May 03, 2007

Istanbul ... and on to Bodrum

What a wonderful thing sleep is! After a decent night’s rest, for a change, I headed off to find the post office. An 11 kg box of African carvings, pottery, and cloth has been my logistical anchor in three countries already. In Kenya the postage would have been $400 USD, Ghana would have produced a $180 USD shipping bill, and Egypt dropped to a tempting $120 USD. The great mystery is that DHL shipped a similarly weighted package for $100 USD from Delhi, India and these African regular postage rates are unbelievably out of line with DHL. So, instead of lugging a 25+ pound box across town to only discover a similar carrier rate, I walked sans box. Much to my delight, the postage rate was a relatively low $73 USD. Done!

After a return trip to post the box the two largest tourist sites of Istanbul were on tap. Construction on Hagia Sophia started under the order of Justinian in 532AD to build a new Christian Basilica for the capital of the Asian Roman Empire. In only five years the sanctuary was completed.





Hagia Sophia was a center of eastern Christian worship for over 900 years until 1453, when Sultan Mehmed “the Conquerer” with his Arab armies took control of Istanbul and turned the edifice into a Mosque. For almost 500 years the former Christian Basilica was gradually converted into a proper mosque.



Beautiful mosaic tile ceilings and walls were covered with plaster and painted with traditional Muslim iconography. Use of Hagia Sophia as a mosque continued even after the equally grand Blue Mosque was erected directly opposite. In 1935, after the secular Muslim revolution of Ataturk the Hagia Sophia mosque was closed and turned into a cultural museum. With this official secular status, restoration of the building began. The original mosaics were very gradually and painstakingly uncovered from layers of surface plaster.





The restoration process is so carefully conducted that seventy-two years later the progress continues. What remains is an amazing blend of Christian and Muslims artifacts under conservation.



(The more faded lower portion is the actual mosaic under renovation, as opposed to the newer painted plaster.)


A simple walk of a few hundred yards, through beautiful gardens, leads to the Blue Mosque.



There are a total of three Blue Mosque buildings in the world. This was the first, then Mohammad Ali built an architectural replica in Cairo but did not used the famous, name sake, blue tiles. So the “true” blue tiled Egyptian blue mosque is a much smaller building and the walls are lined with tiles imported from Turkey. The third blue mosque is in Iran and the likelihood of visiting that site is minimal at best.






If you go back to the blog entry for April 30, 2007, you will see the almost exact external copy from the Turkish Blue Mosque original in Egypt. The tile work in the original Istanbul blue mosque was a little mind numbing. To imagine that volume of tile being hand painted, glazed and fired was quite an achievement.





The symmetry of each tile needed to be exact or the flaw would be very apparent in the broad pattern. Entrance to the mosque was surprisingly casual, as compared to entering like Egyptian holy buildings.



In the European half of Turkey, the citizens hold their secular position very closely to their hearts. The current governmental crisis is due to the Kurdish, eastern half of the country, strongly supporting a more conservative Muslim leader. One “local” that brought the subject into conversation said, “I like my beer, my cigarettes, and my mosque and they want me to only like my mosque.” It will be very interesting to watch Turkey in the coming years to see how a country founded by Ataturk under the principle of a secular Muslim state will settle their evolving church and state dilemma.

On the way back to the hostel, to pick up my bags, I saw a classic scene between a restaurant cook and a cat. The picture had to be taken. I think the cat may have been on the “winning end” of a few conversations in the past, because he was intent on receiving a scrap of meat.



Tonight, an overnight bus will serve as my hostel. It is the road born proxy of an eleven and a half hour “red eye” flight. The long haul buses rarely operate during daylight hours and typically run through the night. It feels a little ironic that in order to travel to the south for a few days of rest, I must endure yet another sleepless marathon.



The people of Turkey continue to be very friendly. However, the travel regimen remains strictly Muslim. Single women sit at the front of the bus, followed by married couples, then old men, then single men in the remaining “back axle” seats. Jammed into the back of the bus, since my original seat was “mistakenly assigned” by the travel agent in the women’s section, the single guys were actually very friendly. No one spoke English but this didn’t stop us from sharing visual conversations and mutual jokes. Finally, Sharul asked if I spoke German. So we shared back and forth on a rudimentary level. Having lived in Germany for 23 years, he spoke perfectly and I understood a surprisingly large amount of content, but my responses were representative of leaving the country in the sixth grade. Sleep was minimal but the ride was enjoyable none-the-less.