Istanbul 03: History is a Pile of Debris

Saturday, May 17, 2008, Turkoman Hotel, Istanbul

Last night we went on the obligatory people-watching pilgrimage to Taksim in what used to be the Genoese colony of Pera that is now the trendy nightlife district of Istanbul. We sat upstairs at Baraka, eating and listening to the house band for a couple of hours. I ended up consuming far too much salty feta in my cucumber and tomato salad.

We spent all day exploring the Topkapi as well as the Archaeology Museum. Exhausted now from the throngs of tourists and number of placards read. At Topkapi, I was struck by the man in tears, visibly moved by the displayed footprint cast in bronze of the Prophet. As my interest in religion deepens, I find myself becoming less tolerant of superstitious, and hence superficial, religious experiences. I think for most people, the reverse is true, so that at the end of life, only childish trinkets remain.

“Disappointing” is too meager a description of my visit to the Byzantine exhibit at the historical museum. So little to actually look at and study. Certainly, there must be more to the Byzantine collection housed in Istanbul, unless, of course, the legend is true that the splendor of Constantinople was indeed hauled off by the cartload as the vanquished disseminated the glory of the classical world across western Europe, sowing seeds of Renaissance throughout the continent. But a thousand years of Christian Byzantine rule should not be so easily erased. I guess it is good to be a conqueror so as to reshape history into one’s own image.

Case in point: reference to the Anatolian architectural consistency expressed in the city walls of Constantinople. Apparently, they were patterned after the fortified Hittite capital of Hattusa. But since neither the Hittites nor the Byzantines were Turks (or Muslims), we’ll reduce it all to a footnote in history. Or worse: to a blog entry by a mediocre hobbyist who doesn’t even believe in history.

Unfortunately, I can’t just dismiss this obvious absence to the Turks since even periodically throughout the Christian Greek empire, radical iconoclasm was official state policy. (And don’t even get me started on those damned European Catholics who plundered the city during the Fourth Crusade!)

Sublime Porte

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Just a short trip to Istanbul and an even shorter stop in London on the return flight. I'll post photos when I get back.

Whither the Turks?

During the forty-six hours I spent in Budapest in the winter of ’96, I befriended another American at the hostel who was traveling the world researching the history of coffee for a book he was writing. We decided to visit the castle way up in the hills of Buda on our last (and my second) day there. After about an hour walking through the historical exhibitions we were struck that there had been no mention of the Turks or the Ottomans in any of the displays. Between the two of us, we pretty much covered all major Western language groups, so we decided to ask a docent whither the Turkish history of Hungary.

I think it would be significantly funnier if we had opened the floodgates of our polyglottery upon that poor, unsuspecting Hungarian girl who happened to be volunteering that sunny winter day twelve years ago. But instead I think we were much more restrained as we passed the linguistic torch back and forth between ourselves.

I asked first in English, to which she stared blankly before shaking her head. Then it was my companion’s turn; this time in German. They were after all one time deeply embedded within the Austro-Hungarian Empire! Nein on the German front. Aha! I thought: let me try out my Polish; the sheer number of Polish tourists and guest workers in Hungary surely made it a viable option. And that would be a nie. His turn now: French. Nope (said in a Cajun accent, no doubt). My high school Spanish? ¡No! One last-ditch effort: my Russian. Nyet such luck.

After the repeated failures of language—not on our part, mind you—we retired to the café for some of that Turkish devil liquid itself that passed through these lands so many generations ago for the first time, shortly after that poor Cossack soldier found a bag of coffee beans on a dying Ottoman fighter following some long forgotten Ukrainian battle.

I wonder if my compatriot/co-traveler ever finished his book on coffee. I wonder if the museum docent ever learned a useful language. I wonder if the Hungarians were ever able to tell their secret history that once converged with the Turks'. I wonder where I’d be now if I would’ve taken up the offer I had received the night before at the disco near the deserted army barracks by the train station. I especially wonder such things when I hear “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” on the radio, one of the many songs we sat around singing at the pub the night before, before heading to the club.

Just a few hours later I was on a frozen train to Krakow.