Istanbul has even more mosques...

A couple of weeks ago, Julie and I and our friends Sarah and Sayeed went to Istanbul. We were staying just south of the Blue Mosque, a short walk up from the Sea of Marmara. We had a great time seeing the lots of mosques, the Aya Sofia, the Grand Bazaar, the Topkapi Palace, the Basilica Cistern, and the other museums and sights in the historic Sultanahmet area. We also had some great daytrips around the city taking a boat up the Bosphorus, exploring the old city walls in the pouring rain at the castle-like Yedikule Museum, walking around with the hoards of people in Taksim, seeing the Eyup Mosque and the Byzantine mosaics and frescoes at the Kariye Museum, and learning more about Istanbul’s history and visual culture at the Istanbul Modern Art Museum. Throughout the whole week, the weather was about as perfect as it could have been, a nice 23 C with one day of very pleasant rain.

The most interesting part about being in Istanbul was seeing how the old and the new would interact in the city’s cultural, political, and religious heritage. The most expressive example of this were at the churches-turned-mosques. At the Kariye Museum (formerly the Church of St. Savior in Chora), the narthex and the funerary chapel were filled with beautiful mosaics and frescoes depicting everything from the life of Christ to the Resurrection and the Second Coming where the Unquenchable Fire, the Outer Darkness, and the Gnashing of Teeth were all depicted in graphic detail. However, in the sanctuary itself (which would have been used for worship by Muslims), all of the iconography had been plastered over and was unrecoverable. In the Aya Sofia, there were several spots where the Muslim motifs were fading from the Ottoman-era to expose the washed-out crosses from the even earlier Byzantine time.

It was also interesting being there with Sarah and Sayeed. Sarah had lots of people comment about the fact that she was Muslim and was “closed” (meaning that she wore a hijab). It seems like more than anywhere else in the world, the hijab serves as a major fault line for your identity. You are either living in Turkey’s traditional past or trying to move forward into the globalizing world. From the short time we were there, it seemed like people viewed themselves as living on one side or the other of this ever-present divide that separates the traditional and the modern. Since Sarah didn’t fall between these two categories, she had lots of people asking for her life-story and how, as an American, she became a Muslim. It was interesting to see and hear. Traveling with the two of them, Julie and I went to places we probably would not have visited otherwise. The most interesting of which was the mosque in Eyup, which is the fourth holiest site in Islam since the tomb of the Prophet’s standard-bearer is located here. Julie and I met a very friendly man who gave Julie bird-food for the pigeons in the courtyard and explained more about why Eyup was special and what he did in the area. It was a definite highlight of the trip.

The other highlights of the trip ranged from everything to feeding fish at the ancient Basilica Cistern to drinking water out of copper cups that were next to rudimentary drinking fountains throughout the city. The day we went to the Yedikule Museum was probably my favorite part of the week. We took the train down the Sea to the museum. Even on a Saturday, we were virtually the only ones at this huge enclosure that looked and seemed just like an ancient castle. We walked up and down the dimly-lit stairs to the top of the walls where we could see all of western Istanbul and the storm coming in from the sea. After thinking it might circle around us, the skies just opened up right over the castle. After being in the Middle East for the past couple month, however, it was more than pleasant to be rained on for a while. When we were coming up the last of the towers, over 30 mosques (that we counted) in the nearby areas all sounded their adan for mid-day prayer. They sounded like dogs barking at one another in the middle of the night, all trying to be the one that was heard. Afterwards, already soaking wet, we walked around looking for the remains of the Church of St. John of Studius that was built in 463. Although there was no one around to let us into the church, we found four puppies just under the fence of the old church. My favorite, Maximilion, came right under the fence to greet us. After some nice petting and drying him off a bit, I put him back with his more shy brothers and we walked back to the train.

The other story that I wanted to tell was in the Basilica Cistern. In the back of the chamber there were two marble carvings of Medusa’s head that were supporting the cistern’s pillars. The first was turned sideways and in the second one she was turned upside down. The second sculpture reminded me of an evocative story that Terry Tempest Williams once told. She talked about a statue in downtown Santa Fe of a St. Francis and a prairie dog. St. Francis is looking down at the prairie dog as the prairie dog looks at St. Francis from his hind legs. If you look down at the prairie dog‘s head, you can see how the copper has the gold-tint from being rubbed down over and over. Since the prairie dog is at ground level, you have to pause and bend over to rub his head. The same things happened with the Medusa sculpture in the cistern. The rest of the marble was dirty from the moisture that constantly enclosed this space. However, her chin (since she was upside down), had been rubbed clean. It just makes you think of how many people took the time to pause, bend down, and reach over the water to touch her chin.

Overall, we had a great time. We came back with some very pretty iznik ceramics and two very nice prints from the Istanbul Modern Art Museum (one of which we just got on the wall last night). I'll hopefully be posting more about my life here in Sharjah throughout the next couple of weeks.