Gratitude

As the sun sets in a view from my hotel terrace on my last night in Istanbul, it now time for my expressions of gratitude for the people who made my trip possible.

For allowing me to visit Istanbul during the school year: Mrs. Pullen, Dr. Watts, and Mrs. Wolcott.

For providing me professional inspirations: my colleagues at Saint Stephen’s, my colleagues in the AP World History community, and my students.

For filling in the gaps in my absence: my wife Heather, my sons, Mr. Zappa, and Mrs. Pommer.

For their hospitality: Recep Cok, the World History Association, the students and professors at Istanbul Sehir University, the staff of the Erguvan Hotel, and the sunny people of Istanbul. 

If any of you are looking for a high quality blog that provided an inspiration for this one, check out greenteamedia.blogspot.com for Christina Pommer’s blog of her trip to Japan two years ago.  It is well worth your visit.   

Sufi Dervish

Islam, just like every other major world religion, has its mystical aspects.  The Sufis are a group of Muslim that have been active for centuries trying to access God’s mysteries through mystical expression.  Many of them wrote beautiful love and dream poetry as I heard in two of the presentations at the symposium.  One sect of Sufis that is still active in Istanbul is the Dervish.  They are famous for using music and dance to enter into a trance in which they have fuller expression of God’s mysteries.  

Several of the members of my group decided to visit the most authentic whirling Dervish monastery in Istanbul for a sacred ceremony.  Instead I decided to go out on the town with Recep.  On my last night, however, I went out to dinner with a group including Ron and his wife, two professors from Alberta, the German professor who helped explain mosaics in Hagia Sophia, and a young grad student from Germany who is also an expert in slavery and eunuchs. 

We ate a glorious fish dinner.  Afterwards we wandered into a more commercial, non-authentic Dervish ceremony at an outdoor market.

Mosaics of Hagia Sophia

When I returned to Hagia Sophia, I got a chance to look at the mosaics with a German specialist in Byzantine history.  He apologized for not being an art historian, but he was marvelous in talking about the political importance of the various mosaics.  Some of them displayed emperors and empresses that I had heard discussed during the symposium. 

These mosaics and the ones at the church at Chora have been preserved because the Muslim took over Constantinople.  The Islamic authorities wanted to quickly rid their churches of their Christian images before turning them into mosques.  So they either painted over them or put plaster on them.  When restoration occurred in the 20^th century, there were the mosaics preserved for 500 years under the paint and plaster. 

History and Turkish Politics

The tour group that I travelled with on Sunday was directed by a professor of Istanbul Sehir University and a capable graduate student.  While we were traveling around Hagia Sophia, my friend Ron, his wife, and I invited the grad student Adil to lunch with us. 

Adil is considered the most promising graduate student in the university’s history department.  He too has worked as a tour guide.  Later when we went through Hagia Sophia and the Topkapi Palace complex (my second time for both), Adil was quite knowledgeable but needed to be prodded with questions before answering.  I think that he was a bit intimidated by the group, most of whom had PhDs in Ottoman and Byzantine history. 

At lunch, however, he opened up.  I asked my typical question, which was “why do you like your university.”  Adil had started a PhD program before in Ottoman history, but he found that his field of study was considered politically inappropriate.  Until recently all universities were government run, and the government has for the past 80 years been neglecting its Ottoman past.  Starting in 1923 Turkey has been a republic.  I was constantly reminded of this by huge banners on the roadways celebrating independence day this Saturday.  Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, tried to strip Turkey of its ignoble past as an empire in decline.  Symbols of the Ottoman Empire were removed.  Even the Fez, the famous Turkish red headgear is STILL illegal for Turks to wear in public.  Religion too was removed from the government establishment in a drive for secular, western values. 

The president of Turkey today has reversed course.  He is using the republican language of Ataturk but stressing that Islamic values are not counter to what Turkey should become.  Some people have said that if France and other countries don’t want Turkey part of the European Union, that’s OK.  Turkey can become the centerpiece of a “new Ottoman empire” with the Balkans and the Middle East in its zone of influence. 

Just a few weeks ago a sweeping set of constitutional changes were adopted in Turkey by popular vote with the support of the president.  These changes were supposed to increase democracy by expanding the role of the courts at the expense of the military.  In reality the president’s party would be in charge of implementing these changes, and by doing so can cement their rule in a tighter hold.  The military, which has always supported the secular views of Ataturk in recent years, could finally be contained. 

Conservative parts of Turkey in the East voted overwhelmingly for the changes.  The western-oriented parts of Istanbul voted against.  The European Union protested the vote, and the president hailed it as a huge victory, and the military did NOT stage a coup d’etat to overthrow the government.  Otherwise I could have been on a front row seat for a military takeover. 

What does this have to do with my conference?  Well, ISU is supported by government ministers and is relatively conservative in its values.  Ottoman history is in vogue here, and I would imagine that most of the people at the school would support the president. 

Yes, history does have power. 

English Uber Alles

English is everywhere in Istanbul.  Very rarely did I find myself in a situation in which my supreme lack of language was a problem.  Although the symposium had a majority of Turkish participants and presenters, all of the major presentations that I heard were in English.  Istanbul Sehir University conducts all of its classes in English, as do a large number of universities in Turkey.  ISU is particularly focused on English because it wants to distinguish itself as a major research institution.  In order for students to be on the cutting edge of research today, they need to learn English. 

Everyone involved in the tourist trade in Istanbul has a passing familiarity with major expressions in English, and I encountered scores of people who were completely fluent.   Once I went to a restaurant (the one recommended by Rick Steves mentioned in an earlier post) that had a large group of Chinese tourists.  They spoke in broken English to the waiter, who himself only spoke in broken English.  It was comical in a way, but a definite sign of the globalized world that we live in and the role of the English language.

People may debate the declining influence of the United States as a world power today.  From my experience the complete  dominance of the English language, however, is undeniable. 

Hippodrome

One of the surprising aspects of my Sunday tour of Istanbul was when our Sunday guide stopped literally right in front of my hotel door and pointed to a huge wall across the street.  This was the foundation to the hippodrome of ancient times, the center of the city’s entertainment area.  He did a short summary of the major hippodrome monuments that the emperors brought to Constantinople from the distant parts of the empire.  The idea was to help reinforce their rule through displaying power monuments from all over their empire. 

The most famous monument was the obelisk that I mentioned in an earlier post.  The base of the monument was what we spent our attention on with the tour.  Several Byzantine specialists in the group talked about the issues of power represented in the carved marble base. 

One side had a dedication of the monument written in Latin.  Another side had its translation in Greek.  Yet another side had the emperor shown in the chariot racing imperial spectator box with his body guards.  A retired German professor in the group pointed out how the hairstyle of the bodyguards showed that they were Germanic. 

Yet another image on the monument displays the emperor with his senators (remember the Roman connection) with crowds of people below including dancing girls at the very bottom. 

My friend Ron

When I first got the idea to travel to Istanbul, I went on to an internet discussion group listserve that has about 3000 world history teachers as subscribers.  I said that I was going to the World History Association symposium in Istanbul in October.  I asked if anyone else was planning on going.  Plenty of people said that they wished that they could go.  Only my friend Ron indicted actual interest in going. 

I’ve known Ron for almost ten years.  He is a teacher in Los Angeles at a private Christian school.  We met in the summer of 2001 when we attended a three-week world history institute hosted by some of the biggest names in the world history community.  Ron and I were project partners.  His good natured, buoyant personality is just fun to be around.  Over the years we have met again at the Advanced Placement exam readings in Nebraska and Colorado.  We’ve gone on several small-scale adventures hiking and exploring, and so he seemed to be the best possible partner on this adventure.  His wife Nathana came with us.  She is not a world historian, but attended most of the sessions with the same good humor as Ron has always shown. 

Plague and Cats Again

Our tour director walked us through a neighborhood close to the site of the Byzantine palace.  The old neighborhood was once the earliest of the Muslim settlements in the Old City.  After the Ottoman conquest waves of plagues swept through the neighborhood just about every decade, killing off the neighborhood time and time again. 

Plague bacteria is carried in the guts of fleas that ride on rats.  I asked the professor about the role of Istanbul cats in 15^th century plague prevention.  In that time, they didn’t have complete knowledge of the role of rats in the spread of the plague.  If they had as many cats as Istanbul has now, they would not have had a problem.  Perhaps this is a research project that I can work on for the next symposium in Istanbul!

Prevent plague!  Love Cats. 

Graveyard Research

Outside of little Hagia Sophia was an ancient Islamic graveyard.  I noticed Byzantine graveyards immediately outside the city walls, after the Roman tradition.  Muslims didn’t have the same thoughts about location of graveyards, so they built their burial sites outside the mosques.  Our guide, fluent in Ottoman script, was able to read the inscriptions on the tombstones.  He mentioned that the size and type of top on the gravestone says a great deal about who is buried below.   He picked one of the stones randomly and read the inscription.  It was of one of the most significant of the people buried in the cemetery.  The inscription gave the date of death (which was 18^th century) his role (which was of palace eunuch) the date of his pilgrimage to Mecca, and some other details of his life. 

The tops of the graves of men have a carved reproduction of the hat that the guys wore.  Hats signified official positions and often membership in particular religious orders.  Women typically had floral designs on the tops of their graves.   

Church of the Saints Sergius and Bacchus

In an earlier post I referred to Hagia Sophia as the mother of all churches.  If that is the case, then the “Little Hagia Sophia” is the grandmother of the mother of all churches.  Built two centuries before Hagia Sophia, it was a significant accomplishment in what would later be the basic design elements of domed architecture.  What Hagia Sophia accomplishes by placing a circular dome in a square space, this church does with an octagon. 

One of the oldest of all Byzantine churches.

After 1453 the Turks converted this space into a mosque, as they did with every early church but one.  The oldest church in Istanbul is on the site of the Topkapi Palace.  Instead it was made into an armory storeroom.  I wasn’t able to visit it, however, since it is used now as a concert space. 

Little Hagia Sophia is still a mosque, so as I had done a few times before, I removed my shoes and entered reverently into the space.  I was struck by the similarity with Hagia Sophia.  There was the dome with the row of windows at the base.  The apse where the altar would be was done in much the same manner but on a much smaller scale.  Like Hagia Sophia, this church had its own cistern that was directly connected to a baptistery.  The Muslims have kept the baptistery and instead used it as a place for their ritual washing before prayer.  Unlike any other place for Islamic washing, this was located inside the Mosque. 

A recent renovation to the space has revealed the cistern.  Our guide pulled up part of the carpet so that we could see the way that the 4^th century Christians worked the water channels

Another unusual twist to this worship space was the use of compact fluorescence bulbs in the overhead chandeliers.  A 1700 year-old building going green.

All around the nave of the church was a Greek inscripton.  Several of the folks in the group could read Greek, and they read sections.  The Greek was added years later to glorify Justinian and Theodora.

A very different sort of mosaic

As mentioned in the previous post, almost all of the remnants of the Byzantine palaces are long gone except for a brief part of the wall facing the water.  About a generation ago, however, renovations of a market area nearby revealed an elaborate collection of floor mosaics from the old Byzantine palace complex from about the time of Justinian (500s CE).  Our tour group of scholars went to investigate this little known museum that holds the collection of mosaics.  The fee for entrance was paid for by the university, which I didn’t expect.    In fact ISU paid for all of the fees for this tour. 

The tiled mosaics look much like old mosaics in ancient Rome for good reason.  The Byzantines were after all the successors to the Roman Empire.  They were not called Byzantines until long after their empire ended.  Instead they called themselves Romans.  I am growing more fascinated by the Byzantines because they have a Christian religion in a Greek culture with Roman politics tied into Asian and African economic systems.  Global multiculturalism 4^th century C.E. 

The mosaics mostly display secular hunting and outdoors scenes.  I saw none of the Christian references that so predominate in other Byzantine sites that I visited.   Some are quite whimsical.  Our professor guide’s area of specialty is ancient hunting practices, so this museum and its mosaics was a treasure trove for his research.

Byzantine Palace

The Sunday morning program for the symposium was a walking tour of the Old City of Istanbul conducted by one of the senior history professors at Istanbul Sehir University.  His knowledge of Byzantine and Ottoman history was vast, but more impressive was the collection of history scholars who were along.  Out of the twenty or so American and German participants, I was most likely the least credentialed historian in the group and probably knew the least about the subject matter that we were investigating.

[This picture is of our tour group at the Topkapi Palace later in the day.  Just about everyone was a specialist in Byzantine and Ottoman History.]

Our first stop was a section of the old wall by the Bosporus.  This part was actually the last remaining fragment of the old palace complex built in the time period right after Constantine moved the capital in 330 C.E. 

The windows that we saw were the windows that the emperors looked out onto the water for about 1100 years.   Where I stood to take the picture was water, and a small port was established in the location just to serve the palace complex. 

Almost all of the remains of the Byzantine palace complexes were destroyed centuries ago with the material recycled for other projects by the Ottomans.  This picture shows the only remaining part still somewhat intact. 

Walls of Constantinople

In the Chora Church I met two visitors.  They were trying to guess the Bible stories that accompanied each image in the church.  I added my ideas, and together the three of us went around the church trying to figure out the iconographic images. 

I was hoping to make friends at the church because I had no idea how to get back to the central part of the Old City.  My taxi ride out to Chora was a rip-off, and I hadn't the money with me at the time to repeat that half of my adventure. 

They quickly agreed to share a taxi, but first they wanted to walk the neighborhood.  It is a relatively poor section of Istanbul with the old city walls right nearby. 

Chora Church

A number of people like my friend Jack and Jamie Moore have emphasized the importance of including a trip to the out-of-the-way church of Chora to see the most wonderful collection of Byzantine art.

These fresco and mosaic pieces have been preserved through the centuries because the Ottomans covered them up when they converted the church into a mosque.  Only relatively recently have the stunning pieces been revealed to the world again in their glory. 

Perhaps the main reason that I came to this church is that I have in my living room a small iconographic replica of the most magnificent of the chora frescos, the Anastasis. 

This image shows Jesus lifting Adam and Eve out of Hell as part of his victory over death with the Resurrection.  The gates of Hell and a bound Satan are at his feet. 

The artwork in this comparatively little church is overwhelming.  It was very much worth the trip. 

Symposium Papers: Literature

For the last of my updates on scholarly papers, I will summarize those that I heard in the session that dealt with literature.

“What is Common in Eastern and Western Literature: The Origin of Courtly Love and Ottoman Classical Literature”
The issue of romantic love and romance in Islamic literature seems like a contradiction, but Muslims during the Ottoman period apparently wrote amazing love poems that seem very similar to the medieval love literature.  This reminded me of my college medieval Europe course in which we read "The Art of Courtly Love," a guidebook of sorts on how to romance women. This paper said that the Islamic world was very much influenced by this book.

“Dervish, Dream and Sultan in the Ottoman Sufi Literature, 1300-1600”
Sufis are mystical Muslims who try to understand God through trances, spiritual exercises, and dreams.  They are known as great poets, and this presentation dealt with dream imagery.  The professor, however, seemed to quote more from the Epic of Gilgamesh than any one other piece.  He really likes how Gilgamesh literally follows his dreams.  Sufis loved to interpret the dreams of the Ottoman sultans.  

“Great Transformation of Turkish Literature in Rum (Anatolia)”
The Islamic literature is vast with beautiful poems written from all sorts of spiritual and person perspectives through centuries.  He compared the literary tradition of Islam to the stone statues on Easter Island: wonderful and grand--but leading to more questions than answers.   

"Byzantium in the History of Book Burning and Censorship”
I went to this session to support my new scholarly friend Dan from New England in his book burning presentation.  He spoke about the Byzantine "golden age of book burning" in which the church authorities in order to enforce orthodox thoughts destroyed books in mass dozens of times.  Most of the books were written from the perspective of those who different in what seems like minor issues of doctrine with Christian thought.  Of course the issues seem minor today but then people were willing to die over the issues.  He has documented about 30 instances of mass book burnings in the late Roman and Byzantine times.  I found it interesting how none of the book burnings involved Islamic writings.  

The Mother of All Churches

Hagia Sophia surpasses all expectations.  Perhaps the antiquity is what pushes this space beyond its architectural achievements. 

The view in the picture above is the one that I am most familiar with.  I didn't know until I got their that this would have been the view from the empress's own viewing area.  The Byzantines, like some modern-day Muslims and orthodox Jews, separated the women from the men in worship.

When I left for my trip, I gave my substitute a set of documents that I typically use this time of year.  Among them is one about the conversion of the Russian people.  More than a thousand years ago, Vladimir of the Russians went religion shopping.  He sent emissaries to various Roman Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish faiths.  He ended up paying the most attention to the group that came to Constantinople. 

This is what the emissaries said about Hagia Sophia: "We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth.  For on earth there is no such splendor... We only know that God dwells there among men." 

Hagia Sophia is magnificent.  Built more than a millennium before St. Peters in Rome, it stands as the mother of all churches. 

Symposium paper: environment

Another session that I attended was on the issue of environmental history in both the Byzantine and Ottoman worlds. 

My summaries:

“European Science in Istanbul During the Tulip Era”
This historian presented on the relationship between Ottoman learning and western learning right after the Ottomans started using the printing press for the first time (1728, somewhat behind the times).  He looked at the first books published and where the information contained in these mostly science and history books came from.  

“The Mountains and the Shores: Some Questions on Ottoman Environmental History from a Mediterranean Perspective”
This historians thoughts were certainly big picture, relating the changes in the Ottoman economy to the changes in the types of land that they control at times.  

“The Ottoman Empire and the Little Ice Age”
This young, ambitious historian wants to describe many of the disasters of the Ottoman Empire to issues of the environment, especially climate change.  In 1621 for example, the Bosporus froze completely so people could actually walk across from Europe to Asia.  A famine in the city resulted.  Riots followed, and a crisis of monarchy occurred.  He also wanted to tag a number of revolts at the same time in France (the Fronde), England (Civil War), China (fall of the Ming Dynasty), and West Africa to the Little Ice Age of the early 1620s.  Inconvenient Truth, anyone?  

Feline Sophia

Hagia Sophia is just about the most important building in world history. 

The focal point of Hagia Sophia for the Christians would be the apse where the altar stood in the time of the Byzantines.  For Muslims the holiest spot would be the minrab, the focal point for prayer. In Hagia Sophia the minrab and the apse are in the same area. 

So, what did I find right at the very most important spot in the most important building. 

Yes, two CATS warming themselves by the lights on a cold day!  Those are some wise cats.

Viking graffiti

Yes, Scandinavians made it all the way down to Constantinople in the 9th century.  At one point they tried to attack the city, but failed of course. 

Eventually the Vikings were able to make some profit off of the Byzantines by serving as personal bodyguards of the holy emperor himself.  Of course at other times they captured Byzantines and put them into slavery.  Thus is the life of a warrior mercenary. 

They left their mark in Constantinople in the oddest way.  Inside of a special set of marble doors on the upper level of Hagia Sophia is the place where the special church councils would meet.  On the railing overlooking the nave of Hagia Sophia is graffiti done in the Scandinavian runic script. 

 

Just goes to show, you just can't take those Vikings out anywhere.  

Picture in need of a caption

Hagia Sophia was both a grand imperial church and a grand imperial mosque.  It was holy to both Christians and Moslems. 

I took this picture outside of Hagia Sophia of a young Muslim family and a group of Christian nuns from Asia. 

Can anyone think of an appropriate caption?

The husband of the woman in the middle was taking the picture.  Here is the family interacting with the nuns a few seconds later. 

When I went inside I also saw a group of women with the full chador and veil looking at a poster describing the early Christian Church.