Before the Roman fall of 1453 there was the Roman fall of 452. Before Venice there was Altinum. When the Huns of Attila burst into northern Italy they sacked a small provincial Roman city on the edge of an unprepossessing lagoon. Fleeing those barbaric invaders, the local Veneti of Altinum took to those treacherous waters and founded a new settlement on one of the lagoon's islands. They named it Torcello, after the Porte Torcellus, one gate of their old destroyed city and they named five other small islands around it after the five other gates: Murano, Burano, Mazzorbo, Ammianco and Constantiacum.
Torcello had a century of significance before an outbreak of malaria decimated the population and the lagoon community shifted a little further out to Venice. It's fitting therefore that when another barbarian invasion swept through the Eastern Roman Empire, many of its survivors sought refuge in the same lagoon as had done during the Western empire's decline and fall. Venice post 1453 had a thriving Greek population. One wonders if any took comfort from the dramatic success the Veneti had built from the wreckage of their sacked mother-city. They probably would never have become a maritime empire if Attila had not driven them into the lagoon. So perhaps something more would one-day rise from the ashes of their own homeland.
If any Greeks did look to Torcello for inspiration, they would have found a physical symbol in the shape of the churches which are all that remains of that settlement to this day. The Basilica of Santa Maria Asunta was first built in 639. It is the oldest building in the entire Venetian lagoon. Its current form dates to 1008 and was restored in 1423. Underneath the altar are the remains of Saint Heliodorus, first Bishop of Altinum and a friend of Saint Jerome. An Orthodox iconostasis divides the chancel from the nave with images of the Virgin and Child and The Twelve Apostles. The semi-dome in the apse behind has a 13th-century mosaic of the Virgin and Child in a field of gold, probably the work of Greek craftsmen from Constantinople who were also responsible for the Apostles in the atrium of San Marco.
But most impressive of all is the spectacular mosaic back wall containing the Crucifixion and the Last Judgement. The heads of the damned, brought to a blue-skinned Satan by his flying demons, are unmistakably Byzantine in their style and it would surely have evoked the most terrible memories in the minds of any survivors of 1453 each time they looked upon it and prayed for the souls of lost friends and family.
