In the year of our Lord 330, on a lovely May morning, A great procession came down this road which’s the highway of an ancient city called Byzantium, and the procession was led by the great Roman Emperor Constantine. He brought with him a bunch of priests, pagan and Christian ones, and they were all holding an incredible collection of relics. There were twelve baskets filled with crumbs, the residue, it was said: “of our Lord’s miracle of the loves and fishes".

 

There was the very axe that now we've made the art with. There was a statue that the emperor himself had brought secretly from Rome, a statue of the Greek God Palace. And at the exact moment prescribed by astrologists, they buried their relics, just over there, at the foot of the column, seven drums of pottery, brought from the Egyptian deserts, and Constantine renamed the city Constantinople, and claimed it as the capital of his grand new empire. And over the years, the column itself became to be seen as a relic, the Byzantines, that’s the people who lived in the city, called it Christ’s Nail, because the thought the great golden statue of Constantine upon the top had something of one of the nails in Christ Crucifixion built into it.

 

And every year on the New Year’s Day, that’s the first of September, the Byzantines turned up at the bottom of this column, and sang him as the saint Constantine, the founder of their city and the mighty empire called Byzantium.

 

Constantinople was designed to be the center of the Christian world, the center of Christ’s government on Earth. These great cups were made to hold the mystery of Christ’s blood inside the city’s churches, church’s glowing with Roman gold and ancient holy images. Images that for a thousand years flooded right though Europe and the East.

 

This saint is Byzantium’s first story, the story of how in two short centuries a dream was made. The dream that was Byzantium. Constantine, the Christian emperor, the man who took the faith of Jesus and the God of Abraham, and created the beginning of the governments and churches in which the West still trusts. He was crowned they say at York in England in 306. For 40 years he’d killed foes and family alike and when he died, people were so frightened of him that no one touched his body for a week.