Manuscript draft of lines from Part III of Czargrad
[1973]
From MS Add.10038/4/6

Riley was not in the habit of dating his worksheets and it is not known exactly when he began Part III of Czargrad. In a letter to Michael Grant, written from Leeds in 1973 but dated simply ‘Tuesday the something’, he enclosed a version of Part III, and explained some of the allusions and references in the poem. Of the three lines beginning ‘green of spring’ shown in this draft from among his own papers, he wrote that they were ‘quoted from I think John of Lydia, definitely speaking of [the] freshly-opened Hagia Sophia’ (then the Greek Orthodox basilica in Constantinople; ‘Czargrad’ is the Russian name for Constantinople).