They don't speak Greek here (2)

Because of the nasty weather, I don't have a lot of pictures from the next couple of days.  Oh, wait, except for the several HUNDRED I took on our Bosporus "cruise," of every manner of building and boat, never mind the rain and the moving ship we were on and my limited skills at photography.

[Yesterday as I was passing on some pictures to my students, one of them said, "Oh, look, we took the same picture," and there was hers on her screen and mine on another student's screen, side by side, and I don't need to tell you which was superior.  By a lot.]

But first another picture from our hotel window, as promised, of the sun setting over the ships moored "downstream" from us, on the other side of the Fish Market.

The next day we went on a package tour, which we arranged through the hotel, which was to include another large mosque, the Spice Market, a bus tour of the European side of the Bosporus, a quick visit to a Byzantine fortress, a cruise of the Bosporus, lunch on the Asia side, and a final stop rather vaguely connected to carpets.  (Some of you will have seen that last one coming.)  The group included a German couple with some English, a French-speaking Quebecois couple, and the three of us.  Our guide was fluent in all those languages and others, as he kept telling us, but that did not mean we were always able to understand him.  Alex found it easier to understand his French than his English, and I kept catching things in German that I'd missed in English.  Sometimes when there was limited time to say something, he just used English, which was okay with the others, but there was a lot of translating going on from the better-English-speaking member of each couple on those occasions.  Here's a picture of him at the mosque that was our first stop.  Dear guests, we go now.

I found the variety of buildings lining the Bosporus to be utterly fascinating, everything from the most ornate palaces and ancient fortress walls to waterfront Starbucks and dilapidated shacks.  The boats in that third picture are moving alongside us, a fleet of fishermen heading in our direction (towards the Black Sea), and the fourth picture is of an expensive floating nightclub.  There are several exclusive clubs in the vicinity of the European end of the first bridge to Asia (in the background, an enormous construction), and they have big curtains they can draw to shut out prying eyes from the water, or more precisely the prying camera lenses of the paparazzi, when the clubs are being visited by especially famous clients.  As I said, I was not deterred by any of the barriers to photography, and if you're lucky maybe someday you can have a look at all my other pictures of buildings and boats.  (Sounds like the title of a Talking Heads album.)  For now you'll have to settle for a picture of Annabel's feet on the ground in Asia.

Our lunch view, which on a clear day would have been magnificent, was not.  This was the first time setting foot in Asia for any of the three of us, and we would have liked to make more of our opportunity, but the rain at this point was coming in buckets.

Very bad traffic (i.e., typical Istanbul traffic) led to a vote to cut off a minor part of the tour (strongly encouraged by our guide), and for the rest of our tour I decided to pack the camera up and concentrate on looking directly at the things in front of me.  The tour of the nineteenth-century palace was very enjoyable, although our guide's habit of repeating the same things in each room grew funny only after it was for some time annoying.  The last stop on the itinerary turned out to be--no surprise to Alex and me--a pitch by some excellent carpet salesmen.  Actually, it was a very enjoyable presentation, and we saw a lot of spectacular carpets, and as soon as we said we weren't buying they left us alone to our tea.  But our fellow "dear guests" must have been a little more encouraging, because it took a while to get out of there.    And then when we thought we were done and headed for the hotel, the elevator door opened on the jewelry floor, where we spent another twenty minutes.  We managed to miss the leather floor.  Earlier in the day, most of the Spice Market portion of our tour was spent in one shop where we heard another informative and entertaining pitch, and actually bought a few things.  One thing about Istanbul:  there was seldom a moment outside our hotel room when someone wasn't trying to sell us something.  It was a little wearying at times, especially trying to make our way down narrow streets around meal times.  But we adjusted.

The next day I left the camera at home, and we ourselves almost turned around just a couple of blocks from home, with the wind threatening to demolish our umbrellas and soaking us from the knees down.  But we persevered, spending most of the day indoors at the older palace, underground in the amazing Byzantine cistern, and shopping in the Grand Bazaar, which was going to be closed the next day because it was a major holiday.  I had been wondering about all the Turkish flags flying everywhere.  Ordinarily I don't consider it a good sign if a place is plastered with national flags--seems like a sign of insecurity or a repressive regime, to me--but it turned out that some of those were specially displayed for the holiday.  Not all, however.  There are lots of very big Turkish flags flying everywhere in Istanbul.  Interpret that as you will.

We spent the holiday visiting the newer part of town, across the Golden Horn but still on the European side, going up in the Renaissance tower that dominates the skyline there (far from the many very tall sky scrapers in the high-rent parts of the newer city), and visiting the beautiful Istanbul Modern Art Museum on the site of an old warehouse on the water.  Our excursion guide had told us, when we pointed in the direction of the museum from the bus and said, "Oh, look there's the Istanbul Modern," "Oh, no, there's no museum there, that's just shopping, just a shopping area."  We were confused for a while, but our dear guide was spectacularly wrong, as it turned out.  The hundred-odd years of Turkish art were very enjoyable, but the building itself was the real gem.

Luckingly for us, the weather was milder on this day, and we were able to walk around with umbrellas tucked away most of the time.  There were intimations of even better weather coming on our last day, as you can see by the red sky at night of yet another shot out our hotel window at sunset.

When the rain stopped we finally ventured up to the terrace on top of our section of the hotel, which wasn't used by anyone but us as far as I could tell (only three apartments in this section), and the view was even better from up there.  But perhaps you've seen enough versions of this one shot?  Are you sure?  Okay, if you're sure.

The bulk of that last day was spent at the Archeological Museum, housed in part of the Byzantine palace complex.  It included three enormous buildings, and we never even made it to the third.  By halfway through the second we were moving very quickly, and I raced through a couple of floors at the end all on my own (while Alex took Annabel on the obligatory museum shop stop), including artifacts from Schliemann's excavation of Troy which I saw at the rate of about 10 seconds per each of the nine or so  excavation levels.  I can only give you a small sampling of the fantastic stuff we saw.  I think we were all most impressed by the really old stuff, the Bronze Age artifacts from all over Asia Minor and the Near East, impressive statues mummies and plaques and altars and all kinds of smaller stuff from the Hittites and Sumerians and Babylonians and Egyptians and others.  I took lots of pictures of different kinds of writing on stone, and just couldn't get over how many kinds of writing there were that long ago.

There was one huge multi-room display devoted to finds from the royal necropolis at Sidon.  Alexander the Great is pictured at the far left in the fourth picture above, taken in that display, and you can still see the yellow paint on his hair, another reminder that they used to paint all that carved marble in gaudy colors.  This frieze is from the "Alexander tomb," which was not actually his, but that of a general and friend of his.  The mass of funerary carving in this display and others in the museum was overwhelming.  There is a whole suite of rooms dedicated to an imaginative reconstruction of Byzantium at the peak of its Roman power, including many of the artifacts on which the reconstruction was based.  Plus a couple of floors of Christian artifacts from Constantinople in the middle ages, that huge Troy display I raced through, and who knows how much more that we never even saw.  It would have been a thoroughly satisfying way to conclude our Istanbul trip if we weren't nervous about getting to the airport.  We ought to have allowed two days for this museum.

Eric had a window seat aft of the wing for the flight back, and took enormous pleasure in picking out landmarks below, including the island of Lesbos, and tracking from the air the ancient water-route to the sprawling modern city at Byzantium.  As you can tell from this final shot of the Blue Mosque, the weather on the flight back was conducive to landmark-spotting, all travel by taxi and plane and bus and taxi again was routine, and before we know it we had left the Greek-capital-in-exile and were back home in the Greek-capital-by-default, having learned no Turkish whatsoever and actually relieved at being in a place where we could sort of read some of the signs and understand a little of what we were told in the native language.

They don't speak Greek here

I can't keep up.  There's too much happening.  We're having too much fun, traveling too often, seeing too many different things.  Life is getting in the way of my blog.  I can't take it any more.  I'm outta here, outta Greece entirely!  I just can't take it!  Get me on a plane out of the entire E.U.!

Okay, but first Alex has to spend countless--count 'em, countless--hours trying to arrange our trip to Istanbul, with all sorts of confusions and changes and complications.  We decide that flying is the only way to go, given our time constraints and desire to spend as much time in Istanbul as possible.  So, as my students scatter to the four winds for our autumn quarter break, to Paris and Rome and Brindisi and Edinburgh and Seoul, we head for the place Greeks consider their lost capital, a country full of Byzantine churches converted to mosques, a country eerily like and unlike Greece, a city that reminds me a lot of Athens but with subtle and powerful differences, a kind of Bizarro-Athens (for you Superman fans out there):  Istanbul, Turkey.

All that effort by Alex resulted in a fabulous apartment a couple of blocks from the Blue Mosque with a view of the Marmora Sea.  I kept taking pictures out this window, sometimes because the bad weather was keeping us in, sometimes because I simply loved the view.

The second picture is from our room--I took all kinds of pictures out that window, in all kinds of light and weather.  (I bet you'll see another one soon.)  The bottom picture was taken from a cafe in the sultan's park at the northwest end of the Old Quarter, beyond the Palace.  After we'd been walking all around the first afternoon, checking out the sights but not going in anywhere, we ended up at this spot, and as we sat there looking over the Bosporus and the Golden Horn, I was thoroughly happy.  Istanbul is a place that has always been defined by the sea, and I just couldn't get over all the traffic.  I thought Piraeus was busy, but this three-armed stretch of water was simply crawling with ships and boats.  I took that bottom picture because I thought I counted at least seven different ship-vectors in this one frame, including ferries going from various shores to various other shores, freighters moving up and down the Bosporus, and fishing boats heading hither and thither (but mostly right in the middle of things) in search of the abundant fish that everyone here seems entirely comfortable with eating, despite all the ships (I accidentally typed "shits" there--hmm....  I must be thinking about what the ships are putting into the water) and whatever flows into this corner of the sea from a city of 20 million people.  The name of an art show at the Istanbul Modern captured it nicely:  "Held Together by Water."  And yes, you read me correctly:  20 million.  Twice the entire population of Greece, just as a for-instance comparison.  All of that population centered on the water, on the same ancient whale-road between the Aegean and the Black Sea through which the Athenians moved the grain upon which they built their empire 2500 years ago and the olive oil and pottery by which they paid for that grain.  For all our time spent in the Old Quarter, touristifying upon the history of Byzantium-Constantinople-Istanbul (and I left off the earlier names), the modern city was everywhere in front of us and around us and as dazzling as any mosaic or tiled dome.

But the tiled domes were amazing.  First the Hagia Sophia, once a church, then a mosque, now a compromise of a museum, but showing its complicated history in the disconcerting mix of Christian and Muslim iconography.

The first picture is for scale, an overview to give you some idea of the space in which we wandered for an hour, and in which the early Christians and not-so-much-later Muslims indulged in their worship.  The Blue Mosque was built to out-stupendify this place, even though the Hagia Sophia had already been co-opted and turned into a mosque, but one-upping this place was no small ambition.  Because of the openness and the incongruities of the Muslim decorations, this place was as impressive to me as the cathedrals in Sevilla and Leon.  The second picture above is the Christian emperor's modest effort to have himself and his empress included as BFF's of the Holy Family, but at least now we know what they looked like, or what they wanted us to think they looked like.  The third picture is to help you picture our challenge in wrapping our minds around the concept of Arabic-language stained glass.  The altar cat was included at Annabel's insistence.  Believe it or not, there are more cats in Istanbul than in Paros or Athens.  They seem to have free passage

[Excuse me, I heard a scream from the bedroom, and went running.  Had to kill a cockroach.  Took some time.  Spilled some water on Alex's bedside table in the process.  But everything's okay now.  I'm back.

Oh, and the power went out on our block and the neighboring one this evening, for at least half an hour.  Made me feel oddly at home.  That said, a darkened Athens neighborhood is quite a bit different from a darkened Fairbanks neighborhood.

Where were we?]

everywhere.  Annabel is entranced and entertained and never tires of seeing cats, and more cats, and MORE cats.  I'm a little tired of them.  (But that didn't keep me from making a fool of myself to the non-English-speaking waiter on our last night in Istanbul, after the busboy threw out the leftovers Annabel had wrapped up for her favorite cat by our hotel.  I'll let Annabel act out this story for you, next time she sees you.)

After the church, the mosque.  They're close together, the latter built, as I said, in very deliberate competition with the thirteeth-century pride of the Christian world.  Here's a view of the mosque from the window of the church.  Oh, and while I'm at it, another shot inside the church.

Did I mention the bad weather?  It's only mildly bad at this point, spitting rain off and on, and chilly.  Later it was truly awful.  But you can see some of the sky in the first picture.

If you look closely at the floor in the center-bottom of the second picture, you'll see a chunk of rock that fell from the reconstruction work going on outside the top window, bounced on the scaffolding, bounced through the open panes in that top window, and dropped towards the head of an unsuspecting tourist.  I think I was the only person to realize what was happening, and yelled something stupid, like "Heads up!" at which he completely failed to protect his head in any way or to move from the spot he was on.  Luckily the stone missed him by a couple of feet.  I think the security guard in the bottom picture may have said something afterwards to the workers.  But perhaps not.  I guess it's in God's hands, one god or another.

Actually, come to think of it, in this case it's the same god, just different prophets.  I'm still a little obsessed with my theories about Greeks being pagans at heart.  Have I explained those theories to you yet?  In any event, the Turks are very much Muslims.  Perhaps you can tell from the first picture below why they call this particular place of worship "the Blue Mosque."

It's all a bit dim from the poor weather, and of course no flash allowed, and of course no shoes and us infidels restricted to certain parts, but it was still a very impressive experience.

But perhaps I need to go keep my slightly creeped-out wife company now, and continue this tomorrow.   Don't you think that would be a good idea?  I'll leave you with a very dark picture of Annabel and me.  the three of us had the glassed-in terrace to ourselves, with an amazing view, and when the call to prayer began, both from the Blue Mosque there in the background and two other smaller and closer mosques, and they cut the music in the restaurant, it was a very moving experience. Don't be fooled by Annabel's irreverent pose--this was taken just before we were struck silent by the amplified voices of the cantors taking their turns at letting people know it was once again time to be thinking about God.

The Navel of the World

The time is slipping away from me, but that's appropriate, because we're visiting some timeless places.  It's been more than two weeks since we went to Delphi, in many ways the center of the ancient Greek world, on a quick two-day bus trip from Athens. We made one other stop on the way, at the monastery of Osios Loukas, St. Lukas, who lived in the tenth century.  Here's a link to read all about him and the place, with better pictures than mine:  http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Medieval/Arch/HossiosLoucas.html.  We had lunch there, high on the slopes of Mt. Helicon, with only a few other tourists around, the weather gloomy and mysterious as it remained for the next two days, and our mood appropriately chastened and sanctified in this sacred Christian site for our next stop at the ancient Greek sanctuary of Apollo.  I'm going to use one of the pictures from this site for our portrait for this blog site, but here are a few others.  The first is of the two connected churches with some of the monastery on the left; the second is the Christ Pancrator at the top of the dome whose eyes follow you everywhere; the third is the mummy of St. Lukas, which Annabel insisted on me taking a picture of despite the flash-ban and the difficulty of seeing anything grisly in the glass case.  He's in there, I promise.  When her camera had run out of charge Annabel was always asking me to take pictures of the grisly stuff, plus of course of cats and rabbits and dogs and bugs and cute stuff.

For this excursion, and for Delphi in particular, I need a new excuse for why my pictures are so bad.  Let's see, I've already used "haven't learned how to work the camera," "the weather was cloudy/hazy," and "flash wasn't allowed."  How about, "it was the scale of the site that made the difference, and that was impossible to capture in this format"?  In other words, you had to be there?   The ultimate photographer's cop-out.  But regardless of the poor quality of the photos, there's no question that the power of Delphi came largely from its setting.  As Michael reminded us often, when the Greeks went about picking sacred sites, what mattered was location, location, location.  We went first to the Temple of Athena and practice race track, just below the main site, and I'll try with a couple of pictures to convey something of the setting, but you'll have to help by imagining sheer rock walls looming above, mountains all around, and the valley floor some distance below.

In addition to being the home of the most respected and frequently consulted oracle of ancient Greece, Delphi also hosted one of the four principal pan-Hellenic athletic competitions (the one at Olympia being the most famous of the four these days, having given its name to the modern revival of such competitions).  The stadium where the runners competed was closed at the time we were there, although I got a good view down into it later, but the practice track was near Athena's temple, and after Michael demonstrated the appropriate form, several of the girls took their positions with toes at the starting line.

After such strenuous effort, naturally we had to re-hydrate.  This is Meredith sucking down holy water from the sacred springs, which unfortunately has been chemically tested and shown not to contain any hallucinatory or other mind-altering substances.  Which doesn't keep some investigators from continuing to look for environmental factors contributing to the awesome powers of the Oracle.  Factors, that is, beyond merely having a giant temple in a large, richly decorated sanctuary in one of the most beautiful spots in the world.  I guess the prophetic powers had to come first, in order to provoke all the statues and temples.  But even in ruins this seems like a wonderful place to get in touch with whatever mystical powers one happens to believe in.

Our next stop was the hotel, perched on the cliffs at the lower edge of the town of Delphi, which was very small, entirely dedicated to tourists (and already partly closed down for the season), stacked in four or five rows along the side of the mountain.  That mountain was Parnassus, home of the muses, and it stretched for miles above the sanctuary and the town.  I had floated the idea of climbing it, or at least partway up it, to experience a scene from The Magus, one of the novels we were reading in my literature class.  But when the time came there were no takers.  I, however, could not resist, and knowing the daylight was limited, made brief inquiries at the hotel desk and then headed up.  Straight up.  For the first fifteen minutes I was slipping along in a muddy goat track, the heat and humidity were bringing out all manner of insects, and I thought seriously about turning around.  But then I hit the main path, a gentler, switchbacking, rock-"paved" trail that wound up the mountain above the town.  There were still lots of insects, but stopping to take pictures of them gave me an excuse to rest.  At times I thought I might lose the trail and the view in the clouds, but the weather improved all the way up.

At the center-bottom of the third picture you can see the site of Athena's temple and the race track, alongside the road we came in on, at roughly the same elevation as our hotel--in other words, where I started from.  I tried in the last picture to convey something of the tricky footing as well as the fog rolling in--it was tougher going down than up, of course, but in both cases I had to look down most of the time when I really wanted to be looking up and out.

At just above the point where the third picture was taken I crested out onto the upper plateau.  I still had a trail, for a while, heading inwards and slightly upwards, but I had no idea where it was going.  I knew the approach was relatively gentle, and the peak itself not particularly dramatic, but I also thought that it was farther away than I was going to be able to cover before dark.  After about ten minutes heading up onto the plateau I heard something...unexpected.

No, it wasn't the goat bells.  I'd been expecting those, and even looking forward to them, while dodging goat poop along what was more and more clearly becoming a goat trail that I was following.  No, it was something else.

Just when I was thinking there was no one here but me and the goats, along comes the goatherd, or maybe his teenage daughter, taking the tiny blue family car out for a spin.  Just after seeing the car I came in view of a couple of farmhouses, and while my sense of athletic accomplishment was considerably diminished, I nevertheless took pleasure in seeing a little bit of the rural life of Parnassus, including meeting a very friendly goat-dog, and wandering off-trail while following a hundred-odd long-horned goats across the heather for a while.

Pretty soon, however, I realized that the dark was coming on, and travel over the thorny and rocky ground was easier for goats than it was for me.  A bit of sun came out on some white rocks at the top of a small rise, or else the rocks glowed with their own inner light, being so chalk-white, but in any event I decided that I'd been given a sign, and here was my destination.  I rested, took a few pictures in the general direction of what I thought might be the summit of Parnassus (this one with my camera bag n the foreground among the glowing white rocks), and then headed back down the mountain with the keen sense of disappointment I always feel when I am forced to surrender altitude.

Alex and Annabel had done a little shopping, but mostly just sat on the terrace of our room and enjoyed the view.  That's a little corner of the Gulf of Corinth down there, by the town of Itea, where we later saw the thousand and one lights of a huge cruise ship, and the whole flat valley is one big olive orchard.

Annabel saw one of the few bats of her entire life at the harbor on Paros, but in the fading light at Delphi she got to see them swooping all around us, eating those abundant insects on a warm autumn evening.  We both tried hard to get pictures, but with little success--this was the best of a bad lot.

The next day we visited the sanctuary of Apollo and the fancy museum.  I took relatively few pictures, partly because it was another gloomy day, partly because I was intimidated by the challenge of capturing this mystical place, and partly because I was getting a little tired of having the camera in front of my face all the time.  But I offer one shot of the temple of Apollo from above, one shot of a stone wall covered by manumission inscriptions (having it in rock at Delphi pretty much guaranteed no one would call you a slave anymore, plus you spent money thanking the gods for your freedom in the process), and a few pictures from the museum.

Everything in this very attractive museum came from Delphi.  There are a lot of fragmented metopes, bits of temple or treasury frieze with scenes from Greek myth-history, like the one in the third picture above.  Lots of gods-vs.-giants and battle-with-the-centaurs and various accomplishments of Herakles and Theseus.  Especially Theseus.  The Spartans had already called dibs on Herakles as mythical founder of their city-state, so the Athenians had to look around for someone comparable, and through strenuous aesthetic effort on walls and pots, and by dint of having all the best storytellers, they managed to elevate Theseus into even more heroic stature.  I couldn't resist including a shot of Theseus beating up on a girl.  Well, it was an Amazon, not just any old girl.  (Michael tells us there is new evidence for an Asia Minor culture that included women warriors, so maybe there's more to the Amazon story than mere gynophobia.)  Another reason to include a shot of Theseus is that he was my first dramatic role, as Annabel keeps reminding me whenever we hear more about him.

The fourth picture above is a hymn, complete with musical notation.  Music and lyrics from 2500 years ago--how cool is that?!?

The last one is for my friend Joseph.  It's a statue of a philosopher, perhaps a particular famous one such as Socrates, but certainly a philosopher.  That was a time when you knew a philosopher just from looking at him, I guess, something about the skepticism in his eyes, or the insouciance with which he wore his leather jacket--er, I mean, himation.

Delphi is a wonderful place to commune with one's household gods, or one's monotheistic monolith of a God, or whatever one chooses to invest with spirit and wisdom.  Much of the power of this place comes, as I've said, from its natural beauty, and so rather than a statue or column, I leave you with one last bug, though I promise it won't be the last bug of this blog, though it just may be the prettiest.