In October 2007 we finally went to Istanbul, after decades of false starts. “The City” was simply too vast and emotional for a Greek to travel too lightly. The flight from Athens, where we lived at the time, to Istanbul takes less than an hour, and we arrived on a very overcast Saturday morning into Ataturk Airport, gliding downward through the mists of the Sea of Marmara. Our cab traced its way around the old city walls, scenes of so much history now in various places restored, in other areas crumbling, and in yet other places the walls themselves form part of the structure of homes wealthy and modest.
Few cities are so favored by geography and topography as Constantinople, but the price for such favor is costly. First, everyone coveted the city, so it suffered innumerable sieges. Second, below the city’s surface some of the world’s deadliest fault lines lurk, shaking the city periodically, and thousands die. But the scene, even in autumn morning drizzle, cannot fail to impress. The old city juts out like a hitchhiker’s thumb, into the Sea of Marmara, which narrows to become the famous Bosphorus, more like a river gorge than a waterway. Another small waterway, the Golden Horn, separates the “thumb” of Constantinople from the posh Beyoglou District, where we would stay.
Rounding the “thumb,” to my left, we saw it. St. Sophia, a squared, orange-colored edifice which seen from afar was slightly less impressive than I thought. As we prepared to cross the Galata Bridge, another mosque appeared which, minus minarets, would pass for a double of St. Sava’s Cathedral in Belgrade, clearly showing that the origins of much of Ottoman architecture are Byzantine.
Upon arriving at the Hotel and registering for my trade conference (the business purpose behind my trip), we hailed a cab to St. Sophia. The area is a dense zone of history, impossible to appreciate without a protracted stay. We walked around vast St. Sophia, utterly intimidated by the profundity of the church/mosque. It lacked the classical grace of the Parthenon, that other symbol of Hellenism, but in terms of sheer envelopment and density, it is peerless.
We returned via public transportation, losing our way several times. Cutting through the suburbs of the city and bisecting the land walls of Constantinople, the train rolled through suburbs with names recalling the Turks’ own refugee experience, such as Yeni Bosna (New Bosnia), just as the Asia Minor districts of Athens, such as Nea Smyrni, recall lost homelands of Asia Minor Greeks. Turkey, like the other Balkan states, had its own refugees and dislocations as a result of Balkan conflicts. On the train we sat next to an older Turkish man with a blond mustache and his teenage son, who in halting English welcomed us to Turkey, and told us that we, as Balkan people, were “brethren.” His father welcomed us by shaking hands very formally and told us through his son that he was “honored to meet us.”
I preferred to let history and topography to be our guide, and also I knew that three days simply could not even scratch the surface of this eternal city. A whole season might begin to do it justice, but for the impressionist sketch, we did our best. I also did not want the tour to be a mourning of the Turkish conquest in 1453. On this trip, I could not bring myself to visit the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate, as this living institution has been so abused by the Turkish authorities that I feared it would too much color the whole trip. We had to paint our impression quickly, on the damp plaster, like the fresco artist.
The next morning a melancholy rain obscured the view of Asia from our hotel window, I hired a cab to take us to “Asia.” We drove north along the European side of the Bosphorus, past Ottoman palaces and exquisite mosques, and looped into the city to reach the northern bridge. There, in the foothills crammed with five-story flats stretching westward into Thrace, we began to appreciate the sheer vastness of the city, a sea of unsteady concrete perched uneasily across seismically-challenged foothills. The City was the largest in Europe for hundreds of years, and it is again, with well over 16 million people, four times the size of Athens, and double the size of London or Chicago, all cities we have called home at one time or another.
We jumped on the Autobahn, crossing the Fatih (Conqueror) Bridge over the Bosphorus, a placard welcomed us to Asia, as we added (at least in a technical sense) another continent to our travel list. The driver exited on the first off-ramp, and set a course down the hills to the Asian side of the Bosphorus. There we drove along the Bosphorus to Anadolu Hisar (“Castle of Anatolia/Asia”), a small fortress the Ottomans built in the 1300s as a prelude to the eventual conquest of Constantinople.
The castle sits in a lovely setting belying its sinister task, but the sniffly weather only allowed for a few photos. This mournful sheet, a collision between the steppe climate of the Black Sea and that of the balmier Mediterranean, created a drizzling melancholy, described in depth by Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize winning Istanbul novelist, as huzun. Pamuk describes huzun as a type of melancholy associated with a sense of loss, and the historical weight of the city, its lost glories, and missing inhabitants, combined with this climatic tendency, certainly fosters this weighty feeling. Moving on, we reached the Ataturk Bridge, returning to Europe, to the continent where the Turks want to pin their identity and their future.
Crossing the Galata Bridge into the old City of Constantinople provided a vague feeling of similarity to crossing the Sava River into Belgrade. Minus minarets, there is something similar between Istanbul and the hilly Serbian capital crowned by its own “St. Sophian” Cathedral, St. Sava. Both descend from a common culture.
Our destination was obvious. We decided to forgo a guided tour of St. Sophia and just walk our way through by ourselves. I entered with trepidation, having heard so many stories about others’ experiences. My primary feeling was the vastness of the Divine, well captured within the vessel of this church. The Islamic geometric artwork and the interior emptiness also came as a bit jarring to one who had always associated St. Sophia with a church, but made more sense once we visited the nearby Blue Mosque. St. Sophia reminded me of St. Sava in Belgrade, which I visited while still in construction, when the Serbian cathedral had a bare interior. In both places one sensed the circular, spatial, embracing totality of God.
The most moving part of St. Sophia lies in the upper galleries, where careful work has brought some of the greatest mosaic icons in the world back to life, and “living” truly describes them, including one of Jesus that looks as if He is drawing breath, ready to preach. We sat transfixed, taking pictures of the Image to which no photo can do justice; you have to see it, and use the rest of your senses to take His image holistically. Other icons too, liberated from centuries of Ottoman plaster, traced the history of the Byzantine Empire, which lasted over 1000 years. In an off-color comment to my wife, I declared, “you see, the truth comes out!” I found an icon of Byzantine Emperor Alexandros, who my wife said bore a striking resemblance to me.
Leaving St. Sophia, our next stop was the Blue Mosque, architecturally a clear descendent of its neighbor, built 1000 years later. Having never been to a functioning mosque, I had expected the interior to be somewhat similar to churches but what we witnessed, in stockinged feet, was a vast emptiness and the geometric patterns of an oriental carpet both below our feet and along the walls and domes. Suddenly, the emptiness of St. Sophia made sense and its austerity reflected an interpretation of God which fit the nomadic origins of the Arabs and the original Turks, themselves nomads who burst out of Central Asia.
Always in my travels, I have preferred the more obscure and significant, to the packaged mass tour which has the effect of obscuring the significant. Thus, the Topkapi Museum did not have the effect it deserved, because the galleries and rooms were filled with tourists milling in a traffic control pattern. What remained from Topkapi were the beautiful kiosks and gardens, and the sweeping views of the Golden Horn, which we appreciated with a lunch in Topkapi’s restaurant. Turkish cuisine did not disappoint us and at the neighboring table a woman from Salonika told us that her mother was expelled from Istanbul in the 1960s, but returned constantly; she had never gotten over leaving “The City.” More huzun.
The delights of the Covered Bazaar I left to my wife, who negotiated the purchase of a fantastic leather jacket for me from a Serbian-born Turkish merchant, while I attended my various meetings, but in conversations, I spoke to many Turks, among them a Turkish-Dutch professor of history. I sensed a mild guilt about the lack of a Greek presence in the City which was, after all, built by the Greeks’ Byzantine ancestors and had a very large Greek population until the deportations of the 1950s and 1960s.
The trade seminar ended with a boat tour of the Bosphorus and as we glided past the Ataturk and Fatih (Conqueror) Bridges, we saw from tens of meters away the restored Ottoman yalis (villas) of a bygone era and felt a quiet solitude in the midst of a city of millions. To complete the story of the castles, we glided past Rumeli Hisar, much larger than its Asian counterpart, commanding an excellent field of fire for any passing ship. I use “field of fire” deliberately, as the Mehmet II, the Fatih (Conqueror) of Constantinople, built this castle in 1452 to seal off Constantinople from any supplies coming from the Black Sea. The Ottomans called it Bogaz Kesen, “cutter of the channel” and the Greeks personified it as laimokopia, “cutter of the throat.”
Sitting on the back deck of the tour boat, well within the sight of Rumeli Hisar’s cannons, I talked to a Dutch-born Turkish professor. We were both children of the Diaspora and descended from this common region. He acknowledged the legacy of Byzantium and the loss of the Greek population as part of that painful separation brought about by nationalism on both sides. In a sense, Istanbul is still the capital of the Balkans, where Byzantium was conquered but never fully dominated. Now that the City is European Capital of Culture, the Constantinople side of Istanbul will be on full display—to those who know where to look. As Greeks, it is our responsibility to tell the full story of the Tsar’s City.
