Turkish Delight Pt 2 - Here I Come, Constantinople
Warning: this post contains no photos, just my long ramblings about Istanbul.
This will sound a bit old-fashioned, but Istanbul (nee Constantinople) strikes me as a city best arrived at by sea. To make a comparison most of you will understand, imagine how wonderful it would be for a tourist to first arrive in Sydney by sea, coming along the northern beaches, around the headlands, and into the harbour, seeing the bridge and the opera house for the first time, then alighting at circular quay to begin their stay. Istanbul is of course very different to Sydney, in place of pristine beaches and modern buildings you have rocky foreshore and a historic skyline of domes and minarettes; in place of the calm harbour, you have the black menacing Bosphorous.... Perhaps what I'm really trying to say is that the way to arrive in Istanbul is not by bus.
Istanbul bus station is out in the cramped legoland suburbs (in the last 50 years, the population has exploded from 1 million to around 15 million; the urban sprawl is, well, sprawling), it looks like an 8 story shopping-centre car park, and must at any given time have around a thousand buses in it, and hundreds coming and going all the time, and in it there are surprisingly few people who speak any English. But we eventually managed to find our way to the historic district Sultanahmet (rhymes with - and hence nicknamed - sultana bread). At least it was quite cool in Istanbul, after a week of temperatures between 40 and 45 along the coast, Istanbul was a refreshing 30 degrees!
In his book, Orhan Pamuk has a lot to say about the Bosphorus. This is not to be compared to the calm harbours or meandering rivers on which cities like Sydney, London and Paris are built. It is a surging black mass of water between two continents, with currents and whitecaps and dolphins chasing the ferries that ply back and forth; all the palaces and mansions of the old empire are along its shore; it has been the scene of midnight explosive collisions between oil tankers, and midnight passage of soviet battleships; on hot weekends (like last Sunday) Istanbullus come out in little boats, or down onto the giant black cuboid boulders along the shore to swim (men only) and fish and cook their catch on little fires... it is the heart and soul of the city.
Another major theme of the book is hüzün: a Turkish word describing a sort of communal melancholy in the hearts and faces of Istanbullus that is born of living in an impoverished city amongst the monuments and palaces and ruins of a great capital of a vast empire. Maybe something similar can be found in places like Cairo, Athens or Rome, but in Istanbul the fall of the empire is relatively recent - the 50 years or so leading up to, and just after World War 1 - and still much fresher in the memory of the city (if not many or any of its actual human residents).
The beauty of the city is a picturesque beauty - meaning accidental, orthogonal to any architects intention: creeping vines, broken blackened wooden mansions, slums leaning in beneath the city's many grat mosques, fallen stones of the city walls. It's a beauty that only comes with time, and makes us think "what glories, and what miseries and punishments, must the people here have lived through to have created the scene we now see before us" (and its why cheap and careless reconstruction of old ruins is so damaging).
This is what makes Haghia Sofia so much more interesting than the Blue Mosque (the two dominating features of the Istanbul Skyline). Haghia Sofia was built in 532 AD, in Byzantine Constantinople. In 1204 is was plundered by the crusaders (despite being a Christian church), in the 15th century is was converted into a mosque, and in the 20th century to a museum. Inside, there are ancient gold and ceramic mosaics of Christian scenes, that were plastered and painted over with abstract Islamic art and caligraphy, then chipped back and rediscovered. The floor is made up of giant marble stones, worn smooth over the centuries. All the layers of history are right there in front of you. The Blue Mosque, on the other hand, is "only" 400 years old, and still stands precisely as it was when first built. The intricate tilings and domes are certainly beautiful, but there is nothing picturesque about it.
That's enough for now, I've got emails to reply to...
This will sound a bit old-fashioned, but Istanbul (nee Constantinople) strikes me as a city best arrived at by sea. To make a comparison most of you will understand, imagine how wonderful it would be for a tourist to first arrive in Sydney by sea, coming along the northern beaches, around the headlands, and into the harbour, seeing the bridge and the opera house for the first time, then alighting at circular quay to begin their stay. Istanbul is of course very different to Sydney, in place of pristine beaches and modern buildings you have rocky foreshore and a historic skyline of domes and minarettes; in place of the calm harbour, you have the black menacing Bosphorous.... Perhaps what I'm really trying to say is that the way to arrive in Istanbul is not by bus.
Istanbul bus station is out in the cramped legoland suburbs (in the last 50 years, the population has exploded from 1 million to around 15 million; the urban sprawl is, well, sprawling), it looks like an 8 story shopping-centre car park, and must at any given time have around a thousand buses in it, and hundreds coming and going all the time, and in it there are surprisingly few people who speak any English. But we eventually managed to find our way to the historic district Sultanahmet (rhymes with - and hence nicknamed - sultana bread). At least it was quite cool in Istanbul, after a week of temperatures between 40 and 45 along the coast, Istanbul was a refreshing 30 degrees!
In his book, Orhan Pamuk has a lot to say about the Bosphorus. This is not to be compared to the calm harbours or meandering rivers on which cities like Sydney, London and Paris are built. It is a surging black mass of water between two continents, with currents and whitecaps and dolphins chasing the ferries that ply back and forth; all the palaces and mansions of the old empire are along its shore; it has been the scene of midnight explosive collisions between oil tankers, and midnight passage of soviet battleships; on hot weekends (like last Sunday) Istanbullus come out in little boats, or down onto the giant black cuboid boulders along the shore to swim (men only) and fish and cook their catch on little fires... it is the heart and soul of the city.
Another major theme of the book is hüzün: a Turkish word describing a sort of communal melancholy in the hearts and faces of Istanbullus that is born of living in an impoverished city amongst the monuments and palaces and ruins of a great capital of a vast empire. Maybe something similar can be found in places like Cairo, Athens or Rome, but in Istanbul the fall of the empire is relatively recent - the 50 years or so leading up to, and just after World War 1 - and still much fresher in the memory of the city (if not many or any of its actual human residents).
The beauty of the city is a picturesque beauty - meaning accidental, orthogonal to any architects intention: creeping vines, broken blackened wooden mansions, slums leaning in beneath the city's many grat mosques, fallen stones of the city walls. It's a beauty that only comes with time, and makes us think "what glories, and what miseries and punishments, must the people here have lived through to have created the scene we now see before us" (and its why cheap and careless reconstruction of old ruins is so damaging).
This is what makes Haghia Sofia so much more interesting than the Blue Mosque (the two dominating features of the Istanbul Skyline). Haghia Sofia was built in 532 AD, in Byzantine Constantinople. In 1204 is was plundered by the crusaders (despite being a Christian church), in the 15th century is was converted into a mosque, and in the 20th century to a museum. Inside, there are ancient gold and ceramic mosaics of Christian scenes, that were plastered and painted over with abstract Islamic art and caligraphy, then chipped back and rediscovered. The floor is made up of giant marble stones, worn smooth over the centuries. All the layers of history are right there in front of you. The Blue Mosque, on the other hand, is "only" 400 years old, and still stands precisely as it was when first built. The intricate tilings and domes are certainly beautiful, but there is nothing picturesque about it.
That's enough for now, I've got emails to reply to...
posted by I-Rock at 12:19 PM
4 Comments:
ooooh. well written.
you right reel good.
are you busy gettin busy?
dead?
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