Day Eighteen: Stephen Wood and the Tomb of Henrico Dandolo

Before I start, I'd like to mention that I had to change the background of the text because large portions of it just showed up as white bars when I first published it.  It looked like someone had gone through and whited out about half of what I said, so I'm thinking it was either an error on the part of the host or some secret agency doesn't want you to read what I've written.  Sorry for any inconvenience that may cause.
Some good stuff has happened since I last wrote.  We toured the Hagia Sophia, the Byzantine church built sometime around 360 and converted into a mosque by the Ottomans after their conquest of Istanbul in

Words can't really capture its beauty.  Neither can pictures, but I took some pictures anyway, and here they are:

 I'm no expert on Arabic calligraphy, but I think this is Arabic calligraphy

 from the second level

 The mosaics are in pretty good shape considering they were covered by plaster from 1453 until the 1950s

The sultan's box.  Kind of like mezzanine level at Camden Yards, except I saw no soft pretzels.

Aside from being an astounding sight to behold and a treasure trove of historical and religious artifacts, the building is also significant for its roof, which was the Largest Dome in the World for some time.  Ottoman architects, among others, tried for a very long time to create a larger dome, but no one succeeded until a mosque in Edirne, in Northeastern Turkey, was built with a larger dome about a thousand years after the Hagia Sophia.  Yeah, a thousand.  Unfortunately, the Hagia Sophia lost this title before the creation of the Guinness Book of World Records, so the dome was never featured alongside pictures of people with ten foot-long toenails.  But if you ask me, it's still more impressive than all the toenails in the world put together.

Right?

Again, I can't really do that justice with a photograph.  Something I might be able to do justice, however, is the tomb of Henrico Dandolo.  Henrico Dandolo was a crusader from an Italian city-state whose name I forget who attacked Constantinople during the Byzantine period.  Apparently those Byzantines were really nice people, because after Dandolo was killed in the attack they decided to bury him, a Catholic who was trying to take over their city, in their own Greek Orthodox church, which happened to be the most amazing building in the world, even though in Greek Orthodoxy people usually aren't buried in churches.  My theory is that they just did it because the phrase "The Tomb of Henrico Dandolo" sounded awesome.  Maybe that's not why they did it, but that's why I took a picture of it.  It's just casually embedded in the marble on the upper level of the church/mosque/museum.

I'm getting comfortable in this neighborhood.  Just as I looked forward to walking around the city, buying groceries or whatever, that's one of the things I'm enjoying the most.  Just running around or taking a five-minute walk to a bakery to buy borek, this awesome thing that consists of the kind of bread they use in baklava surrounding cheese, potatoes, or just more bread (my choice!), excites me almost as much as crossing the Bosporus on a ferry or standing under the dome of the Hagia Sophia.  My dad might not be far from the truth when he says it's the perfect place to get pickpocketed, but it's also the perfect place to experience Istanbul.  It's been here forever-Byzantine walls separate it from the road that goes by the water-but it's nothing like an historic district.  There's an old Ottoman bathhouse on one street, but nobody makes a big deal out of it.  There's always someone selling fruit, there are usually kids playing in the street, there are always lazy cats and dogs on the sidewalk, there are often men playing cards and laughing in the open-air restaurants, and there is always borek, thankfully. 

 Now that we know our way around this neighborhood, we've been exploring other parts of Istanbul.  This week we've spent a lot of time in Bebek, an affluent neighborhood to the north of Taksin located on the water, close to where the Bosporus is at its most narrow.  On Sunday, we had dinner at a restaurant right by the water.  The restaurant is one of maybe ten around the city that are operated by the government of Istanbul, apparently so that customers know they're getting quality service and can count on it being clean.  When Professor Gilson told us that, I had to wonder what had prompted the city council to get together and say, "Guys, we really need there to be some kind of restaurant that people know is clean."  Anyway, there are some great non-state-run ice cream places in Bebek, and some beautiful old buildings that I wish we had walked past before my camera died.  

a picture of swimmers near Bebek and the Bosporus Bridge, taken in my camera's final moments

I left the extra batteries in my room, but before it died we toured a house on a hill near Bebek.  From what I could tell, the story behind this house was basically that it belonged to a rich industrialist and that late in his life he decided to turn it into a museum to show everyone all the nice things he had collected over his career as a rich industrialist.  And truly, he had some very nice things.  My camera died about halfway through the tour, so unfortunately I can't show you all the priceless manuscripts and classics of Turkish art in the lower levels of the museum.  It's a shame-there were probably a hundred different Korans, all of then hand-painted and gold-leafed and filled with beautiful calligraphy.  There were also large pieced of parchment with the signatures of various sultans.  I learned that each of the lines and swirls and other beautiful curves in these elaborate signatures actually has a meaning, although they seem like something just put there to make it look fancy.  Apparently the signatures gave not only the sultan's full name but also the name of his father (and possibly other significant relatives), along with his father's epithet ("The Mighty," "The Conqueror," "Mr. October," etc.).  

This is a large decorative shield bearing the signature of a sultan.  It's less blurry in real life.

I also learned that, although Islam forbids the artistic rendering of anything created by God, artists used calligraphy to create such shapes.  What that means is that they could write something so elaborate and detailed that if you stand back it looks like a fish.  They did that with all sorts of animals and, coolest of all in my opinion, boats.  Really wish I'd brought extra batteries for my camera.

I did get pictures of a few things, and here they are:

 the view of the Bosporus from in front of the museum

a painting of the Bosporus inside the museum

Not pictured: Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat

Those last few were all sultans, but of course I forget which ones.  But the sultans weren't the only ones whose images decorated the grounds of this mansion-turned-museum:

Yep, you guessed it-the guy who owned the house decided to have busts made of him and seven of his family members and put them on marble pedestals in the front yard.  Mom, this might be something else we can put in the yard to cover up the lack of grass.

We've also been learning some things.  I gave a presentation on millet reform in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century in class on Monday.  To sum it up, the Ottomans basically tried to bring their people together by requiring the various religious sects within the empire to come up with their own, separate constitutions.  It didn't work.  Be glad you got the brief version of that lecture-my classmates had to sit through the long version while the AC in our classroom was broken.  Professor Hanioglu ended up dismissing class twenty minutes early when I was done, which everyone agreed was the only thing to do given the temperature.

Turkish is going pretty well.  We're learning how to use verbs and the locative case (the nominative case's tricky sister), and we can now ask whether something is there or not, which is huge for going to bazaars and restaurants.  The Turkish kids in our history class don't join us for Turkish class for obvious reasons, but they're always very willing to help us with Turkish and to shepherd us around Istanbul.  On two such excursions over the last two days, a curious thing has happened on the bus.  I've been standing there, holding on to the handles for dear life and chatting casually with my friends, when one of my fellow busriders has told me to shut up.  The first time, the guy next to me turned to me, with a pained expression on his face, and said, "Silence, please."  I thought maybe he had a headache or something, so I tried to distance myself from him and speak much quieter.  Weird, but whatever.  I didn't think much of it until just before we got off the bus, when another man explained (loudly, I should add) to my friend that some people were tired and that she should be quiet.  We got off the bus wondering how anyone could think that public transportation was supposed to be a quiet-time place, especially when plenty of native Istanbullus were talking.  I thought maybe there was an unwritten rule that you didn't talk too loudly on the bus when you knew people were returning from work tired and ready to go to bed, so I thought, "Gee, that sure is nice of them!" and put it out of my mind.  But then today, when I was shushed vigorously on a bus at about 1 in the afternoon, I realized that there isn't an unwritten rule-we're just Loud Americans.  I'm not sure if there's anything I can do to become anything else, other than just not talking.  Maybe the fact that that sounds impossible to me is why those three guys all felt it was necessary to quiet us.  Hmm.  Every time it happened, I was tempted to include in my apology the phrase, "I'm from Canada" just to disprove the Loud American stereotype that I was enforcing, but I decided that would be wrong.  You're welcome, Canada.