Keith and Christine would love to hear from you with questions, comments, personal news and any news at all from Australia or wherever you are. We will reply to all emails! Please write to either windlechristine@gmail.com or windle.keith@gmail.com
This morning we called it a day with the dormitory, with the match score being snorer 3 – sleepers 0. Our hostel only had expensive double rooms so we found another hotel and gratefully moved in. A gentle and friendly man runs it with his similarly natured cousin as assistant, and as it has only been for about a month, everything is sparkling and cared for, right down to the pretty, rose patterned, white bedspread.
Sleeping problems sorted, we started the day with Aya Sofia. Just outside the main door is an excavation, which naturally can’t be extended, which shows that Emperor Theodosius had built a wooden roofed basilica there in 418, but it had burnt down. There is a lovely stone relief of 12 lambs, representing the 12 apostles, remaining from that church. I love symbols because they give an artist the opportunity to never have to do what they don’t want to. Of course this work would have been commissioned and there may have been a poor stone mason lamenting that he didn’t pay attention in the woolly animals sculpting class and could only really do human beings in robes.
These light hearted thoughts were the last for a while because Aya Sofia is a grand and monumental building and there is so much to see and appreciate. It was built to be the greatest church in Christendom by Emperor Justinian in 537, with the intention to put Constantinople (Istanbul’s former name) and the Roman Empire on the map a bit more. In 1453 it became a mosque and in 1935 Atatürk declared that it would be a museum. This was an interesting and sensible move but must have been contentious at the time. We read that scholars had already been cleaning back areas and beautiful mosaics with gold backgrounds had been revealed. They had been documented and in some cases covered over again for mosque purposes. We learnt more of the history in a display in the outer corridor, where we saw a decorative style, used throughout the building, which was new to us. Panels of marble, differing in colours and with the slabs split and the pieces placed to form mirror images, were framed with carved borders. Later I overheard a guide say that some people believed that the split marble revealed God’s word. He showed several that he said looked like the devil, one that looked like a mushroom cloud from an atom bomb exploding and another that depicted alien visitors – perhaps getting a little off the track, but obviously interesting to the entranced tourists. A small boy saw camels – a bit like cloud watching really.
I put my finger into the hole in the weeping pillar, turned my hand 360 degrees and pulled it out damp, which according to legend, means that my ailments will be cured. Keith preferred to suffer on with his ailments and stick to taking photos of me.
Four aspects of Aya Sofia were overwhelming for us. The first was the incredibly grand scale that the building is on. It has an immense open space and an enormous dome, and is cleverly designed so that the ribs supporting it are concealed in the walls. Windows circle the dome and the areas below so that they provide light and pattern at the same time. There is an upstairs gallery that is so wide that a small part of it was used as a Synod Meeting Chamber. Downstairs a large area is set aside as a library, with several Koran stands in it. Reconstruction scaffolding covered nearly half of the main part, but it was still so big that, apart from destroying the feel and any sense of sanctity that was left by the very noisy visitors and the art displays by children and citizens, its impact was not too bad.
Secondly, the mosaics are so finely and beautifully made, with brilliant colours and golden pieces that shine. They were added from the ninth century on. Many have been covered or lost but so many have survived that it is possible to imagine what this basilica must have been like before the Ottoman conquest. The mosaics depict Bible stories but also include historical figures, with a main one over the grand Imperial door, made in the 11th century, showing the Emperor Constantine IX and Empress Zoe, with Christ enthroned between them.
A third striking aspect was looking at obvious and the more subtle changes that were made during the conversion to a mosque. Originally there would have been simple cross motifs on the ceilings and walls and, while these are painted over with decorations depicting flowers, it is still possible to see the crosses within the paintings. 
Some stone crosses were chiselled off. Arabic Muslim calligraphy has been added on enormous wooden discs, with diameters of about six metres, which hang from pillars just below the gallery. They certainly dominate any view.
Finally, this building with all its sophistication of design, architecture and technology pre-dates most other famous churches by nearly a thousand years. The time factor was mind boggling. A distressed German man asked me whether I agreed that the Turkish people had got this one all wrong. He explained that here was a church, magnificent and ancient, worthy of respect and emotion whatever your religion, with treasures and history, and the atmosphere was just like being in a bazaar.
It was true – the noise level was very high, people were calling to each other from one side to another, guides were ever louder so that their groups could hear, a couple were eating kebabs from paper wrappers, children were running and rolling about, and a poor frustrated attendant had shouted "No flash!" to an Italian tour group for at least the tenth time. The art works on the outer walls of the scaffolding, while a pleasant diversion in a square, did not add to the feel of the place at all. I had to agree that what had been achieved in the Blue Mosque in modifying visitor behaviour, was in no way attempted here. And yes, it did detract from our experience of Aya Sofia, the greatest church in Christendom. The man clasped my hands and said that he had just needed to tell one person how he was feeling, and he thanked me for understanding. He left and we continued. If this place had a hallowed atmosphere I think it would be possible to have the feeling of other times very clearly and I wanted that. As it was, we put the bazaar atmosphere aside as much as possible and behaved respectfully ourselves.
We grabbed a piece of corn for lunch so that we wouldn’t waste time on eating. Our next venue was a kind of funky and fun contrast, being the city cistern built in the sixth century under the ground. This vast water tank stored water, brought from 28 kilometres away by aqueduct, for the city. It currently serves as a cool (in both senses) tourist attraction and home to thousands of fat fish who would rival the Sanliurfa holy carp in being on a good wicket.
The cistern was built with bits and pieces from old monuments, castles and other buildings from near and far, so its 336 columns are grand and a bit of a mixture. At one spot there are two carvings of Medusa, one upside down and one sideways. They are in the big support blocks that the columns stand on and it is thought that their inclusion was for structural purposes only. Their meaning of protection against enemies and bad fortune would not have been in line with the Christian thinking of the time of the cistern’s construction, so that may have led to the strange placements.
We filed around the board walk, enjoying being dripped on and watching for albino fish, when we came to the final section which had been lit up especially to highlight the reflections. I wondered if the photographer of last night had seen them. Keith tried for ages to take the perfect picture but even lit up it would be described as gloomy half light.
The visiting day, which ends at 5 pm at this time of the year, was disappearing and we wouldn’t have enough time at the archaeological museum. Nevertheless we made a start with the first building, which is the Museum of the Ancient Orient. It had a fascinating collection of pre-Islamic items from the Anatolian region. Apart from the items, we were reading about kingdoms and civilisations that we had never heard of.
It had ancient tablets with official and personal information on them including one which is the earliest known peace treaty, between the Hittites and the Egyptians in 1269 BC. Another is the earliest love poem written (or chiselled), between 2037 and 2039 BC, during the neo-Sumerian period. The statues ranged from the stocky Hittite types to Egyptian items and to a simple statue of Lugal-Dalu, King of Adab. There were other items such as ceramics and sundials and many reliefs which showed different skills and decorative tastes over time and for different cultures. Most unusual for us were the very old, but in excellent condition, glazed brick wall designs of animals from the Ishtar Gate in Babylon, from the time of Nebuchadnezzar II, between 605 and 562 BC.
I was still keen to continue into the next building, but Keith had reached the end of his ability to absorb information and stay standing. He took a little break on a seat under a tree in the courtyard but was soon awakened by one of the museum cats landing softly on his lap. Keith originally started his interest in photographing cats when we saw so many of them on every street in Egypt, and has continued to amass hundreds of cat portraits over the last four months.
Meanwhile I had entered a fascinating labyrinth and doubted that Keith would ever find me. I had just entered the section on statues over the ages when a man asked the attendant, in a loud stage whisper, where the toilet was. Suddenly most of the English speakers perusing the Roman antiquities were inspired to go too, and followed the man in the know discreetly. By the time we had crossed four or five galleries and gone down passageways, our line had given up pretending that we just happened to be going that way and formed a moving queue following our leader. Finally reaching the toilets we all thanked him and rushed in. By the time I found the main door of the museum again, Keith was just coming through it, brushing cat hairs off his legs.
The exhibition called ‘8000 Years of Istanbul in the Light of Day’ explained the archaeological finds uncovered when the extensions to the underground rail system were made in the 1990s. One current land area had been a harbour, and many sunken vessels, including their cargos, were found. Areas fairly close to each other had some similar items, but could also be seen to have been settled by different groups. The excavators had also come across a series of preceding settlements as they dug down deeper.
This museum was initiated and administered by Osman Hamdy Bey, the Director General of the Imperial Museum, who was educated in both Istanbul and Europe. He held many official administrative positions but was a painter and an archaeologist as well. He led an expedition and excavation, discovering the extensive Sidon Necropolis in 1887, following a tip off by a farmer who was digging near a well and found a sarcophagus. Sidon was at the site of Side in modern day Lebanon. Osman Hamdy Bey convinced the sultan to build a whole new wing to the museum to display the sarcophagi which are absolutely massive and in virtually as new condition. One is a re-used Egyptian one and another is Lycean from the 5th century. The most complex and beautifully sculptured reliefs are on the ‘Alexander’ sarcophagus. They depict Alexander the Great and his men fighting the Persians on one side and a lion hunt on the other.
There are traces of the paint which would have originally enhanced the relief. This sarcophagus was used for King Abdalonymos of Sidon at the end of the 4th century BC. It has never occurred to us that marble sculptures and reliefs would have been painted, and a modern example of the finished effect was very interesting.
Finally we started on the fascinating Byzantine section, which explained that the Greek city of Bizanton was renamed Constantinople by the Emperor Constantine in 330 and made the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. The term ‘Byzantine’ is one applied by historians to the members of the Eastern Roman Empire and was not used at the time. This exhibition was informative and contained public, religious and domestic items. We were struck by the lack of paintings of any kind and had just come upon one from the late 13th century at 4.40 pm when an assertive attendant shouted "Museum finish, close, get out." A few, including Keith, mumbled that it was nowhere near five and we hadn’t finished in that section but, possibly with the imperative to be locked up at five o’clock, she herded us all out with vigour.
Tea was in the Hippodrome – an area where chariot races were held in Roman times and where the populus met for demonstrations and riots. The chariot teams, the blues and the greens, had connections to political parties so supporters were declaring their political allegiances as well as having a sporting night out. Today it is a long, treed area with several historic columns in it. The first is a rough column, with no outer casing, built by Constantine Porphyrogenetus in the 10th century. All the columns appear to be set in holes because the ground level was 2 metres lower in those days. Next is the spiral ‘Serpent Column’, which was erected in the 4th century. Originally it was three snakes, which ended at the top with three heads, but they have been broken off and it looks a bit strange now. A wary rat was peeping out of a hole near the base and made its way to safety inside the column.
The final column is the ‘Obelisk of Theodosius’, erected in 390, and either a gift or booty from the Egyptians, having been taken from the Amon-Re temple at Karnak. The hieroglyphics carved on its pink granite sides are in perfect condition, while the carvings in the softer marble are very weathered. A pretty little building like a miniature bandstand is the fountain that Kaiser Wilhelm gave as a gift when he visited in 1901.
We chatted with, and gave feedback to, some students who were rehearsing their English project, which was to give information using video on the sites of Istanbul. Children rode bikes, families met and socialised, tourists took photos, tour groups passed by in flocks, a man talked to a group of young men in Fagin style and then they all dispersed to carry out whatever mission he had commanded, sellers called their wares – it was a regular evening at the hippodrome, without a sign of insurrection or riot.
This morning we called it a day with the dormitory, with the match score being snorer 3 – sleepers 0. Our hostel only had expensive double rooms so we found another hotel and gratefully moved in. A gentle and friendly man runs it with his similarly natured cousin as assistant, and as it has only been for about a month, everything is sparkling and cared for, right down to the pretty, rose patterned, white bedspread.
Sleeping problems sorted, we started the day with Aya Sofia. Just outside the main door is an excavation, which naturally can’t be extended, which shows that Emperor Theodosius had built a wooden roofed basilica there in 418, but it had burnt down. There is a lovely stone relief of 12 lambs, representing the 12 apostles, remaining from that church. I love symbols because they give an artist the opportunity to never have to do what they don’t want to. Of course this work would have been commissioned and there may have been a poor stone mason lamenting that he didn’t pay attention in the woolly animals sculpting class and could only really do human beings in robes.
These light hearted thoughts were the last for a while because Aya Sofia is a grand and monumental building and there is so much to see and appreciate. It was built to be the greatest church in Christendom by Emperor Justinian in 537, with the intention to put Constantinople (Istanbul’s former name) and the Roman Empire on the map a bit more. In 1453 it became a mosque and in 1935 Atatürk declared that it would be a museum. This was an interesting and sensible move but must have been contentious at the time. We read that scholars had already been cleaning back areas and beautiful mosaics with gold backgrounds had been revealed. They had been documented and in some cases covered over again for mosque purposes. We learnt more of the history in a display in the outer corridor, where we saw a decorative style, used throughout the building, which was new to us. Panels of marble, differing in colours and with the slabs split and the pieces placed to form mirror images, were framed with carved borders. Later I overheard a guide say that some people believed that the split marble revealed God’s word. He showed several that he said looked like the devil, one that looked like a mushroom cloud from an atom bomb exploding and another that depicted alien visitors – perhaps getting a little off the track, but obviously interesting to the entranced tourists. A small boy saw camels – a bit like cloud watching really.
I put my finger into the hole in the weeping pillar, turned my hand 360 degrees and pulled it out damp, which according to legend, means that my ailments will be cured. Keith preferred to suffer on with his ailments and stick to taking photos of me.Four aspects of Aya Sofia were overwhelming for us. The first was the incredibly grand scale that the building is on. It has an immense open space and an enormous dome, and is cleverly designed so that the ribs supporting it are concealed in the walls. Windows circle the dome and the areas below so that they provide light and pattern at the same time. There is an upstairs gallery that is so wide that a small part of it was used as a Synod Meeting Chamber. Downstairs a large area is set aside as a library, with several Koran stands in it. Reconstruction scaffolding covered nearly half of the main part, but it was still so big that, apart from destroying the feel and any sense of sanctity that was left by the very noisy visitors and the art displays by children and citizens, its impact was not too bad.Secondly, the mosaics are so finely and beautifully made, with brilliant colours and golden pieces that shine. They were added from the ninth century on. Many have been covered or lost but so many have survived that it is possible to imagine what this basilica must have been like before the Ottoman conquest. The mosaics depict Bible stories but also include historical figures, with a main one over the grand Imperial door, made in the 11th century, showing the Emperor Constantine IX and Empress Zoe, with Christ enthroned between them.A third striking aspect was looking at obvious and the more subtle changes that were made during the conversion to a mosque. Originally there would have been simple cross motifs on the ceilings and walls and, while these are painted over with decorations depicting flowers, it is still possible to see the crosses within the paintings. Some stone crosses were chiselled off. Arabic Muslim calligraphy has been added on enormous wooden discs, with diameters of about six metres, which hang from pillars just below the gallery. They certainly dominate any view.Finally, this building with all its sophistication of design, architecture and technology pre-dates most other famous churches by nearly a thousand years. The time factor was mind boggling. A distressed German man asked me whether I agreed that the Turkish people had got this one all wrong. He explained that here was a church, magnificent and ancient, worthy of respect and emotion whatever your religion, with treasures and history, and the atmosphere was just like being in a bazaar.It was true – the noise level was very high, people were calling to each other from one side to another, guides were ever louder so that their groups could hear, a couple were eating kebabs from paper wrappers, children were running and rolling about, and a poor frustrated attendant had shouted "No flash!" to an Italian tour group for at least the tenth time. The art works on the outer walls of the scaffolding, while a pleasant diversion in a square, did not add to the feel of the place at all. I had to agree that what had been achieved in the Blue Mosque in modifying visitor behaviour, was in no way attempted here. And yes, it did detract from our experience of Aya Sofia, the greatest church in Christendom. The man clasped my hands and said that he had just needed to tell one person how he was feeling, and he thanked me for understanding. He left and we continued. If this place had a hallowed atmosphere I think it would be possible to have the feeling of other times very clearly and I wanted that. As it was, we put the bazaar atmosphere aside as much as possible and behaved respectfully ourselves.We grabbed a piece of corn for lunch so that we wouldn’t waste time on eating. Our next venue was a kind of funky and fun contrast, being the city cistern built in the sixth century under the ground. This vast water tank stored water, brought from 28 kilometres away by aqueduct, for the city. It currently serves as a cool (in both senses) tourist attraction and home to thousands of fat fish who would rival the Sanliurfa holy carp in being on a good wicket.The cistern was built with bits and pieces from old monuments, castles and other buildings from near and far, so its 336 columns are grand and a bit of a mixture. At one spot there are two carvings of Medusa, one upside down and one sideways. They are in the big support blocks that the columns stand on and it is thought that their inclusion was for structural purposes only. Their meaning of protection against enemies and bad fortune would not have been in line with the Christian thinking of the time of the cistern’s construction, so that may have led to the strange placements.We filed around the board walk, enjoying being dripped on and watching for albino fish, when we came to the final section which had been lit up especially to highlight the reflections. I wondered if the photographer of last night had seen them. Keith tried for ages to take the perfect picture but even lit up it would be described as gloomy half light.The visiting day, which ends at 5 pm at this time of the year, was disappearing and we wouldn’t have enough time at the archaeological museum. Nevertheless we made a start with the first building, which is the Museum of the Ancient Orient. It had a fascinating collection of pre-Islamic items from the Anatolian region. Apart from the items, we were reading about kingdoms and civilisations that we had never heard of.It had ancient tablets with official and personal information on them including one which is the earliest known peace treaty, between the Hittites and the Egyptians in 1269 BC. Another is the earliest love poem written (or chiselled), between 2037 and 2039 BC, during the neo-Sumerian period. The statues ranged from the stocky Hittite types to Egyptian items and to a simple statue of Lugal-Dalu, King of Adab. There were other items such as ceramics and sundials and many reliefs which showed different skills and decorative tastes over time and for different cultures. Most unusual for us were the very old, but in excellent condition, glazed brick wall designs of animals from the Ishtar Gate in Babylon, from the time of Nebuchadnezzar II, between 605 and 562 BC.
I was still keen to continue into the next building, but Keith had reached the end of his ability to absorb information and stay standing. He took a little break on a seat under a tree in the courtyard but was soon awakened by one of the museum cats landing softly on his lap. Keith originally started his interest in photographing cats when we saw so many of them on every street in Egypt, and has continued to amass hundreds of cat portraits over the last four months.Meanwhile I had entered a fascinating labyrinth and doubted that Keith would ever find me. I had just entered the section on statues over the ages when a man asked the attendant, in a loud stage whisper, where the toilet was. Suddenly most of the English speakers perusing the Roman antiquities were inspired to go too, and followed the man in the know discreetly. By the time we had crossed four or five galleries and gone down passageways, our line had given up pretending that we just happened to be going that way and formed a moving queue following our leader. Finally reaching the toilets we all thanked him and rushed in. By the time I found the main door of the museum again, Keith was just coming through it, brushing cat hairs off his legs.
The exhibition called ‘8000 Years of Istanbul in the Light of Day’ explained the archaeological finds uncovered when the extensions to the underground rail system were made in the 1990s. One current land area had been a harbour, and many sunken vessels, including their cargos, were found. Areas fairly close to each other had some similar items, but could also be seen to have been settled by different groups. The excavators had also come across a series of preceding settlements as they dug down deeper.
This museum was initiated and administered by Osman Hamdy Bey, the Director General of the Imperial Museum, who was educated in both Istanbul and Europe. He held many official administrative positions but was a painter and an archaeologist as well. He led an expedition and excavation, discovering the extensive Sidon Necropolis in 1887, following a tip off by a farmer who was digging near a well and found a sarcophagus. Sidon was at the site of Side in modern day Lebanon. Osman Hamdy Bey convinced the sultan to build a whole new wing to the museum to display the sarcophagi which are absolutely massive and in virtually as new condition. One is a re-used Egyptian one and another is Lycean from the 5th century. The most complex and beautifully sculptured reliefs are on the ‘Alexander’ sarcophagus. They depict Alexander the Great and his men fighting the Persians on one side and a lion hunt on the other.
There are traces of the paint which would have originally enhanced the relief. This sarcophagus was used for King Abdalonymos of Sidon at the end of the 4th century BC. It has never occurred to us that marble sculptures and reliefs would have been painted, and a modern example of the finished effect was very interesting.Finally we started on the fascinating Byzantine section, which explained that the Greek city of Bizanton was renamed Constantinople by the Emperor Constantine in 330 and made the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. The term ‘Byzantine’ is one applied by historians to the members of the Eastern Roman Empire and was not used at the time. This exhibition was informative and contained public, religious and domestic items. We were struck by the lack of paintings of any kind and had just come upon one from the late 13th century at 4.40 pm when an assertive attendant shouted "Museum finish, close, get out." A few, including Keith, mumbled that it was nowhere near five and we hadn’t finished in that section but, possibly with the imperative to be locked up at five o’clock, she herded us all out with vigour.Tea was in the Hippodrome – an area where chariot races were held in Roman times and where the populus met for demonstrations and riots. The chariot teams, the blues and the greens, had connections to political parties so supporters were declaring their political allegiances as well as having a sporting night out. Today it is a long, treed area with several historic columns in it. The first is a rough column, with no outer casing, built by Constantine Porphyrogenetus in the 10th century. All the columns appear to be set in holes because the ground level was 2 metres lower in those days. Next is the spiral ‘Serpent Column’, which was erected in the 4th century. Originally it was three snakes, which ended at the top with three heads, but they have been broken off and it looks a bit strange now. A wary rat was peeping out of a hole near the base and made its way to safety inside the column.
The final column is the ‘Obelisk of Theodosius’, erected in 390, and either a gift or booty from the Egyptians, having been taken from the Amon-Re temple at Karnak. The hieroglyphics carved on its pink granite sides are in perfect condition, while the carvings in the softer marble are very weathered. A pretty little building like a miniature bandstand is the fountain that Kaiser Wilhelm gave as a gift when he visited in 1901.We chatted with, and gave feedback to, some students who were rehearsing their English project, which was to give information using video on the sites of Istanbul. Children rode bikes, families met and socialised, tourists took photos, tour groups passed by in flocks, a man talked to a group of young men in Fagin style and then they all dispersed to carry out whatever mission he had commanded, sellers called their wares – it was a regular evening at the hippodrome, without a sign of insurrection or riot. 
No comments:
Post a Comment