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.