The Jake Report: Istanbul, Saturday, 24 May 2008

Saturday morning Yusef, our driver, met us at the hotel with the van. We picked up Ersin, our guide enroute to the European side of Istanbul. The first stop was the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts. I can easily grow tired in historical museums (art museums are completely different - I do enjoy leisurely browsing paintings and photographs), but the collections of manuscripts and carpets was extremely interesting. Across the street was the Hippodrome. On the far side, then, was the entrance to the "Blue Mosque" (which is not its name in Turkish, but rather it's westernized nickname). After walking through the Blue Mosque, with a fascinating explanation of the design and purpose by Ersin, we walked past the Hagia Sophia to the Topkapi Palace, seat of the Ottoman Empire for four centuries. This was a little too much museum for me. When given the opportunity, I relaxed on a bench in the exhibit of the royal treasury - cooler, darker and away from the crushing crowds - and on a shaded patio overlooking the Bosphorus. I'm neither claustrophobic or agoraphobic, but it was in the upper 80s and being a Saturday, there were lots and lots of people - too much for me on this particular day.

We enjoyed a late lunch at the Pudding Shop, a restaurant made famous in the 60s as an intersection where hippies embarking on expeditions east would meet those returning (this gateway to the East being effectively sealed off by the situations in Iran and Afghanistan in the 70s and 80s). After lunch, we headed to the Hagia Sophia, which was one of the highlights of the trip. Built in the sixth century, this incredible basilica was a Christian church for over 900 years, until 1453, when Constantinople was captured by the Ottomans. (It hasn't been used as a mosque since the 1950s, when the Turkish government turned it into a museum - which I'm sure is visited by most of the 21 million tourists who visit Turkey each year.) This is another one of those places I've encountered where I could simply sit and let my mind wander for hours - from the places where the cross-pieces of crosses were torn off, leaving still visible holes or mosaics of crosses or angels or Christ himself painted or plastered over, to the large Arabic seals hanging from the four corners of the basilica (the tops covered in pigeon crap, I noticed with some delight), it's a place of intense beauty and intense and conflicting emotion.

After the Hagia Sophia, we went underground to the old underground cisterns used to store drinking water for the people of Istanbul. But it was after the cisterns that we were treated to one of my favorite parts of the trip - a short seminar on Turkish carpets by our guide, Aydin. On Friday, he had instructed us that if we were near the bazaar, we should drop in and see him. Aydin has been a guide in his hometown, Istanbul, for over 40 years. These days, however, most of his time is spent with his first love, teaching lectures on Turkish carpets - either at the Istanbul Handcraft Center, where we met him, or on cruise ships in the Mediterranean and Aegean seas.

That evening we were supposed to see the world-renown Grand Bazaar, though at the suggestion of Dr. Hoefer, most of the group decided to see a performance by the "whirling dervishes", while a couple others went back to the hotel. So I tagged along to see this traditional Sufi Islam spiritual dance ritual (in a large, dimly-lit room in the Istanbul train station). Afterwards, we took the ferry back across the Strait to the hotel.

[Dr. Hoefer (extreme left), Yusef, and Ersin, our guide.]

[The Bosphorus Strait from the bridge.]

[Museum.]

[The "Blue Mosque" from the museum court. In the foreground you can see an Egyptian obelisk in the Hippodrome across the street from the museum.]

["Chai" - Turkish tea. I had had this style of tea in the Middle East before. One thing I really enjoyed was that everywhere you went you could find it - and almost always served in a small glass like this. They pour a bit of concentrated tea into these small glasses, draw in some hot water and serve with one or two sugar cubes. I noticed Ersin drank tea everywhere we stopped, so I asked if there was a special time of day - after meals or in the morning - when Turkish people drink tea and how many cups he drank in a single day. The answer: 10 to 15! Sounded like a challenge to me.]

[Ersin at the entrance to the Blue Mosque.]

[Inside the Blue Mosque.]

[Group photo with the Hagia Sophia in the background (from left): Ryan, Me, Rachel, Enoch and Kristin Peterson, and in the foreground, Dr. Herbert Hoefer and the Rev. Brent Smith.]

[Topkapi Palace kitchens. As usually happens, I'm more fascinated by the structure and the grounds than the artifacts inside - in this case, a collection of centuries-old Japanese and Chinese porcelain. I liked the bricks.]

[View of the Asian side of Istanbul from a patio at the palace. On the left, just on shore, you can see the pink facade of the Harem Otel.]

[Mosaic in the entrance to the Hagia Sophia.]

[I wonder what it looked like "back in the day"? (It was approx. 8" tall.)]

[Scaffolding in the dome. Ersin said they've been restoring the dome for nearly 20 years, but that it will be done in the next 1-2 years (I wonder how long they've been saying that?).]

[The next time I travel to Istanbul I'm bringing one of those little tri-fold camp stools and I will park myself in front of this mosaic until they kick me out.]

[Beautiful Savior.]

[They didn't have a stairway to get to the upper portico, rather this stone ramp. The lighting and the orange paint on the ceiling - a unique color in the Hagia Sophia - drew my attention.]

[A mosaic of Mary and the baby Jesus perched above Islamic stained-glass windows (not normal for a mosque, but they had to do something when they converted it from a church to a mosque, I guess). You can also see the top of the "niche" pointing toward Mecca at the bottom of the frame.]

[Mosaic crosses that had been painted-over.]

[The cistern.]

[Aydin delivering a fascinating lecture on Turkish carpets. After explaining the declining numbers of weavers and predicting the demise of this art, he mentioned the Starbucks on the street outside that had replaced one of the former stores where you could purchase this carpets. "The girls would rather make the same amount of money selling coffee instead of weaving carpets, I guess" he lamented. One of the carpets he showed us took two women two years to make. List price: approximately $50,000.]