Qualla: St. Helena Church

St. Helena Church: Introduction

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Azizehelena, CC BY-SA 4.0. The cornerstone for St. Helena was laid on 17 June 1904 in Karsiyaka, then a leafy suburb across the bay from Smyrna where French engineers, Italian merchants, and Levantine families with mixed European passports were building summer villas with view-bearing gardens. They needed a parish. Sultan Abdulhamid II had granted the firman two years earlier on condition that costs not exceed 1,000 Ottoman lira and that funds be raised voluntarily from the neighbourhood Catholics. The architect they chose, Raymond Charles Pere, had recently designed the clock tower at Konak that still defines the Izmir skyline. He gave them a small neo-Gothic church with a three-nave plan, twelve white Marmara marble columns, a Carrara marble altar in the apse, and pinnacles and a bifora across the facade.

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Image: Azizehelena | CC BY-SA 4.0

St. Helena Church: Why Cordelio Filled with Catholics

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Odabekcisi, CC BY-SA 4.0. Karsiyaka, known to the foreigners by its Levantine name Cordelio, sits on the north shore of the gulf of Izmir directly across from the old Smyrna waterfront. The nineteenth-century Sultans, eager to keep pace with the modernization sweeping Europe, hired specialists from across...

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Image: Odabekcisi | CC BY-SA 4.0

St. Helena Church: Don Alfonso and a Donated Plot

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Odabekcisi, CC BY-SA 4.0. Don Alfonso M. Vallery was appointed first parish priest of the new parish of Karsiyaka in 1882, and he stayed for forty-five years, longer than most marriages last. During his tenure 405 baptisms, 48 marriages, and 190 funerals were recorded in the small chapel. Count Nicola Ali...

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Image: Odabekcisi | CC BY-SA 4.0

St. Helena Church: The Building Itself

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Odabekcisi, CC BY-SA 4.0. St. Helena is built of brick, concrete, and sandstone, laid out as a basilica with three naves, no columns down the central axis, and a generous gallery above the small ones at the rear. Inside, the central nave reaches fourteen metres at its peak. Pointed arches separate the nav...

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Image: Odabekcisi | CC BY-SA 4.0

St. Helena Church: The Earth Shook

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Odabekcisi, CC BY-SA 4.0. Father Domenico Bertogli was parish priest on the night of 2 February 1974 when, at four minutes past two in the morning, the ground beneath Izmir lurched. People poured into the streets in their bedclothes. The 1974 earthquake registered nothing extraordinary by Anatolian standa...

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Image: Odabekcisi | CC BY-SA 4.0

St. Helena Church: What a Small Church Carries

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ozlmktv, CC BY-SA 4.0. St. Helena is named for the mother of Constantine the Great, the empress who, by tradition, recovered the True Cross in Jerusalem and distributed fragments of it to the eastern Christian world. The dedication is appropriate for a coastal city in Asia Minor where, by Christian tra...

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Image: Ozlmktv | CC BY-SA 4.0