Church of the Holy Trinity Taksim

With its splendid mansions, grand houses and palaces occupied by embassies, Pera, where wealthy Greeks used to live, was once a prosperous district. After the founding of the Church of the Presentation of the Mother of God, yet another church was founded, one that is now the largest still functioning.
This last was the Church of the Holy Trinity in Taksim, a vast western-style building whose foundation-stone was laid in 1867 by Patriarch Gregorios VI.
Leading members of the Greek community, among them the Imperial Architect Vassilakis Efendi Ioannides, George Zarifis, E. Eugenides, P. Stefanovic Skylitsis and G. Koronaios, secured the loan required to complete so large a building.
Millas states that during the consecration of the church thirteen years later Skylitsis, Eugenides and Zarifis, rather than make any other donation, placed the promissory notes, which they had redeemed, in the collection plate.
Apart from the churches built in Pera there were founded schools. City and Greek schools, girls schools and foreign language and commercial schools and, in addition, literary associations for women 'a education, student clubs and charitable societies.
Two of the schools, the Zographeion and the six-storey Zappeion Girls School, attended by the Greek youth of Constantinople, set the standard and gave evidence of the strength, both economic and cultural, of the Greek community in the City.
Reference must be made to the Aghiasma of Saint George, with its marble basin fed by three spouts, in the south part of the narthex of the Church of the Holy Trinity.
Unfortunately this stately church is now much damaged and work on its conservation must begin very shortly.

Ismini Kapandai
Churches in Constantinople
Nikos Ghinis – Constantinos Stratos