the patriarchate itself, and remains unresolved, which leaves the senior see of Orthodoxy without a seminary in its own country.

The sea has a harder physical fact under it. The North Anatolian fault runs beneath the Marmara, and the earthquake of August 1999 on its eastern end killed more than seventeen thousand people; seismologists expect another large rupture beneath the sea within decades.