Istanbul Coda: the Chora Church (And More)

Come for the mosaics.

Last hours of my last day in Istanbul. I had a professional tour guide take me to the Chora Church to view the mosaics.

The first Chora Church building pre-dated even Hagia Sophia, but the addition of the decorative mosaics goes back to the 1300's, the late Byzantine period. This church has one of the finest collections of Constantinople mosaics that survive anywhere.

Let's have a look inside.

The mosaics, as with stained glass windows, depict Biblical scenes for an illiterate population. Very few could read and write back then, so religious arts was how Biblical stories were communicated. And mosaics were a popular artform for this.

After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, the Chora Church became a mosque. After Kemal Atatürk founded the modern Turkish state on more secular principles, it became a museum. Now, it is back to being a mosque.

In the Ottoman era, because of the Islamic prohibition on depicting the human form, the mosaics are plastered over, covered. They were not "destroyed" per se, but effectively were removed from view. While many of the mosaics have been lost, a great many have been recovered by being uncovered.

This is a dramatic mosaic, depicting the slaughter of the innocents. This is when King Herod, upon learning of the birth of Christ, and fearing for his continued rule in light of the birth of this new king, decreed that the children born around the time of the birth of Jesus were to be put to death. These are literally the first Christian martyrs recognized by the Catholic Church.

Fortunately, the other scenes depicting in these mosaics are not as gruesome.

This is Mary. You may recall I visited her house the other day.

This is the prayer area of the functioning mosque.

Shoes had to be removed in order to enter because that's the rule.

Here is St. Peter, the fundamentally flawed "rock" upon which Jesus Christ built his church:

 

And this is St. Paul:

Here is a classic annunciation scene:

It is not too different from the scene as depicted in much Renaissance art.

The benefactor of the mosaics of this church is hiding behind Mary's skirt:

He was greedy and corrupt, but he did end up financing a beautiful church with incredible mosaics.

The dome:

The lower scene on this mosaic depicts something most "modern" Christians do not like to even think about:

The judging of the dead, separating the wheat from the chaff and the sheep from the goats. We don't like to think nowadays about anyone being judged unworthy of eternal heaven. To many modern-era Christians, the population of Hell is 2: Satan and Hitler. That's it. This mosaic reminds us that we did not always have such an optimistic view of our destination after the end of these days.

This hallway is the place of the frescoes, rather than mosaics. And the place for the photo-portrait of a visiting tourist:

There are far more mosaics than frescoes and even though this is back to being a functioning mosque, the mosaics still are on display.

Frescoes, too.

The Chora Church is right near the Old City walls.

This is where the Ottoman troops besieged the city in the mid-1400's. The final siege, in which the city was completely surrounded and isolated, took place over 53 days in 1453, with population starving and trapped in a sanitation nightmare.

And here is the leader of the siege:

Sultan Mehmet.

Pigeons feasting on stale bread:

A lion feasting on a calf:

Unlike the above photo, with actual live pigeons feasting on actual tangible bread, this is merely a statuary lion feasting on a statuary depiction of a calf. No actual meat was consumed in this statue.

At this point, my tour guide is walking me to the nearest tram station for me to take a nice tram ride close (enough) to my hotel. Still, there have been interesting sights to see along the way.

Such as the Shehzade Mosque.

Why do I feel the new for a photo in the doorway to the Shehzade Mosque? It's a beautiful mosque, but that's not the reason.

It also is known as the "Prince Mosque." Unfortunately, sadly, the "Prince" in the name does not refer to Prince Rogers Nelson, the Artist Who Will Always Be Known As Prince, the man behind "Little Red Corvette" and the "Purple Rain" soundtrack.

Ablution station.

And, in the inner courtyard, another ablution station. In case your feet got dirty moving from one courtyard to the next.

You can tell this is not about the musical Prince because there is no purple inside.

It's magnificent nevertheless.

And with that, it was time to say "good-bye" to my tour guide and board the tram back to the part of town where my hotel is. But, first, I was a little hungry. So I stopped in a tourist restaurant -- they all are tourist restaurants in this part of the city -- it's just a question of how much you want to pay for the privilege of eating in the tourist part of town -- and ordered a pistachio milkshake.

The restaurant was called Mado. The other flavors of milkshakes and smoothies may have sounded more enticing (lemon!) (blackberry!), but where else can you get a pistachio milkshake?

The milkshake was so-so, unfortunately. Even though it was made with pistachio ice cream, is was not creamy and there was a noticeable lack of pistachio flavor. I thought you could assume there would be a noticeable pistachio flavor when you order a pistachio milkshake, but I assumed in error.

The meal was meatballs. Turkish meatballs. I've even many this trip and I can't get enough. But after this meal at Mado, I won't be getting any more Turkish meatballs in Turkey for awhile. I will return someday soon. But not for the pistachio milkshake at Mado.

Istanbul Coda: Walking Along the Bosphorus

Fishing in the Bosphorus. The cruise boat doesn't mind.

A funicular ride. A small archaeological dig. The Istanbul letters. All this and Kemal Atatürk, too, today in Istanbul.

First, the funicular ride.

As with the Taksim-Kabataş funicular ride from about two weeks ago, the Tünel funicular suffers the same problem as being housed completely within a tunnel and having a rather gentle ascent.

But this one is noticeably superior. It's historic. It passes through an old town with water dripping, as opposed to the sleek, antiseptic tunnel of the other funicular. And the ascent/descent is at just a little steeper angle. Still too gentle for a real funicular, but definitely an improvement.

I would rate this: worth a detour.

I then crossed the Galata Bridge, waded through the sea of humanity in their various queues to board various Bosphorus cruise boats and, once I was away from the cruise boat boarding area, the sidewalks cleared. Even though I was in the tourist side of town, for one of the most visited cities on the planet, I was out of the tourist zone. And at an archaeological dig:

Right there, where the Golden Horn separating the Old City from the New City in European Istanbul, flows into the Bosphorus, was a small archaeological dig.

The column fragments are a "tell" that this dig is from the late Roman Era of Byzantium.

Before it was re-badged Constantinople since this was before there was a Constantine.

But there was a cat at the dig.

It's not much, but it's fascinating that, not only is there an active archaeological in the middle of the most heavily touristed part of a heavily touristed city, but that hardly any other tourists are here.

There's only a few tourists at "The Letters."

Every tourist city has "The Letters." It's usually a major stop on the tourist photo circuit. But not here. There was a couple of tourists taking photos with the letters as a backdrop -- and by "a couple of tourists" I mean I literally saw two different tourists taking a photo with the letters in the background and that was it.

There also was a giant "walk around-able" map of the Istanbul tourist zones embedded in the sidewalk here.

Each one of those "stumps" represents a major Istanbul tourist site, with the name and a rendering of the site on a metal plate fixed to the concrete stump, including mosques, museums, towers, and bazaars.

This one answered a question I had:

Not verbally, but by its location and the description on its plate. It is the plate for the Beyazıt Kulesi, an historic fire watch tower that I saw lit up in green from my hotel room window. I knew the tower was too fat to be a minaret. I kept asking people working at my hotel and they did not know. But, thanks to the "map" in the sidewalk, I now know: Beyazıt Tower. You can see the tower design on the metal plate in the foreground. Maps rule!

We now reach the Kemal Atatürk portion of our final-day walking tour of Istanbul.

Let's move in for a closer look:

The founder of the modern Turkish state. And not just the founder, but the molder and shaper of the modern secular Turkish state.

And nearby is a statue of someone decidedly not from the modern secular Turkish state:

The Turgut Reis Monument. Turgut Reis was an Ottoman admiral from the early 16th Century who built the Ottoman Empire into a naval power. The fact that he is behind barbed wire is not a comment on his military prowess, but on the construction that is happening around him.

And we end the walk with the Ahırkapı Feneri Çeşmesi, the Ahırkapı lighthouse.

It looks like a lighthouse, even though it's on a very busy street in a massive mega-city. At this point, the time has come to meet my tour guide to show me the sights in a different part of the city. Stay tuned. There's more to come.

Return to Istanbul: A Room with a View and a Turkish Taco

I don't know if I paid extra for the view from my hotel room, but if I did it would've been justified.

Back in Istanbul for Round Two.

I flew in from Izmir's Adnan MenderesAirport, which is the airport for the Selçuk and Ephesus tourist magnets and found Istanbul's Airport decked out for Christmas.

Already! We haven't even had Nevada Day yet. Normally I would kvetch and carp about starting the Christmas season too far in advance, but I'm in a Moslem country, so any recognition of Christmas is welcome, even if it is more than two months ahead of schedule.

I am staying in the Doruk Palas Hotel this time around, which is in the Beyoğlu district of the Emekyemez neighborhood of the Galata area. Or so they say. This is the "New City" part of European Istanbul, north of the Golden Horn that separates the Old City (where I stayed two weeks ago) (yes, I've been on this trip that long) from the New City.

The room is small. Very small. New York apartment for someone not working for a hedge fund small. But the view is expansive. That's the Golden Horn Metro Bridge making a straight line for my hotel room. It doesn't collide with my hotel room because the metro line disappears into a tunnel before it would hit my hotel broadside. The enormous Suleymaniye Mosque is to the bridge's left.

I was hungry, having not eaten since the hotel breakfast in Selçuk. Luckily, this is the trendy nightlife part of town. And it's not just for tourists.

Now, when I travel, I like to eat local. All the cool tourists do. But, sometimes, occasionally, when I'm in a mood, I do like to try the country that I am visiting's version of Mexican food. Thus: Hey Döner!

I guess we could be trendy and call Hey Döner "fusion" cuisine. It's more like a culinary trainwreck of Mexican and Turkish cuisine, where a Mexican taco truck got driven into a Turkish bazaar. I got two tacos and a small order of onion rings. The tacos had chicken and cheese on a bread that was somewhere in between pita and a flour tortilla, but not quite either. And on the taco, in addition to chicken and cheese, was a very tasty spicy sauce, along with French fries (?) and pickle slices (??). Let's just say it was better than it sounds, primarily because the creamy hot sauce was awesome and the star of the taco show.