Istanbul

Istanbul

I would rather write about Turkey, but sadly I haven’t seen it. I’ve only been a few miles outside the city limits of Istanbul, and Istanbul is not Turkey. That would be like saying New York is America. NYC is great, with a distillation of many things American but lacking in the finer details. By the same token, Istanbul has what I would imagine to be a greatest hits album of the rest of the country, but not those great b-sides that lead you into the heart and soul of the artist.

Istanbul is not a Turkish name but a corruption of a Greek name. It is not for nothing that there is a shared sound at the end of the names “Constantinople”, “Sevastopol” and “Istanbul”. The last syllables all are derived from the Greek word for “city”. When you walk back the name of “Istanbul”, it means quite simply, “The City”. And this makes for a good start as to how to approach it, it is a city that has evolved over three thousand years much like how an amoeba would evolve into a higher creature given enough time and outside forces that would stimulate mutation.

Let’s start with ancient history. There was a body of water known as the Black Sea today. The connection to the Mediterranean may well have formed when a sill of rock formed from the considerable volcanic and seismic activity of the region was broken through and an internal sea like the Caspian suddenly had an outlet into the larger world ocean. In Greek Mythology, the point at which this occurred was known as the Scylla and Charybdis, the two rocks on either side of the waterway that would slam shut with disastrous result for those trying to pass. (This was also referenced by Sting in “Wrapped Around Your Finger” and was a nonsense line for me until I found this out.) Some say that this was located between the toe of Italy and Sicily, but I think I prefer it at the outlet of the Black Sea.

Istanbul was Constantinople, which was Byzantion before history plucked it from obscurity to be the site of the new capital of the greatest empire in the world. Byzantion was a city of a few thousand Greeks occupying the western side of a passage of water connecting two massive bodies of water a few miles to the south of the famed rocky gates from the Odyssey. Its position as a crossroads for both land and sea traffic was not lost on Constantine the Great in the fourth century. He was looking for a place to consolidate his power; a place where the past was buried and he could build his legacy.

Okay, here goes, a very quick distillation of late Roman history. Diocletian was the emperor who tried to save Rome from a hundred years of civil war because of the lack of well-defined succession from one ruler to the next. He saw the whole of the empire as ungovernable, so he cut it in half and named his best friend as emperor of the east (the “Augustus”) with a sub-emperor who would be the successor (the “Caesar”). When a Caesar moved up, he there would be appointed a new Caesar. Constantine was the son of a Caesar who was cut out of his right by some inside baseball, and as luck would have it he had the biggest, brassiest set of ovis in the empire. He gathered his loyal soldiers and marched from Germany to Rome and defeated his enemies at the Milvian Bridge. The night before the battle he had a vision of the chi-rho, the Greek letters that form the initials of Jesus Christ, and a voice said, “By this sign, conquer”. He had his forces paint a cross on their shields and the rest is one of those mutations that started to turn the amoeba into the multicellular creature.

Constantine had never lived in Rome and had no loyalty to the city. He first issued the Edict of Milan, which officially ended persecution of Christians, then he scouted out a place to make his own. He had several factors to weigh out. First, Rome was poorly placed to administer its territory. With all of the wealth in the east, it had become a backwater in its own empire. Secondly, there was very firmly entrenched oligarchic system that put too many parties in a place where they could aspire to power, causing the turmoil that lead to recurrent civil wars. Finally, it was increasingly difficult to defend with the wealth of the empire coming from the hinterlands and no real resources on the peninsula of Italy. Any holder of the city was almost by definition impoverished unless he had another power base elsewhere.

He took the power base of his last rival Severus Maximus and made it home. The small provincial city of Byzantion was chosen as the site of The Second Rome, Constantinople. When the capital was moved, the bureaucracy needed to move with it. To have a place in the new hierarchy, you needed to be a Christian. There was a simultaneous physical uprooting of the bureaucrats, and a spiritual replanting to go with it. Within a few generations, the old religion was displaced by the new because there was no future in the old, professionally. Another effect of the uprooting was that the Roman way instantly became a veneer over the Greek and in short order that veneer was worn away until “Romans” spoke Greek, thought Greek, and lost all but nominal connection to their roots. (This remained true all the way through the 1400’s, when on of the last emperors became royally insulted by being called “Greek”. He was Roman.)

It is ludicrous to try to encapsulate the history of the Byzantines in less than a three-volume set, so I will hit a few pivotal highlights. Constantine placed his imprimatur on both the history of his own realm and that of the nascent Christian church, though ironically he wasn’t baptized until he was on his deathbed. (The better to have every single one of his sins washed away, e.g. killing both his wife and son. Obviously God could be gamed.) Under his watch, the essence of Christian canon was formed in the Nicene Creed. This was a tool by which orthodoxy could be established in Christian practice, and by definition heresy could be excluded. By my calculations, then, unified Christianity started on Constantine’s accession in 312, and ended a dozen years later in 325 when the Nicean Council made believers in Arianism (a variant that saw Jesus as a creature, and not coexistent with God the Father) into excommunicates. To oversimplify to the extreme, this eventually alienated a large segment of the Christian church in modern day Iraq and Egypt and eventually made the area fertile for Islam several hundred years later.

The fortunes of the Eastern Roman Empire ebbed and flowed. The western half was lost in the fifth century though was nearly regained by the next great emperor of Rome, Justinian. His own reign was nearly ended when the equivalent of teabaggers rioted and nearly destroyed the city by fire. Justinian was packing his bags when his wife Theodora demanded that he grow a pair or else, which inspired him to invite the rioters into the hippodrome, slam the gates shut and slay them to a man, some thirty thousand of them. (Obama, take note.) This Operation Sudden Manhood was to form the mold that shaped the rest of his reign. He commissioned his great general Belisarius to go get some, and he didn’t stop until he had reconquered Libya, Mediterranean Spain, Sicily, and darn near all of Italy. Belisarius only stalled when two things happened. First of all, Theodora was whispering into the emperor’s ear about how Belisarius was probably going to overthrow him, and then a devastating plague that is still of unknown origin depopulated the empire likely to the tune of 40%. Coffers empty from war, frontiers decimated of troops, his gambit collapsed from within starting what Gibbons termed Rome’s long slow collapse into the night.

The low point occurred some 250 years before the end, when in 1204 a crusade that was ostensibly waged to support the Christians of the Levant was sidetracked to the gates of Constantinople. An internecine dispute in succession left the victor with an unpayable debt to the crusaders who put him in power, which gave justification for the Venetian-backed pirates to dissemble a thousand years of accumulated wealth and ship it to Venice in boxes. Several decades of Latin rule removed the rest of Byzantium’s mojo, and by the time the Greeks regained their throne there was just a shadow left of what had been The New Rome.

That should have been the end, but it wasn’t. The new Byzantine Empire did not have the resources of the previous incarnation but made up for this by having its own renaissance. The visual arts were served by a new generation of artisans who made frescoes and mosaics, some of which last to this day. This was accompanied by another political implosion as the Turks gradually enveloped them. Initially they could be partners, then the Greeks would be vassals, and finally the great walls that had held against Atilla and King Stephen of the Bulgars and the caliphate could hold no further when the cannon made them obsolete. Near the end, the emperor said that Byzantium did not need an emperor but a mayor. In 1453, Emperor Constantine XI died on the walls of the city trying to repel Mehmet the Conqueror. There was no body found, and Rome was gone, but in truth Mehmet assumed control of a city that already had been nearly in ruins from lack of maintenance.

As the crescent moon displaced the cross, there should have been a clean break but in truth there wasn’t at least not for another half millennium. A great creative force was turned loose on the world in the Diaspora of Byzantium. It could be argued that the Renaissance as we know it wouldn’t have happened without the dispersal of knowledge. Certainly, individuals like El Greco of Spain (“The Greek”) took their vision to new places. And in the city of Istanbul (still commonly called “Constantinople” into the 20^th century), a sizable Greek minority remained active all the way through the Ottoman rulers, only ending with the ethnic cleansing of both Greece and Turkey in the early 1920’s. Nearly 1000000 Turks were driven from Greece, and over 1.5 million Greeks were forced to leave Turkey. Towns that had never been Turkish had to be abandoned when the only people who ever lived there were exiled to their “home country”. At the collapse of the Ottomans until the rise of modern Turkey, Constantinople was Greek again in 1922 for a few weeks.  Turkey pushed back under Ataturk and kept pushing until there were almost no Greeks left on the east shore of the Aegean.

And so now we have Istanbul.  It is a layer cake of a city, where new discoveries are still made because every stratum holds a secret. New chambers are still being found of the Byzantine palaces. Excavation for a new tunnel across the Bosporus turned up evidence of a Greek port. The progress of construction of the subway is halted by new archeological discoveries. History is not only contained underground but also even above ground, in plain sight. The cannibalism of the old to make the new gives you Roman temples made into Christian churches into Turkish mosques.

My own fascination with this era started when I was exposed to a show on Byzantium by John Roemer. Before The History Channel had much of a catalog, they would repeat a show over and over, and I must have watched the entire series several times. I read a three-volume history of Byzantium, and biographies of Justinian and an account of the Fourth Crusade that destroyed Constantinople. I listened to several courses from The Teaching Company by Professor Kenneth Harl. This chunk of history I knew nothing about at all, as if it was from another planet, enraptured me. And then my nephew Tom moves to Istanbul right when I was at the zenith of Byzantium frenzy.

The Bosporus

Tom had gotten a job at a private high school. He lived in the suburb of Arnavutkoy, about ten miles north of the center of the city. He had gotten a French girlfriend who was also a teacher. A connection was made, and my Istanbul dreams began to take shape. In the Spring, we flew from the US to Ataturk Airport where Tom awaited us. The cab drove us through the rolling hills of northern Istanbul to his apartment above a house overlooking the Bosporus. Tom left his place to us and stayed with Carine and suddenly we had a home in Turkey.

From the deck off the living room we looked down on the town and the waterway. You would see Russian tankers and container ships go by in slow succession. On a neighboring hill you could see what looked to be a modern estate of some sort, with what could be offices nearly built into the hill it topped. On the other side of the hill was Arnavutkoy proper. It would take about 20 minutes to walk down then up then down again to reach the downtown. As it had initially been its own entity but only recently was phagocytosed into Istanbul proper, it still operated like a village where everyone knew everyone. It wasn’t too long until we also became part of the landscape. “Oh, there go those two Americans. They must be related to the tall, skinny blond one.” Soon the butcher and the barber and the candy store guy knew who we were. A few steps further and we were at the waterfront where a bus would hug the line between the hills and the water to bring us to the Sultanahmet neighborhood, from which it all extends.

When you think Istanbul, this is what you speak of. You have a triangle formed by the Sea of Marmara to the south, the Golden Horn to the north, and the Theodosian walls to the west. The eastern tip of the triangle holds the most famous sights: the Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, and the Topkapi Palace. To the west of the Blue Mosque are the remains of the Hippodrome, which include the obelisks that were the center of the racecourse and the south end of the great curve as a lap was half completed.

You are supposed to leave your most outstanding feature for last, but here it leads. The Hagia Sophia is one of the great feats of mankind. The name means “Holy Wisdom” in Greek, and is the third structure to stand on this site. The first we know almost nothing about and lasted just over forty years. The second was a grand cathedral that had lasted just over a century and was destroyed by the riots that nearly unseated Justinian. The one that we have today was completed in 537 and was designed not by trained architects but by theoreticians who had never built a building before. Two crews worked competitively day and night and one of the grandest buildings ever was completed in just five years.  Justinian’s comment as he entered the church for the first time: “Solomon, I have outdone thee.”

The focal point is the dome that is suspended 180 feet above the door. Any building is a balance between forces, vertically and horizontally. Vertical is easy. The resistance to the vertical is the earth, though a strong foundation is needed also. Compression is easy, stones compress just fine. The trick is horizontal. If a force goes outward, something has to push back. In the Notre Dame, that role is filled by the flying buttress. In the Hagia Sophia, it’s the pendentive. The dome is supported by a half-moon arch, supported by another half-moon, repeated again and again. One arch supports the next until the outward forces are distributed many different directions, while the downward forces are directed to the earth. The pitch of the original dome was too shallow resulting in unsupported downforce, but a second steeper dome spread more downforce outward into the pendentives. Hard to visualize, harder still to explain.

Once you get past the architecture, you get to the purpose of the basilica, and the purpose of all such buildings. It is supposed to rock your world. The quote from the early Russian embassy to Constantinople reflects the desired effect: “Surely God must dwell in this building.” The mosaics accumulated from the early 800’s over the next five hundred years or so. Some were magnificent, like the Theotokus over the altar, the Virgin and Child. Some were almost laughable, such as the small mosaic in a gallery of an emperor of such meanness and ill repute that he barely registers a footnote in the history of the empire. Others are of archangels and bishops of Constantinople. One of the great works of religious art features Mary, Jesus and John the Baptist, instantly recognizable.

Other non-symbolic features are worth taking note of. The magnificent columns of Egyptian porphyry, a maroon marble, bearing the great weight of the galleries. In one particular column, moisture collects and can be felt in a hole in the stone, supposedly tears of angels. Two giant marble ewers are on either side of the people’s entry to the sanctuary. In the floor under the dome but not in the center is the Omphalion, Greek for “navel”. In this spot, each new emperor would be crowned, be he gaining his crown by inheritance or murder.  From this spot the rest of the world emanates.

The Omphalion

After the conquest by Mehmet, due respect was paid to the building as Christians are “people of the book” and are owed some deference. The mosaics were plastered over as Muslims consider them graven images. Other alterations were the construction of a pulpit for the prayer leaders, a mihrab so you know which direction to pray, and circular plaques that show in Arabic the names of Allah, Mohammad, the first four caliphs and two grandsons of the Prophet. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed with the secular Turkish Republic taking its place, the mosque was converted into a museum. The plaster was removed and the nearly forgotten mosaics were once again on display.

After all the history and architecture and analysis, there is one thing that is missing in my description. The awe. The soul. The wonder of a building 1500 years old, still magnificent and miraculous. The knowledge that it was the largest enclosed space on earth for 1000 years.  The connection with people long, long since dead but still hearing the echoes of their chants. As you walk through the door that only the Emperor could use, see the wear in the stone floor where you see the foot marks of guards from the last millennium, and know that if you emptied the room of people it would look almost the same as it did when Jesus was a recent historical figure. I can say this truly: it is the most extraordinary place I have ever been.

Forgive me if I don’t wax as poetic about the rest of the district. Take away the Ayasofya (Turkish name), and the rest would be almost as unbelievable. Across a garden and some buildings for public baths, you find the Blue Mosque. It was built for Mehmet the Conqueror. I must say, it was the architectural equivalent of penis envy. This is not intentionally denigrating the building. And yet it is Mehmet trying to match Justinian, and for my money not quite getting there. The domes inside are just as magnificent, and the pastel blues make one think you have entered a Wedgewood teapot. On the floor is the largest Persian rug you have ever laid eyes on, and iron chandeliers hang from phenomenal heights to be almost reachable by a tall person. Proper respect for Allah must be paid, modest clothes are worn, a scarf for women to cover the hair, and shoes left in an organized manner as you enter. I suppose you should really do it right by washing before you enter. Then there’s that teenager in the hot pants and tank top, smacking gum and taking flash photos, talking loudly, making me ashamed to be a Westerner.

As you leave the mosque, you once again enter the square where once stood The Milion, of which only a single vertical stone remains. This is the great gate under which you passed to enter the domain of the Hagia Sophia. From this point, all mile markers of Byzantium are measured. It is important to remember that, as you stand in front of this landmark, that, no, you really don’t want to help that young man learn English. It is to here that the carpet salesmen on just the far side of the Blue Mosque dispatch their sons to “help them learn English” and next thing you know, you are sipping tea with someone and getting ready to part with a few thousand dollars for a carpet. Resist the urge, but be polite.

As you turn to the south (and left) beside the mosque is the plain that was once occupied by the Hippodrome. It was like the Super Bowl and the World Cup rolled into one, with Las Vegas allowed on the grounds. The four great hooligans clubs, the Reds, the Greens, the Whites and the Blues, represented different segments of society. Political influence was bought and sold there, membership in the clubs were a birthright, and fanaticism was expected. A lap started at the Milion and took one turn for home. In the middle of the racecourse were two obelisks and a sculpture of a three-headed snake. The first obelisk survives nearly unchanged today. It was removed from Egpyt and brought up the hill from the waterfront with great difficulty. It has been in its spot for 1600 years. It was in its previous home in Egypt for 3000 years. (I love how my nephew puts it: “It was brought here because it was old.”) The limestone base is worn but its story is still evident, with sculptures of the emperor ruling over a thankful populace over a groveling, defeated mob. In contrast, the marble of the old obelisk looks perfect, none the worse for wear of 4500 years.

The other two objects d’art in the median of the horse track didn’t fare nearly as well. The other obelisk is of more contemporary construction, a marble veneer over a brick infrastructure. Well, the marble was shipped off to Venice or was used to build new mosques after the Fall, and the remainder is just pretty ugly. The three-headed snake did better until fairly recently. It was a bronze hollow shell, sort of like a metal chocolate Easter bunny. One night around the year 1700, a drunken Polish envoy took to it with something like a sledgehammer leaving us with the necks but no heads. Ignominious, I know (if true).

The Emperor's Window

The area south and east of here is a neighborhood of hilly streets and small houses, but was built on the ruins of the Great Palace, where Constantine held court. You walk down the street, and in between wooden houses, there it is, a wall of the palace, scree scattered about. You go to the major road at the foot of the seawalls, and there is the last remaining gate to the palace from the water, where the ruler would board his galley. A pathway through the lower part of this leads into the nether regions below the palace, a place where I was not brave enough to go but I am sure lead to chambers as yet undiscovered. As you walk toward the west from the Blue Mosque, you descend past the rounded end of the Hippodrome, with arches that would have lead into the lower rooms for whatever purpose.

As you walk just a little further downhill from here, you encounter a church even older than the Ayasofya, though only by a few years. Its original name was The Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, two soldier martyrs, though now its known as the Kuçukayasofya (the Little Ayasophia). It is a mosque but a closer look shows a church that lies just under the surface. It has a dome that is suspended over a rectangular worship space, with galleries above for women to pray in. There is a elevated lectern for the prayer leader, and a beautiful blue carpet underfoot. But as you look at the ring of stone at the base of the elevated gallery, it is carved in Greek, a tribute to Justinian, Theodora, and Saint Sergius (for some reason Bacchus was omitted).

Just outside are a few things to note. First of all, the commuter train runs mere feet away from the upper colonnades’ windows, causing a goshawful racket. Second, on one side of the mosque is a cemetery for Muslim faithful. Turkish tombstones are topped with a turban that would reflect the design of whatever guild or social rank the deceased was a member of. Finally, out the front door is a lovely garden where you would perform your ablutions, and now has a quaint teahouse with a very welcoming man to serve you with a smile and a story.

Returning to the Ayasofya, there is another church immediately behind the great cathedral that is a forgotten little sister, the Hagia Eirene, or the Holy Peace. As ornate and over-the-top as the more famous sister is as understated as the other is. The reason for this is actually a good lesson historically. There are no mosaics in the Ayasofya before 832 because they were destroyed in the Iconoclastic Crisis. In the 700’s, Justinian’s misadventures left the Byzantines Empire broke and depopulated. The Arian Apostasy had made large segments of the empire disloyal to the central government. This made for low hanging fruit for the next great human wave, the force of history known as Islam. As the frontiers were collapsing and defeat followed defeat, a crisis of confidence made a sizable minority wonder whether graven images were being worshipped by Orthodoxy. It seemed that whoever was in power was on the opposite side of the argument from his predecessor, so art would be destroyed then redone then destroyed again. The Hagia Eirene was emptied of its art during this time period, and unlike her sister was never re-adorned. It has a simple, plain cross in its apse and is denuded otherwise. It is only open on rare occasions for concerts as its acoustics are supposedly superb.

A little further down a tree-lined drive are the gates into another era and another peoples. The Turks were nomadic tribesmen from central Asia who were swept ahead of the tsunami called the Golden Horde. They started to move into Anatolia around the turn of the millennium, making their mark permanent at the battle of Manzikert. The Seljuk Turks were the initial wave of Central Asians in the region, and the battle was a disaster for the Byzantines, a roll of the dice where nearly their entire army was destroyed. The Seljuks were decimated by the Horde (which actually protected the Byzantines), but a few generations later a minor band of Turks known as the Ottomans found themselves across the Bosporus from the Greeks, then behind them up Gallipoli, then finally closing in on the north. As the last vestiges of Rome desperately held on, eventually the wave crashed and Byzantium was washed away.

This left the Ottomans as the holders of the New Rome, the significance of which was not lost on them. They went from a minor tribe of Turks to the most powerful force in the juggernaut of Islam. Soon they held suzerainty from Afghanistan to Morocco. With the title of sultan came the position of caliph, that is, religious ruler of the Islamic world (a position held all the way through WWI and since that time vacant). Anyway, at the end of the tree-lined boulevard is the guard gate to the pleasure palace of Topkapi. Behind these gates were the sultan, his harem, his eunuchs to mind the harem, and then the descendants of the sultan. Of the males, one would become the next sultan and the rest strangled so as to not rival the new monarch.

The palace grounds are much more like a college campus than a singular palace. There was the room where the sultan would hold court, the living quarters that included the harem, a library, a building that made me think of a three-season porch as it was intended to be open aired, with low benches and ornate pillows. In the armory, there are exhibits featuring kaftans worn during different eras, uniforms of the Janissaries, even Mohammad’s sword. I know I should have had more reverence for this than I did but it was a weapon certainly held by one of history’s most influential men, but it was a period of history that just hasn’t struck me as interesting, at least for now. Lastly, a walk further out to the point of land overlooking the nexus of the Golden Horn and the Bosporus, to a gazebo where a sultan could have some alone time.

On the grounds of the Topkapi is a place not to be missed, the Istanbul Museum of Archeology. It is quite simply one of the foremost museums of antiquity on earth. Certainly the British Museum has an impressive collection, but as it was from a British penchant for outright thievery, I find the Istanbul collection to be more authentic. After all, within the bounds of the Ottoman Empire were seven ancient empires, the Egyptian, the Hebrew, the Mesopotamian, the Hittite, the Armenian, the Roman, and the Greek, and probably a few more I’m not thinking of. The thought always strikes me when I am in the presence of figures carved from life, just a life that ended several thousand years ago: We haven’t changed very much. Maybe a little taller and fatter, but still two eyes from a brain of about the same size, arms and legs, hungers and drives likely identical. We still have a propensity to form tribes, to fight and kill yet be kind to strangers, love children and nature.

You can find further examples of archeological preservation, but on a more scattered and haphazard manner. When you are displacing a previous culture, what it held holy often serve as building blocks of other structures, some holy, some vulgar or common. Pillars of temples become pillars of churches. Marble from palaces is recycled into mosques. You can actually see the scree from Byzantine structures scattered hither and yon in parks and along streets. As the culture you are in becomes seemingly the natural rulers of your region, the ancient can be as much as forgotten. That is what happened when a Westerner heard of Istanbulians fishing from a hole in their basements in the 1700’s. The cisterns of Constantinople were the forgotten marvels underfoot.

The cisterns were a practicality that served multiple purposes. As the city was on a peninsula with an impregnable system of walls protecting from both the sea and the land, it needed water. Romans being Romans, they built aqueducts that still stand tall to this day, bringing water from the hinterlands. This served as a weak link, though, because in times of siege this could be shut off. A second problem was the hills that formed the peninsula (supposedly seven, just like in Rome). The engineers of early Constantinople came up with an ingenious solution. Raise the valley floor and make the new “ground” a platform under which would be reservoirs of cool, salt-free water, a nearly unlimited supply. The building materials could be found all around, the remains of Greek temples, scavenged and used to serve the Christian Empire.

The Basilica Cistern is the grandest of the lot. You pay your entrance fee and walk down below the houses and restaurants. The air suddenly become cool and moist, and it is quite dark with the exception of what serves as mood lighting, colored floods off in the distance. Every ten yards or so there is a thirty foot tall column from the water surface to the ceiling, disappearingly high.  You walk on wooden walkways like you were on one long backyard deck. You snake among the pillars, eerie space music floats Anya-like in the damp atmosphere, strategically placed lights bouncing off the water below. As you get to the far end of the chamber, you see what must have been a statement by the Christian Byzantines. There were two Medusa heads that must have been part of a sculpture placed at the base of adjacent columns. One is sideways and the other is upside down, probably to show that the old gods were now subjugated to the new.

The Golden Horn, actually an arm off the Bosporus, separates the old city from the newer district of Galata (new means it dates from around 1200). Crossing this is the Galata Bridge, a crossing of multiple purposes. It of course is how cars and light rail cross the water. Foot traffic also joins this vehicular procession. Under the road deck, there are restaurants of all sorts trying to pull in the tourists. Along the sidewalk above, you have to take extreme caution because if there’s one thing an Istanbulian loves to do is fish, with great long poles and the line going eighty feet down to the water.  At the south end of the bridge are the “New Mosque” (naturally the oldest in the city) and the Egyptian Bazaar, commonly known as the Spice Bazaar. You step inside and you are amidst a riot of color, the yellows of the saffron and coriander, the greens of the leafy parsleys, the bright reds of the paprika, and the brown sumac. You have large containers of dried apricots and dates, and nuts of all sorts. One thing that you can get here better than any other place in the city is tea.

Turks love tea. No doubt about it. No sale is complete until you have a small glass of tea with a lump of sugar with the proprietor. The glass is about the size of a double shot, and there is no handle. You grab it gingerly by the rim and sip. We don’t drink enough tea to speak of, generally it’s a Sunday afternoon thing in the winter, so we still have Turkish tea we haven’t even opened. Even so, it’s glorious stuff and when in Istanbul you will drink tea by the gallon. Anyway, you get all varieties of English and smoked teas, apple and mint teas, tea with jasmine, rose, orange, lemon, and I am sure many others.

As you exit the south of the smaller Egyptian Bazaar you are lead up hill by the tide of people through narrow streets, delivery vans picking their way through the pedestrians, very old men carrying remarkably large bales of cloth up the hill. The last time we were there we saw a case of gridlock that is still likely to be there to this day, and nobody was moving an inch. Up, up past stores selling labels to be sewn into clothing like Armani, Dior, etc., obviously not going onto any products carrying that name honestly. There were also beauty supply shops, and shoe stores with cheap imports with four stripes instead of three, swoosh stripes that weren’t quite right. My favorite store had circumcision suits. Mannequins of eight-year old boys with ornate white outfits with red scarves and a turban with a gold brooch at the forehead. I think the mannequin had a vague look of disquiet like something real bad was about to happen. I don’t think I would have been fooled. “Mom, keep the outfit, I like my little friend exactly as he is.” The bright red flourishes should be your first hint that something is rotten in Denmark.

Seemingly out of the chaos below, you walk into a passageway and before you know it, you are in the Grand Bazaar. Business has been happening hear since Byzantine times, probably in one form or the other for 1500 years. At the north end you have one silversmith after the other, gleaming tea services under bright spotlights and behind quite solid looking glass windows. Beyond this you walk into the leather section, dozens of stores with sneakers, others with Russian icons, carpets, cloth. Barkers in front of many of the stores I am sure can hawk goods in two dozen languages, often with quite witty lines. “Sir, your wife looks cold, could she use this nice leather coat?” “Sir, let me please show you something you don’t need!” Often a good line brings you in just to show appreciation. Of course, negotiation is the whole point, but I always feel a bit slimy when I do it. Here I am negotiating down by a few coins when I have more than he will ever have, but it’s expected. It’s part of the game.

Between the tourist shops selling snowy globes of the Ayasofya and evil eyes by the hundreds, soccer jerseys usually of Man U or AC Milan, it gets very bewildering and you can get lost quite easily. I have one favorite section that I always seem to find, the book bazaar. It’s not that I can read Turkish, but books are always comforting things to me no matter what the language. There are stores with specialties like computer books or language. At least two stores sell prints from very old Turkish books. I purchased something that I have in my office, a print of several Turkish surgeons autopsying some poor soul. Even though my print is from the early 1700’s, I have seen several other similar prints and the little stamp in the bottom corner from the Turkish government assures me that they let it out of the country and hence, worthless. I also purchased this big, beautiful map of Turkey that I have on my wall in the office.

As you emerge from the south end of the Grand Bazaar, you enter into an oval shaped square (is that possible?), and at the center is a tall tower that has been under renovation for both of our visits. It’s certainly tall enough to get your attention but not apparently anything that extraordinary, but stop and take a moment, it is. Constantine the Great himself placed the tower. They say that within the porphyry drums is placed a piece of the true cross, crumbs from the loaves and fishes, relics from the two thieves crucified with Christ, and just to be safe a small statue of the Greek goddess Athena. It stands on the street that has not moved since 330 AD. At the base marched triumphant armies and despised enemies, rioters, religious processions, and the Crusaders of 1204 hauling their booty to Venice, and the conquering Turks in 1453. At the western gate where the street ends was known as the Golden Gate, through which Belisarius passed as the returning victor from war in Tunisia at the ruins of Carthage.

Following the street westward, you pass under the aqueduct of Valens, miraculously standing for 1500 years of earthquakes and taxis jockeying at its feet, past the University and into more of a normal city scene of auto dealerships, small corner shops and apartments, but a few miles west looms a continuous wall that reflected the wrath of Atilla to the west, bouncing “The Scourge Of God” all the way to Italy to conquer a city with a less imposing wall, Rome. The Theodosian Walls were built originally in the 400’s and was the key reason why Byzantium withstood siege after siege, all after the gold of Empire was contained therein but impossible to be extracted. Along the battlements, the icon of The Virgin would be paraded, giving heart to the defenders but dread to her enemies. The walls had been damaged to the point of being useless by a major quake during Theodosian’s reign as Atilla was carousing the Balkans, but every available hand in the city were mobilized and by the time Atilla showed on the horizon, it was reconstructed to an even higher standard. At the north end of the wall was built the last palace of Byzantium, the Blachernae palace, from the 1300’s. There are only a few windows left above ground (though I am sure there is more palace below the surface). What I find curious is why one would build a palace for the monarch along the city walls, unless one of the things you are protecting yourself against are the city’s residents.

As I said previously, after the Latin conquest of 1204, Byzantium was never the same politically. It retained some territory along the Black and Aegean Seas but those areas are not producers of natural resources or agriculture, so it was against all odds that it survived another 200 years. Even so, artistically the Byzantines of that era produced some of the most spectacular works of religious art known to man. Many of the Ayasofya mosaics date from this period, but there is a little church that holds some of the most spectacular mosaics and frescoes a few blocks from the walls, Saint Savior in Chora. Like the Ayasofya, it was a church turned mosques turned museum.

One thing should be restated: there was no “Saint Savior” in Chora or any other place. Like the Hagia Sophia is often wrongly called “Saint Sophia”, the words for “holy” and “Saint” are identical in Greek. More properly it would be called “Holy Savior”, but for some reason nobody does. Along the narthex are mosaics of Christ and Mary participating in several bible stories. There is a large mosaic of a prostrate man in a turban (the benefactor of what was a small rural church) presenting the facility to Jesus. Along an inner narthex there are small domes with Christ and Mary in the centers, and apostles along the pie slices radiating outward.

Along a side gallery there are frescoes picturing saints. As one advances to the end of the hallway, the ceiling depicts time and space rolling up like a scroll, and at the far end is a depiction of Jesus pulling Adam and Even from the grave, and other arising into heaven, with the damned groveling at their feet. The building has suffered seven hundred years of deterioration and is in a constant state of renovation, but the frescoes had been refreshed and they pop out of the walls.

The sanctuary shows more aging than the rest of the walls. Whatever mosaic was in the dome is long since lost and I am not sure whether there is evidence as to what was there. There is a mosaic around the emphasis of the virgin being assumed into heaven at her death, but maybe it wasn’t as inspired or maybe after seeing Action Jesus in the gallery raising the dead and time rolling up like a scroll, the Assumption just doesn’t have the same pizzazz.

As you leave the peninsula, you also leave behind most of the Greek character of the city. At the north end of the Galata Bridge was a suburb composed alternately of Venetians or Genoans, depending on who the Emperor was in bed with at that time. There was a protective wall that didn’t last too long, but the only remnant was this watchtower at the peak of the hill. It still dominates the skyline to the north of the old city, and as you climb the steep streets and steps to the base, you end the main commercial district of Istanbul. The main street through the Galata district is for foot traffic only, and it is also remarkably devoid of Westerners. As you walk past high fashion women’s stores and kebab shops and cafes, about two miles of unabashed capitalism. Toward the north end of this pedestrian mall are the “balak” restaurants, the fish shops. Now, Turks are nomads from the steppes of central Asia, and their ancestors had the habit of salting their meat under the saddles of their horses, but once they met the Bosporus, everything changed. Fish is now the food of choice. Sometime big fish are set on your plate, simply presented with sumac and lemon and yogurt. The small ones are deep fried and consumed whole, head, tail and everything between. A crunch and they’re gone. Musicians troll the tables both inside and outside. One evening we were seated next to what appeared to be a very wealthy man feting a colleague with fish and raki, a particularly devilish liquor that is flavored with anise like ouzo. It is clear until you mix it with water, which turns it milky white. A few of those have even me signing in Turkish.

The northern end of street places you at the heart of commercial and secular Turkey, Taksim Square. We had an apartment just off of this on our second visit that we rented from a grad student of the arts and a Facebook friend, Pinar. The complex where the apartment is, is like a lot of places there; a cool old building next to a derelict one and then a modern hotel and a bank, a mishmash of styles and eras. The square itself is the primo meeting spot for the young. If you want to see someone there, you just keep texting each other until you happen at the same spot. At the far end of the square is a state library where there was a humongous cloth banner of Ataturk, as it was the anniversary of his death during our visit.

To compare Ataturk to George Washington is not fair. George is honored as
“Father Of His Country” but Ataturk is much more than this. Ataturk is the singular star of the Turkish state. George had a panoply of stars in the sky with him, the Jefferson’s and the Adams’s. And yet, we poke fun at him. Wooden teeth. I cannot tell a lie. He is featured in ads on TV at least annually in February. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk is the subject of secular shrines. His tomb in Ankara is as grand as Napoleon’s in Paris. I believe it is even illegal to speak ill of him.

On the morning of the anniversary of his death at 11 AM, air raid siren blare and every Turk (or almost) stops wherever he is, bows his head for a minute and a city that was bustling a few seconds before stops where it is. Traffic stops, the only thing moving are the birds. Mary and I stood at the window of the apartment amazed at the power of the man seventy years after his death. Later that day, we went to take the public transit, and all the school kids had a large button with a black ribbon, the visage of Ataturk wisely looking out at us. Along the wall aside the main street paralleling the Bosporus are billboards showing Ataturk as leader, diplomat, humanist, and the embodiment of what he envisioned every Turk should be.

Mustafa Kemal was a man of extraordinary vision who had the good fortune of being exactly where history needed him. As the “sick man of Europe”, the Ottoman Empire had gone from being at Vienna’s gates to a poor reflection of its former power over the course of the 19^th century. The ruling sultan had become a cartoonish character who often would stay occupied in the harem while the empire fell further behind its rivals to the west. By the beginning of the 20^th century, a new generation of Army officers known as the Young Turks had cornered power from the ineffectual sultan and incompetent general staff.

Kemal was not in the initial center of power. He had made his fame by being a mid-level officer in the Gallipoli campaign by ordering his men to die where they were instead of retreating at the mere threat of British and Anzac forces. This stabilized the lines and showed Turks that they could stand up against the Brits. As the war was ending and the frontiers were collapsing around them and the hated Greeks had occupied Constantinople, Kemal stepped into the power vacuum and rallied his countrymen in counterattack and reclaimed Istanbul.

Kemal’s vision for a new Turkey had to rise from the ashes of the Ottoman state. He banned the turban that served as a badge of social class; now the fez became the headgear for the new Turkey. He declared that written Turkish be in Latin script, not Arabic (and hence giving rise to a plethora of umlauts and cedillas). He made it law that everyone had to take a last name, rather than a first name and a rank or other descriptor. He totally removed any Islamist overtones to the government. The new government was absolutely secular.

The palaces of the sultan became property of the state, the most over-the-top of which was the newest, Dolmabahce Palace on the banks of the Bosporus, at the bottom of the hill from our apartment. It is known above all else for being extreme in every way imaginable. While the Ottoman Empire was crumbling and the sultans became more characatures of themselves, the palace was ornate beyond all taste. It had flourishes on its flourishes, as gaudy as rococo could be. When the new Turkey replaced the old Ottomans, though, this became the residence of the ultimate Turk, Ataturk. And all I can say of him is that he was and still is revered by his country. And the bed that he died of cirrhosis after years of drink in an upstairs chamber was covered to overflowing with flowers the day after the anniversary of his passing. As you approached the room, you hear a recording, his high-pitched voice exhorting his people in Turkish. The tour guide stood with sadness, almost as if he had died last week.

I walked through the rest of the castle not paying much attention to the grand halls, somehow feeling the sorrow a nation still felt for its lost father, if only as seen with a poor mirror. We went to the gift shop where there was the standard tourist fare of the Ayasophia in minimature and shiny tourist publications of the Blue Mosque, but I was drawn to the collector’s plates with the profile of Ataturk. Caught up in the spirit of the day, I chose a very nice one. The old man behind the counter saw the reverence I had and I tried to communicate in my poor Turkish at how he seemed to be a great man. Mary told me that as I left he touched his heart that someone who wasn’t Turkish seemed to finally understand.

On our last full day of our second visit to Istanbul, my nephew Tom was able to spend a day with us. We caught the passenger ferry up the Bosporus. We rode it north, crisscrossing the straits several times, from the port of Ortakoy near the Dolmabahce. As you head north you cross under two suspension bridges that connect Europe with Asia. This is the only place where there is such a clear divide between the continents. I suppose that the division is as much spiritual and cultural rather than physical, but bouncing back and forth between the two great continents as we transported ordinary people visiting relatives on the other side is extraordinary. We were actually in the only city that straddles two continents. As you head north you pass Tom’s old home of Arnavutkoy. You would see the yalis (pronounced “yowles”) the wooden summer homes right on the water’s edge on both sides. Now, many are in poor repair, yet others retain the noveau riche dock for the Chris Craft wooden powerboats. Beyond Arnavutkoy on the west side is the Rumeli Castle, built by Mehmet the Conqueror as the final link in the chain of fortresses surrounding poor Constantine XI, cutting off what little life remaining in Rome.

As we stood on the deck of the ferry, crossing from port to starboard and back, in the sun and the wind depending on what there was to see in this grand old waterway, the hills became tree-covered on both sides as the city finally withdrew, all 20 million souls of Istanbul. The last town on the Asia side has the last port to welcome the ferry and a few fish restaurants neighbor the quayside. We walked up narrow paths, past farms and gardens and small houses and eventually came to the remains of an old Genoan fortress of which remained only a few crumbling towers and walls atop a hill, seven hundred years old in all. As Byzantium withered, the economic interests in the Italian ports remained strong and tolls were collected with the aid of cannons in these towers. As we looked north from the towers, the Bosporus received outflow of the Black Sea. And guarding the entrance to the passage between two great seas are Scylla and Charibdis, still threatening Odysseus with rack and ruin if he ventured too closely.