Journal

Graffiti in bark St George’s Church Candle for Pat Mosque graveyard Lapcat

I don’t believe in the power of prayer, except as a way of tuning up one’s own state of mind, but with the news of my mother’s precarious state of health Elaine bought a beeswax candle in the Church of St George, part of the walled complex of Greek Orthodox Patriarchate buildings – and I lit it, placing it in a bowl of sand in a niche. And that also in spite of having seen a man prowling around the church earlier, snuffing out the candles when they were only part-burned, tossing them into a bag.  Not sure whether this was a matter of penny-pinching or religious recycling – nor am I at all sure how long a candle has to burn in order for a prayer to be dispatched through the appropriate channels.  Still, one lives in hope.

The main door of the complex has been welded shut, in memory of Patriarch Gregory V, who was lynched nearby in 1821, after apparently encouraging the Greeks to overthrow Ottoman rule at the beginning of the Greek War of Independence. Today, I learned from the Eyewitness Travel book Istanbul, the clergy are protected by a metal detector. We experienced nothing but friendliness in Istanbul, but it is clear that there have been intense cycles of religious, ethnic and national antagonisms here.

Later, we visited a mosque and shrine containing a number of impressive tombs. Afterwards, I sat in the sun and watched a group of film-makers preparing to shoot a dark-haired young woman weeping at the shrine. As I sat on the wall of the graveyard, a  marmalade cat waltzed along the top of the wall towards me – jumped into my lap, lay down and went to sleep instantaneously. Felt adopted.

Then we spent a wonderful couple of hours wandering around Topkapi Palace, but more of that in a separate blog.

Looking east-nort-east, or somesuch Breakfast: Gull, egg and Elaine Looking west: Topkapi and the Blue Mosque

The Seres Hotel is fine, as far as it goes, but the views across the Golden Horn and Bosporus on one side – and across to Topkapi Palace on the other – are amazing. There’s even a huge super-liner in port that I think passed us when we were out on Jan-Olaf’s yacht in Oslo Fjord a couple of weeks back. A sense of being at a true crossroads in terms of trade, peoples and cultures.

Rain Walls 1 Walls 2

Carcassonne, I said to Elaine when I first saw the extraordinary land walls of Byzantine Constantinople – and then Peter said that the French stronghold’s walls had been modelled on Constantinople’s. Rain was sluicing from the heavens as we picked our way around the walls, built between AD412 and 422, during the reign of Theodosius II. Not long after, in 447, an earthquake destroyed no less than 54 of the towers, but they were promptly rebuilt – because Attila the Hun was on the warpath. It wasn’t until May 1453 that Mehmet the Conqueror breached the walls, although Eyewitness Travel’s Istanbul notes that successive kept them in good condition until the end of the 17th century.

Haghia Sophia 1 Haghia Sophia: stairway to heaven Haghia Sophia: stairway 2 Haghia Sophia: Sultan’s Loge Haghia Sophia: chandelier Haghia Sophia: a blur of tourists Haghia Sophia: Jar and couple Haghia Sophia: Jar and pot-belly

Elaine and I flew into Turkey on Saturday, for a study tour on the Ottoman Empire, based in Istanbul. Today, we visited places like the Hippodrome, the Blue Mosque and the church of St Saviour in Chora. But the place that I had wanted to visit since I was a child, and which we visited during the afternoon, was Haghia Sophia.  I would put it on a par with Krak des Chevaliers, Syria, in terms of places that have moved me profoundly. The scaffolding in the interior, ahead of Istanbul’s becoming City of Culture in 2010, probably annoys many, but I found the ‘stairway to heaven’ effect rather appropriate.

While we were in Oslo, I didn’t see the papers – and therefore didn’t see the obituaries, long one of my great interests, indeed pleasures. Last night, Elaine’s sister Christine brought over the half dozen missing copies of The Times and I tore through them this morning, literally. First came Ellie Greenwich, who wrote songs like Be My Baby, Da Doo Ron Ron, River Deep Mountain High and Then He Kissed Me, all long-standing favourites, including more recently on a couple of iPods; Barry Flanagan, whose hare statues Elaine and I have long adored; and then, today, Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary, whose version of John Denver’s Leaving on a Jet Plane has sometimes seemed to me a suitable anthem for my working life.