The following morning, the Istanbul Modern Art Museum was free to the public, so we decided to take advantage of that. There was a special exhibit by Saudi artists, mostly of interesting graphic social critiques of environmental, gender and political issues. Unfortunately, some of the art was also rather psychologically disturbing and we had to leave earlier than we had planned. This picture of shapeless, low statuettes shrouded in black cloth may give you an idea:
To clear our heads a bit, we chose to walk the long distance to the other side of the Golden Horn River where we were headed. As we crossed the fishermen-covered bridge once more, we noticed a fish market nearby on the shore and walked through it before heading to the bazaar that we had been to the previous day with the intention of splitting up to buy Christmas stocking-stuffers for one another and then trying another street food that we had seen – chick peas and rice cooked in chicken broth and covered in pepper and ketchup – and then indulged in some delicious baklava. Emily was leaving that evening for Greece and wanted to investigate the train station nearby, so we went there and discovered a free, entertaining one-room train museum! We then spent the afternoon in a beautiful park, people-watching, talking, and having our Christmas photo taken with an enormous statue of Ataturk (as Sarah describes him, Turkey’s George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison combined into a single person – he was a military hero, founder of the modern republic, author of the constitution and savvy politician of the early 20th century). We went Christmas-gift hunting and got a delicious dinner at a cafeteria on Istiklal before going back to our hostel so that Emily could pack. Sarah and I took her to the train station that evening. It was sad to see her leave; we’re so glad we met her, if only for four days, and it felt a little lonely in our hostel room that evening. Emily should be in Bulgaria by now, continuing her series of adventures down a different path than Sarah and me.
On Christmas Eve, Sarah and I went to see the Aya Sofia (aka., Hagia Sofia, Church of the Divine Wisdom). We had been told that it wasn’t worth the 20 lira to see, but I decided that having heard so much about it, even in my terrible high school world history text book, we couldn’t leave Istanbul without seeing it. 20 lira was a little exorbitant, but I’m extremely glad that we chose to go anyway. The inside was amazing, and Sarah and I used the handy-dandy Lonely Planet book on Istanbul that Emily had left us to guide ourselves. It’s beautiful in a very different way than the Blue Mosque; the dome doesn’t appear to be held up by anything, and apparently it did actually collapse a number of times in history.
Originally the walls and ceilings had more mosaics representing saints, the holy family and important Byzantine political figures of the time (there was actually a war over whether this could be considered idol worship or not and iconoclasts (“image-breakers”) destroyed a number), but when the church became a Mosque in the 15th century after the Turks’ conquest of Constantinople the images representing human and animal forms were destroyed or covered up with plaster because life-like representations of creation is in Islam considered a competition with Allah. The mosaics that were covered with plaster have since been uncovered and restored, and what could be inferred about missing mosaics was represented in paint on plaster by those in charge of the restoration. This mosaic was my favorite. It represents the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus, flanked by the Empress Zoe and her last fortunate husband. Zoe had married the emperor, who had died shortly afterwards… and then she married again, and again and again, and when she’d gone through a few she tried ruling by herself. Apparently she was a horrible empress and was in fact so bad at administrating the empire that she was forced to marry again, to a noble who also died. She went through a few more husbands until the last one simply outlived her (he must have said, “Phew!”). The mosaic representation of the face of her husband on the left therefore had to be destroyed and re-done multiple times to keep up with her current royal partner. Though nothing we read actually said that she was, it sounds to me as though she was a power-hungry husband-killer! Makes for a juicy story, at least.
When the church was converted into a mosque, a mihrab was added at the front of the church, slightly off-center, to indicate the direction of Mecca, along with a minbar (basically a pulpit for the imam), a special screened-off box for the sultan and some large calligraphed shields with the names of Allah, Muhammad and the first caliphs. It was fun to see a church that had been converted into a mosque, because all this semester in my wonderful art and architecture class I’ve been studying mosques that were converted into churches in Spain after the Christian conquest.
Sarah and I spent the afternoon in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, which was incredibly disorganized and a bit overwhelming in its clutter of Really Old Stuff. We were particularly amused by the fact that almost every sign said something along the lines of “This is [fill in the blank] and its counterpart or more important pieces or entire context is currently located in the British Museum in London.” Really, the British Museum has everybody’s everything. We recovered from the archaeology museum by discovering ANOTHER kind of street food, called kumpir, which is basically a heart-attack waiting to happen and therefore one of the most delicious things I’ve ever tasted. It’s a baked potato, mashed up inside its skin with cheese and butter and mountain-topped with every kind of topping imaginable – olives, purple pickled cabbage, spicy chili sauce, corn and bean salad, beets, pickles, and basically everything else you could possibly think of. It was an enjoyable Christmas Eve, and we added the Christmas-y part by going to a candle-lit English church service which was strange but gave us our fix of Christmas carols. We sang Christmas carols under our breath all the way back to our hostel that evening.
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