Constantinople is where the pagan world ended, and where Dionysus met his untimely demise

There would be no global Christianity without this city, which later, under the Ottomans, came to be known as The Abode of Happiness. Constantinople is where the pagan world ended, and where Dionysus met his untimely demise. Its stony melancholy is imperial, austere and attuned to the One God, whether that of Justinian or of Mehmet the Conqueror. 'Gong-tormented' and vaporous, as Patrick Leigh Fermor famously described it in Mani, that exquisite meditation on, among many other things, the long drawn-out and misunderstood genius of Byzantium.

L. Osborne, The wet and the dry (2013), 196