Fifty shades of blue

The best view of the exterior of the Sultanahmet mosque of Istanbul comes from the south gallery of the Hagia Sophia (featured photo). This is the last of the great works of classical Ottoman architecture, completed in 1617 CE, just at the beginning of the three century long decline of the empire. You can see the main dome and two of the four semi-domes supporting it, as well as several of the lower supporting domes, and four of the six minarets. You can probably see more of the structure from the ground, but then the building looms over you and distorts the perspective of the domes.

This is a working mosque, which means that there is no entry charge, but you have to be dressed appropriately. When we reached the mosque it was time for prayers and tourists were being asked to come back in an hour. That gave us an opportunity to walk along the hippodrome, and walk downhill to see the little Hagia Sophia. When we came back from the charming district of Fatih the gates had opened again. Tourists enter through gate B next to the Hippodrome. You can’t wear shoes into a mosque for a very good reason, but you are handed plastic bags to carry them in. We were happy to see that there is a bag collection point at the exit.

The first view of the inside is stunning. There is a sense of light everywhere which is quite different from the experience of the Hagia Sophia. The classic Ottoman style skillfully blends older Turkish architectural styles with Byzantine to produce a light and soaring architecture. This is a prefiguring of modernity, like the two centuries of Ottoman political dominance in the Eurasian continent. This mosque was built at the precise point in time when Ottoman society could not make a transition from the medieval into the modern. The Ottoman army had been reorganized, the navy had fought down the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, and controlled the spice trade, but the infusion of large volumes of silver from the Americas destabilized the Ottoman economy before a mercantile class could rise.

The incredible tile work of the Sultanahmet mosque gives it the name that tourist guides use: Blue mosque. (In a conversation on a tram I found that Sultanahmet mosque is what Istanbullus say). I would have liked to lie down to look at the ceiling carefully, but that was impossible. We had entered at a time when the interior was really crowded: people were still coming in late to pray but tourists were also inside. The photo above shows the main dome (mainly blue) and the western supporting semi-dome (mainly gold) with a soaring arch between them.

When you look up, it is like falling into a drawing by Escher. The multiple domes and their pendentive arches create a confusion of persepectives, deliciously enhanced by the repeating patterns of tiles. These are hand-painted tiles from Iznik, and I believe that this was the first large-scale use of such tiles. I wonder whether the extreme decorativeness of the interior has anything to do with the fact that the chief architect, Sedefkar Mehmet Aga trained in inlay work before becoming a pupil of Mimar Sinan. Interstingly, this was his first large commission, obtained at the age of 69. He, and his patron sultan Ahmet I, died within a year of completion of the mosque.

I had museum eyes by this time, and could not give this place the attention it deserves. I walked out and sat under a tree waiting for The Family. She managed to take a much more leisurely walk through the interior. I keep missing one of the major things about Turkish mosques, the deeply comfortable carpets needed for prayers. I would not have remembered the glowing red carpet with its interlocking blue and white flowers (notice the tulips among them) if it was not for the photos that she took.

Clouds gathered as I waited. The sporadic rain and shine of the day was building into something dramatic. I was prepared with both a raincoat and an umbrella, and I took them out. The umbrella provided the camera with some protection as I took the photo of dramatic clouds gathering over the mosque. It started pouring within seconds of The Family coming out of the mosque.

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We will bury you

After leaving the Hagia Sophia, we walked across an open space towards the Sultanahmet mosque. Amazingly, this space has been open since the founding of the Roman city of Byzantium in 330 CE, when it was called the Augustaeum. Entrance to the mosque was temporarily barred to tourists because it was time for midday prayers. We decided to walk off to one side to see the remains of the ancient hippodrome. Standing just to the east of the now-buried grand palace of the emperors, and west of the Sultanahmet mosque, it is now simply an open space, as you can see from the featured photo.

This late-Ottoman style water fountain at the northern end of the hippodrome was intriguing. It turns out that it is called the German fountain for a good reason. It was financed by the German government to commemorate the visit of Kaiser Wilhelm II to Istanbul in 1898. This was the first thing we saw as we reached the area. We admired the beautiful mosaic work on the inside of the dome before moving on. This juxtaposition of new and old disturbed me, until I realized the tragic hubris behind it; Kaiser is cognate to Caesar, and the same hubris would fester for forty years in a dream of a doomed “thousand year empire”. Planting this fountain here in the center of Constantine’s city must have been a political statement.

At the founding of Constantine’s city, this was the stadium where the emperor watched chariot races along with the rest of the city. It was said to be decorated with statues of the Roman gods, wild animals, and creatures out of legends which were brought from across the empire. Interestingly, in medieval times, after the custom of chariot races had disappeared, this place was still a center of social life, and people began to attribute supernatural powers to these statues. The famous gilded bronze statues of the horses which once stood here were looted by Venetians in the 13th century, and now stand in St. Mark’s square in Venice. Interestingly, this was taken to Paris by Napoleon, and placed atop the arch of the carousel, before being returned after his defeat at Waterloo.

Only three decorations from the early centuries remains in the Hippodrome. One of them is the serpent column which you see in one of the photos above. It was first erected in Delphi to commemorate the Greek victory in 479 BCE over Persia in the Battle of Platea, and brought here around the end of the 4th century CE. It wasn’t erected in a sunken pit though. The pit is part of the normal process of building up a city over centuries. The bottom of the pit is the level of the chariot races of the 4th century CE. The past is always buried under a new layer. We got a better feel of this gradual burial of the past when we walked down a sloping road at the north-eastern end of this vast plaza and passed the curved south wall of the old hippodrome. The second decoration is an obelisk from the Theban temple of Amon, which is one of a pair. One was taken by Constantius in 357 CE to be erected in the Circus Maximum in Rome, the other was brought here by Theodosius in 390 CE (photo above). The third is called the Built Obelisk, and is the one in the foreground of the featured photo. An article by Sarah Guberti Bassett explains very lucidly the symbolism of political power expressed by these.

The Little Hagia Sophia

In the 6th century CE, the Byzantine chronicler Procopius wrote that the little Hagia Sophia (then called the Church of Saint Sergius and Saint Bacchus) was second only to the Hagia Sophia in beauty. The construction of this church was started in 527 CE, after Justinian I became emperor, and just five years before the center of Constantinople was burnt down in the Nika riots. It was completed just before the Hagia Sophia, and the architects are said to be the same Anthenius of Tralles and Isidorus of Miletus who are known as the architects of the Hagia Sophia.

Looking at the structure from outside it was clear that it was not quite like the Hagia Sophia. The dome here is not supported by semi-domes (although there are two), but instead rests on an octagonal base, with large windows on alternate sides. Around this central octagonal column there are other structures whose ground plan, taken together, looks roughly like a rectangle. The church was built out of brick and mortar like most Byzantine buildings of its time.

We entered from a little gate in the north-west. The complex has been used as a mosque since the early 16th century. Right in front of us, on the western end of the rectangle, was a little portico and minaret which were clearly later additions. You can see from the photo above, that they are made of stone and not brick. The main prayer was over, and we were free to enter the mosque. A couple of people washed they hands and faces and said a quick prayer without going in.

As I took off my shoes I happened to glance up, and found a glowing painting on the inner curve of the dome atop the portico. The whole inner surface is plastered and painted white, and the colourful design with its three-fold symmetry was quite stunning. When I looked more carefully I saw an interesting play of numbers here: after the three-fold symmetry of the innermost circle was an eleven-fold symmetry of the next. I wonder whether the ratio 11/3 has some mystic significance.

As soon as you enter, your eye is drawn up to dome. This is where the main similarity with the Hagia Sophia is visible: the dome is ribbed and windows are cut into its base. Apparently this reduces the weight of the dome, and is important to making it light enough to span a large space. This was the first Byzantine building we entered after the Hagia Sophia, and the contrast was immense.

Here the multiple windows in this smaller structure gave it a sense of light and airiness, as opposed to the grandeur of Hagia Sophia’s upper reaches rising out of a deep gloom. As you can see from both the featured photo and the one above, the gallery admits as much light as the dome, and the windows at the lowest level also serve to illuminate the interior. I looked at the stone work of the capitals of the pillars, and the bands running around the gallery and they looked almost identical to that in the Hagia Sophia. Not surprising really, since the two were completed almost simultaneously. The same stone masons must have worked on both.

The Family was mesmerized by the blue carpet. Almost all the mosques that we visited had really deep piles, much better than the carpets we’d been shown in shops. The marble columns were very special; the pair that you see in the photo above were made of Synnara marble brought from Anatolia. Behind the minbar you can see an antechamber; below one of the semi-domes. The stairs up to the gallery were barred; perhaps it would open later. But here, I could admire the wonderful woodwork above my head. I think this is Ottoman, like the painted designs on the wall.

There was no one else around; certainly no other tourists. It was amazingly peaceful and calm. I wondered whether at any time in the future it would be possible to strip away at least part of the plaster to reveal the mosaics which had been praised by Procopius. The train line which runs south of here apparently put the structure under great stress; enough that it was put on the list of the hundred most endangered structures. After extensive repairs a few years ago, it was reopened to the public in 2015. I didn’t know that; lucky we didn’t come here four years before!

Meowday

Istanbul is cat city. In 2017 there were 125,000 cats in the streets of Istanbul. I wonder whether the featured cat from Hagia Sophia counts as a street cat. It was proud of being a museum cat, and disdained all tourists. The three in the photo below were not inside a building, so I guess they would certainly count among the 125,000. Unless there are more by now. They are proud street cats, and would not spare a second glance at someone who had no food for them.

There were no signs of the packs of dogs, which, according to Orhan Pamuk, were “mentioned by every Western traveller to pass through Istanbul during the nineteenth century, from Lamartine and Nerval to Mark Twain”, and which “continue to bring drama to the city’s streets.” Instead, there are the cats, bringing a regal touch to the everyday lives of Istanbullus.

The street cats are not the thin uncared-for foragers which you see in Indian cities. Someone has laid out a pallet for this one to sun itself on. Elsewhere, after I took a photo of a cat walking along a wall, a passerby affectionately rubbed its fur, eliciting a purr in response. Istanbul lives at peace with its cats.

Street food on the Halic

The ferry terminal on the Golden Horn may not be the most fashionable place to eat in Istanbul, but it is easily accessible. The double decked Galata bridge has a deck full of restaurants. The punters here were mainly tourists, and the restaurants were beginning to shut down already at 11 at night. Continuing music indicated that at least one bar was planning to keep open later.

We’d spent the evening hopping from place to place tasting wonderful Turkish wines and little eats, otherwise it would have been nice to sit at one of these tables and stare out at the ferries. The atmosphere reminded me of the waterfront eateries on Shamian Island in Guangzhou.

The upper deck of the bridge was lined with people fishing. Those must be really long lines, to reach all the way down to the water. I should have asked one of them how high the bridge is, because I couldn’t find the information any where. It is a bascule bridge, rolling up to let shipping pass below it, but only only traffic here seem to be the ferries, and they are low enough to pass. People with smaller lines were fishing on the waterfront below the bridge. The cheerful candles must have been special to Ramazan.

We stopped to look at a kiosk open for late customers. I love to look at the kind of things that would have stopped me in my tracks when I was a school boy, only now I don’t think of buying them. The silent school kid inside me must be screaming at this betrayal. The young salesman was very friendly and smiled for the camera.

The waterfront is a great place at this time: not too crowded, but there is activity enough to be interesting. Just the place to sit down for a chat. The Family stepped up to the safety wall to check for a place to sit. I was happy to take photos. We walked on.

There was a quiet little party happening on a boat. One person stepped off as we stood nearby. Another couple of friends joined them. It was very casual, quiet, just a small thing after a day’s work. The man fishing nearby was quite sure that the chatter and the lights would not keep the fish away, but I didn’t see him land a catch in the time we stood there.

The ferry terminal was closed, but this man in front of it had a lot of yet unsold mussels. I thought for a moment of trying out one. The Family does not like to risk it. If there had been a crowd around the man it would have reassured me enough to risk it. But with no local around, I was not sure whether fresh catch from the Halic is edible. Maybe it is; Erdogan came to power first as a mayor of Istanbul who promised a clean-up of the Golden Horn.

A cart nearby was selling boiled corn. I’m used to barbecued corn on the cob with lime, salt, and chili flakes. That’s a staple of Indian street food. The boiled variety does not tempt me. Also, I saw no chili flakes. The cart made a pretty picture, though. As pretty, in its way, as the picture of the chap frying fish on a boat. Earlier, we’d seen a bar right up on the terrace of a building looking out to the Halic and Bosphorus. It was time for a nightcap.

People in Hagia Sophia

I wanted a clear and unobstructed photo of the marble door in the south gallery of the Hagia Sophia. This is not easy, because a continuous stream of people go through it. After a long wait I decided that I should be taking photos of tourists instead. In any case, ambush photography is great fun: you take photographs of people who are being photographed by others. The Family and I had an argument a few days before about whether Chinese tourists outnumber everyone else.

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I’m not terribly good at pinpointing nationalities, but by my count about two and a half photos out of the eight in the slide show contain Chinese people. A significantly larger number come from eastern Europe. Add in the west Europeans, Turks, and a smattering of people from across Asia outside of China, and I think you begin to get a picture of where the tourists come from. About half of them take selfies, a fourth have someone else take their photo, and the rest are not interested in their own photos. My survey was interrupted because I was spotted while taking a non-ambush photo. I had to go back to being a tourist interested in the marble door again.

Sober cold stone

You enter the Hagia Sophia from the narthex on the west, so that the first thing you see when you step into the square naos is the immense apse right in front of you. It is difficult to tear your eyes away from it, but it is worthwhile later to come back to this place and look at what was behind you. The beautiful west gallery above you is fabulously decorated with mosaics and a carved stone railing between elegant pillars (featured photo). The gallery had collapsed in an earthquake in 989 CE, and the portion which was rebuilt has painted plaster instead of the mosaics of the rest of the interior. You can tell this easily by the fact that the paint is beginning to peel.

The details on the pillars are amazing. I brought my camera down to the pillars that hold up this curved gallery simply because it is there. Time and invaders have been kind to this part of the structure. The details are as razor sharp as they would have been 1500 years ago when they were freshly chiseled out. It is hard to remember that the use of regular geometric floral motifs was deliberate: it would be faster to do this repeatedly.

Above the Imperial Door in the middle of the western wall is this small stone inlay panel. I’m fairly certain that this must have symbolic meaning, but neither my audio guide, nor any references throw any light on it. I could remain ignorant for ever, or I could toss this question out to you (o gentle reader). What is the symbolism in this panel?

In the south eastern corner of the naos the light was much better. The carved capitals of the pillars were as breathtaking as the black, white, and red inlay work in the wall next to it. But all this was outshone by the mosaic above the pillar, with its large fields of gold. This is stone on fire, heady, breathtaking; quite the opposite of stone cold sober.

On another wall we came across panels of marble: Afyon marble, white with purple patches, alternating with Carian marble, red with white flakes. Between the panels ran a band of Tunisian marble with its dark veins running through reddish white. The light from the large windows lit up this wall and the gold tesserae of mosaic above it.

The cubicle that you can see in the photo above is the library of Sultan Mahmud I. We looked through the golden grille in the southern vestibule which separated it from the rest of the space. My audioguide did not warn me to spend time looking at the railing above it, which you can see in this photo. This railing is decorated with a repeating pattern of regular nonagons (nine-sided polygons). Constructing regular nonagons with compass and ruler is an ancient problem, and its solution presented in this railing was a statement about the mathematical prowess of the architect, Mimar Sinan. I must remember to take a close look at it the next time I visit this museum.

Let me end this post with a photo taken in the south gallery, one level above this. Again you see the wonderful carved capitals of the pillars similar to those in the featured photo. The complexity of the mosaic above the pillars is astounding for something made in the 6th century CE. Beyond it you can see part of the central dome, with the some of the forty windows which run around its base, and the forty ribs which support it. This was the main innovation of Isidore the Younger when the dome was re-erected in 563 CE, five years after the earthquake which destroyed the original dome.

Stress and buttress

I was trying to get a close look at the western turrets added to the Hagia Sophia in the 16th century CE by Mimar Sinan (featured photo) when I realized that I was looking at four buttresses to the church. I stepped back a little to photograph them in their entirety (below) and realized that they were actually flying buttresses. I’d thought that they were invented in the 12th century in France, so this surprised me.

Hagia Sophia is remarkably stable, given the frequency of earthquakes in Istanbul. Over 1500 years, the dome has had to be rebuilt only twice. A large part of this stability is due to the geometric design of the dome, with its supporting half domes built atop a central square section. However, recent studies found that the improperly cured bricks and mortar miraculously make the structure stronger than properly cured bricks of the 6th century would have. This is likely to be an accident of the hurried construction of the church, rather than deliberate materials science, especially since this technique was not used in any other Byzantine structure. Even with this fortunate accident, the pressure of the huge dome would have caused the structure to collapse if it were not for buttresses added over the years.

The four flying buttresses on the western facade, which you see in the photo above, are remarkable. They look like they are, at least in part, made of the same material as the rest of the western facade. This was rebuilt in 994 CE, within five years of its collapse during the earthquake of 989 CE. So I wondered whether the flying buttress was invented by the Byzantines before the French. The older view is stated clearly in this paper from 1935, “… we can at once discard any hypothesis which would date these buttresses to the ninth century, for the simple reason that flying buttresses were unknown before the twelfth century”. This paper buttresses this erroneous reasoning with an aesthetic judgement that these four are different from “ungainly masses” which were erected by Byzantine and Turkish architects, and so must have been made by French engineers who arrived here during the Venetian occupation.

The modern view is different. Flying buttresses have been discovered in buildings in Cyprus which were buried in the 8th century CE, well before its reinvention in France. So these buttresses which puzzled me could have been a Byzantine construction from the 10th century CE. In a structure as old as the Hagia Sophia, one seldom has a clear answer to questions of provenance unless there is contemporary documentation. For these four there is none, although the circumstantial evidence is that the buttresses are about a thousand years old. This raises the inverse question, could the egineering idea of flying buttresses, which began to be used from the 12th century in western Europe, have been carried there from Byzantium?

Galleries of Mosaics

There was a lot of work going on inside the Hagia Sophia when I visited. The whole of the north section of the naos was taken up by an enormous scaffolding, so you could neither look out of the north gallery, nor get a good view of the inner north wall of the naos. In the south gallery too, there was much work on, so some of the mosaics I wanted to see were not visible. What could be seen was quite stunning.

The mosaic of Komnenos

This large mosaic was probably covered in plaster at some time, because you can see the surrounding layer of thick plaster. It shows the emperor John Komnenos II holding a bag of gold, and his consort, the empress Irene, with a scroll flanking a seated Madonna and Child. The featured photo is a detail of this 12th century mosaic. Some art historians believe that the plaster covering was historically useful, since it prevented visitors or workers from removing the gold tesserae. This mosaic is so well preserved that you could believe it.

Deisis

One of the most famous of the mosaics is the Deisis (or Deesis, the English spelling is ambiguous). No writing about it fails to mention that the icon of Deisis always has at its center the Christ Pantokrator, and is surrounded by other holy figures praying to him. One of the introductory pieces that I read mentioned that this also illustrates a hierarchical style of prayers, where you pray to a saint to pray on your behalf: very bureaucratic and Byzantine.

My first reaction to it was a disappointment: so little of this 13th century work remains! Judith Herrin, in her magisterial book on the Byzantine empire says that there was a superstition that a little stone chip, tessera, from holy paintings could bring you luck, and that there could have been a thriving trade in pieces of this mosaic. Peter Sarris also talks about late Byzantine superstitions regarding images.

Nevertheless, when you look at details of what remains, it is stunning. Byzantine art took a long time to recover from the iconoclast politics. Sarris points out that representational art had not died out altogether, but many of the skills had been lost, and had to be redeveloped. When you compare the Mary here with that in the earlier mosaic on the apse, you can see how much more nuanced this is. Five centuries separate these two mosaics.

The incredible detail on the face and hair of John the Baptist, seems so much more naturalistic than, for example, the hair on the head of Irene in the Komnenos mosaic (featured photo). About a century separates the two. In matters of skill, it is not only the schooling that is important but also the individual.

The Family and I were not the only people who spent a long time in front of this mosaic, admiring little details. There was quite a crowd. And why not? After all even experts in art or Byzantine history devote considerable energy and space in discussing this mosaic.

Marble Door

We came up to the galleries through ramps at the north eastern end of the structure. The gallery on the southern side is divided into an outer part (where the Empress Theodora is said to have sat for the opening of the church in 536 CE) and an inner part (where the Synod council of 1166 CE is supposed to have met). Between them is a door made of marble.

Every door inside the museum is a choke point, through which an enormous number of tourists stream. I waited for a clear shot, but could not get one. The shot that you see above is the best that I could do. I was a little anti-social, and planted myself in the middle of the stream, depending on the goodwill of people to stop. Most did, so I could quickly take this shot and move away.

My audio guide pointed out various interesting features on the door, including a story that one side of the door represents heaven and the other hell. The only difference I could see was that one side was well-lit and the other a little dark. In any case, this door was plundered from some old Greek structure and brought here, and so probably was not designed to have any symbolic meaning at all.

North wall

At this level you could see some of the mosaic panels on the upper walls of the naos. The view from the north gallery was completely blocked off by a scaffolding, so I could only look out from the south.

I could see only one mosaic which has been disinterred from under a thick layer of plaster. Who is it? A saint, by the halo around his head, and probably a Patriarch, from his priestly clothes. If this is indeed of the Patriarch Ignatios, then the mosaic dates back to the 9th or 10th century, soon after the end of the iconoclast period.

The Golden Horn

We were lucky with our choice of a hotel in Istanbul. It was close to the ferry terminals in Eminönü and to the Topkapi palace. When we tired of the history of Constantinople, we could immerse ourselves in the everyday life of Istanbul. Waking up in the mornings, above the sounds of the streets, all you could hear was the deep and mournful honks of ferries and the mewing of gulls as they floated past our windows.

After the stormy weather of the first evening and the next morning, it was wonderful to walk in the sun next to the Golden Horn, called Halic. As we stood and looked at the sea, we saw dolphins. This was not something we were expecting! Dolphins are hard to photograph, even with The Family’s patience forcing mine. They would hump up in the air briefly, and then disappear, only to reappear meters away. It seemed to me that they were feeding, and probably leaving bits of fish uneaten, because gulls had begun to sweep down into this area. I tried to keep photographing the gulls, hoping that I would catch a dolphin surfacing by chance. I didn’t get the dolphins, but I did get a lot of activity on the Golden Horn.