Wandering in Byzantium - The Streets of Istanbul

Istanbul is magic. It's full of magnificent architecture, the food is great and the Golden Horn and Bosporus are splendid. Admittedly, I didn't venture beyond the Sultanahmet/Grand Bazaar area because there is so much to look at there I ran out of time, but what really strikes one about the city is the street theatre. So here are some photographs in the streets of Istanbul.

At first glance, this could be pretty much anywhere.

outside main railway station, Istanbul

But then you look again

Things happen in the streets of Istanbul. Sometimes they're quite normal things, like tending the multitudinous parks and gardens.

These are the Topkapi Palace gardens, but even freeway embankments are adorned with lawns and flowers.

One of the people who look after it all

There are always road works in progress, too.

Driving in parts of Istanbul does get a bit tricky at times. This is the street where I was staying.

Most city streets have lines painted down the middle but in Istanbul something more substantial is necessary. The staples down the middle of the road are to ensure the traffic keeps to one side or the other. Which side is pretty much optional, depending on where the obstructions are.

Sensible people walk around the city, and there are people about waiting to clean your shoes. They all have these elaborate boxes for their brushes and polishes. But I don't know how much trade they get. Most people I saw were wearing either thongs or runners.

Of course, there are buskers around the streets, including the inevitable South American band. Although in this case, there was only one musician required.

Turkish bands get a bit bigger.

These gentlemen paraded around the Hippodrome before putting on a performance on stage. The bass drum took centre stage and the drummer was magnificent.

Before you ask, Fatih is the name of this part of Istanbul and Belediyesi is the equivalent of the local municipal council. Council officials came by checking up on steet vendors and other things every so often. This is how they get around. You stand up on it, like a Segway. Beats walking.

It was a hot day and I was pleased when a man came by selling bottled water. He was followed by another man selling bread rolls, which he carried on a pole.

bread and toffee (I think)

I never did identify this - it was wound and stretched like old-fashioned candy and that's probably what it was, but I wasn't brave enough to try any. This is in a park above the Basilica Cistern and I think the wall might be a remnant of the original basilica.
The little stand is very light, and a few minutes later he folded it up and moved off to another location. I became fascinated by these strolling street vendors, who are everywhere, so began photographing some of them.

bread sticks and pretzels

watermelon

kebabs while you wait

nectarines - and he really was wheeling this big
barrow around the Bazaar

mussels

more kebabs

roasted chestnuts and corn - also roasted. Yum.

 There were several men selling apples and cucumbers, peeled and ready to eat.

 This is a handy gadget that, with a few turns of the handle, peels and cores your apple and cuts it into a neat spiral. My friend was fascinated - "Forget the apple" she said "I want one of those things!" Immediately a little man materialised beside her with a brand new apple-peeler in a box for 85 Turkish Lira. Be very careful what you wish for in Istanbul.

freshly squeezed fruit juice

 Every afternoon an impromptu market appeared in Beyazit Square, in front of the Istanbul University. Sometimes the police came by and it all vanished until they went away again. Here is another person selling cold drinks from an elaborate flask on his back.

I was going to include markets in this blog entry, but it got too big so I'll finish up with a couple of nice evening shots at Eminonu.

Next entry: The Grand Bazaar. And other things.

Columns: recycling, re-using

Here I am in Berlin, and this is the Pergamon Museum , where you can see many enchanting and amazing objects.

It was built specifically to house this:

This magnificent colonnade is a reconstruction of the front of the Great Temple to Zeus that once stood at Pergamon. This is a model of the Great Temple.

 

Of course, I’ve been to the museum and seen the Temple before, but this time it was different, because only three weeks ago I was here:

This is Bergama in western Turkey, known for its olive oil, carpets and onyx. And the terraces under the trees are the original foundations where  the Great Altar used to be.

Warning: History. With dates and stuff

Pergamon was a Lydian city until the Persian invasion of 546BCE. After Alexander the Great defeated the Persians it became an important Hellenistic centre of arts, culture and learning with the second biggest library in the empire (after Alexandria), and a magnificent and famous hospital, the Aesclepeus.   

When Attalos III died in 133BCE he bequeathed his city and everything to the Romans, who looked after it pretty well. It remained a prominent cultural centre, though with little political importance. As the Roman Empire faded, so did Pergamon and by the Byzantine period its main importance seems to have been as a source of building materials. 

As Tasmanians know, if you want some dressed stone it’s a lot easier to help yourself to the remains of an old building than start at the quarry face. This is an ancient recycling practice called spoliation, and archaeologists hate it, especially when it means inscriptions end up broken into pieces and scattered in all the wrong places. 

Here is a wall at Pergamon that, when the Romans were there, had an elegant marble facing:

The Emperor's New Church

In the years 532 – 537 the emperor Justinian organized the building of a new church in Constantinople, the last two having been destroyed by rioters. He had the marble facing from walls at Pergamon removed and used to decorate his new church. I have absolutely no idea which particular pieces of marble in Hagia Sofia came from Pergamon, but these are jolly impressive.

A couple of hundred years later Pergamon was sacked and burned by the Arabs; new fortifications were built using stone from the ancient buildings. There were still a few amazing things left there, however. During the reign of Murad III (1574 – 1595) two great big marble jars, originally from the Hellenistic period, were brought from Pergamon and placed in Hagia Sofia, which was now a mosque. Here’s a rather dark photograph of one of them:

Justinian was determined his new church should be bigger and better than any ever built before, and had materials shipped in from all over the middle east. Columns came from the famous Temple of Diana at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

Now it might seem a big job shifting a lot of 9-metre-high marble columns, but at least you can take them apart. Wooden, and later lead, pins were used to hold the pieces together.

Tour guide at Ephesus explaining to us how
to secure the pieces of a column.

Cat coming to help

There isn’t a lot left at the Temple of Diana these days. It’s on the outskirts of the town of Selcuk and has been thoroughly quarried.  So little trace remains it took sixty years to work out where the temple had been; an expedition sponsored by the British Museum finally succeeded in 1869, so that’s where all the good bits have gone.

Archaeologists have pieced together some scraps of different columns just to give us tourists an idea of how high it was. It was pretty big - 450' long by 225' wide and 60 feet high, with more than 127 columns, according to that reliable source, Wikipedia.

The temple lasted for about six hundred years. It may have been severely damaged by an earthquake and rebuilt, but was finally destroyed by the Goths in 268CE. There must have been plenty of useable stone left lying around, for columns were also used in the Byzantine fort built during the sixth century on Ayasuluk, in the background of this photograph. There’s a Turkish flag flying over the fort. 

There are a lot of columns in Hagia Sofia

Whether or not they come from Ephesus,  they look pretty

It seems a little odd to think that structural items from a pagan temple supposedly destroyed by the Christian God (according to the apocryphal Acts of St John) later became the supports of a Greek Orthodox cathedral which itself became a Roman Catholic Cathedral and then a mosque before retiring as a museum. But stranger things have happened.

Justinian gathered up columns from a lot of other places for his building projects. My personal favourite piece of Justinian recycling is the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul. There had been an ancient basilica, probably built by Constantine, next door to the site of Hagia Sophia and Justinian turned the foundations into a cistern to supply water to the palace. 

There are at least a hundred ancient cisterns under the city, but this is by far the largest at 140 metres by 70 metres. There are steps leading down to it and walkways have been constructed to take the place of the boats that used to take tourists around.  

It has a capacity of 80,000 cubic metres, but there are only a few centimetres of water in there now- just enough to reflect the strategically placed lights and turn the whole place into magic. 

The vaulting is supported on 336 columns each roughly nine metres high. They vary greatly in size and style; about ninety have Corinthian capitals and probably came from the same building. The rest came from other buildings around Constantinople and beyond. 

Some weren’t high enough, so had to have bits added. 

 

Two of the most notable bits are heads of Medusa, obviously fragments of another building. One had to be turned on its side to provide the right height; the other is upside down. People try to make up stories about why this should be so, but I imagine it’s merely because they worked better that way. And anyway, they would be under water, where nobody would see them. 

In Turkish the cistern is called Yerebatan Sarayi – the Sunken Palace.

Digging around the Dardanelles - Part two: Troy

Next morning we sailed for Troy. Wow! Just like all those ancient Greeks three thousand years ago that Homer wrote about!

Well, perhaps a vehicle ferry isn't all that romantic

The Dardanelles are 61 kilometers long and between 1.2 and 6 kilometers wide, and are one of the trickiest and busiest waterways in the world. They retain their strategic importance, linking the Mediterranean to the Black Sea.

the foreshore at Eceabat, looking across The Narrows from Europe to Asia.

It's just over a kilometre across the Dardanelles from Eceabat to Çanakkale. It's not as far, and not nearly as pretty as the trip across to Bruny Island from Kettering. Then we had another bus ride.

This is the first thing you see when the bus stops at Troy. 

Oh dear, was my first thought. My second thought, however, was: the story of Troy has been told for about 3,000 years; even people who haven't heard it or read  it know about the Wooden Horse. Over this period there have been countless imaginative recreations, descriptions and illustrations of it – why should this be any better or any worse than the others? So I decided to like it, but I didn't bother climbing the ladder to peer out the windows.

It was created by architect Kadir Izzet Senemoglu on behalf of the Ministry of Culture in 1974. But did they have to paint it Mission Brown, with a gloss finish?

a bit of Trojan plumbing; yes, terracotta water pipes there

The first archaeologist to dig around here at Hisarlik was Frank Calvert, an English diplomat who bought the site in 1865, and was a prominent authority on things Trojan. He thought the missing city could be here, but couldn't get the funding to search for it as academics generally considered the entire story of Troy a literary fiction. When Heinrich Schliemann turned up three years later, Calvert talked him into taking over the excavation.

 

Treasure Hunt

 Schliemann was more interested in treasure and self-promotion than history, and hired an army of locals to plough a trench through the middle of the hill. If he'd had a backhoe, he would have used that. This is the result:

 

He did leave a few bits that were too hard to dig through. And he did find his treasure, to everyone's surprise. 

Most of it went off to Berlin and vanished during WWII, but about 1994 officials at the Pushkin Museum in Russia admitted they had quite a lot of it. And no, they aren't giving it back to the Germans. If it belongs to anyone, it would be Turkey, but they'd probably have a hard job getting it back, too. 

Included in the treasure were items from as far afield as Afghanistan and the Baltic, indicating the importance of Troy as a trading city. And this, of course, is why the famous Trojan War began. 

Stories of stolen wives are much more fun, but the cold hard truth is that Troy was in a powerful strategic position controlling important trade routes, and Agamemnon wanted it. His sister-in-law's elopement might have been an excuse for the invasion, but certainly not a reason. 

Sea Change

According to Homer, the Greeks beached their ships at the mouth of the river Karamenderes, or Scamander, which formed a natural harbour 3,000 years ago. Since then the river mouths have silted up and these days Troy is five kilometres inland. 

 

This is taken from the Temple of Athena, looking towards the Dardanelles. The ancient shoreline was roughly where the trees are at the end of the nearest ploughed field.

there's always an amphitheatre. The wooden stage is a
modern reconstruction

Because of its position, the site was occupied for a long time. Every now and then the buildings there were destroyed by earthquakes, invasions or fire, and a new town was built. There were nine at last count. The final Roman one was established under Augustus (63BCE - 14CE), and extended much further than the area Schliemann excavated. It gradually fell into decline in Byzantine times and eventually vanished from memory. Perhaps it was beginning to cost too much to dredge the harbour?

The world is littered with ancient battlefields, remains of lost civilizations and vast cities, ruined or not, and most have just as exciting a past as Troy. But unless you know the stories they are meaningless. As they say, if it wasn't on TV, it didn't happen. 

Without their legends, Gallipoli is just a picturesque peninsula at the end of the Mediterranean, Mighty Ilium is a pile of stones keeping a few archaeologists amused for a while. 

So let's hear it for the story tellers!