Istanbul 2

   Friday, April 25.

         Hagia Sophia

         Hippodrome.  This was the venue for athletic contests built by 203 CE by Septimius Severus and renovated by Constantine in the early 4th century CE as part of the moving of the capitol from Rome to Constantinople.

   Later, at the height of the Ottoman Empire (1609 - 16), the Blue Mosque was built to the South of the Hippodrome.  The stones from the Hippodrome went into the Mosque; the dirt from the foundation was dumped where the Hippodrome was, raising the level several meters.  Thus, there is a park in the shape of a hippodrome.

   The three vertical items you see in the reconstruction above have survived, including the bronze serpents (decapitated)  column and the Egyptian obelisk.

    The obelisk went up here in the 4th century CE under Theodosius.  (THe Egyptian date is mid -15th century BCE.)  Made of a block of granite, it almost looks new.  The marble base, however, is pretty eroded.

   
         The Mozaik Museum is basically a structure built over a huge, but badly damaged Roman Palace mosaic floor.  It probably dates back to the reign of Justinian, around 550 CE.   This panel shows a couple of pudgy, unimpressed tourist kids taking the camel ride.

       

A lizard-eating chimera.

       
   We had a terrific dinner at the Mozaik restaurant.  Borek, lamb tagine, local cabernet & "Okuzgozu" (a local varietal the waiter said translates as "cows eyes").

****
4/26  Taksim to Modern Art Museum.
A gloomy day.  So, of course, we chose to do a walk.  This is Taksim Square, the main square in the newer part of Istanbul.

Attaturk was a military hero at Gallipoli.  He became President, threw out British and Greek occupiers of Istanbul and the Mediterranean Coast, abolished the fez and head covering in public places, replaced the Arabic alphabet with Latin characters, and abolished all state religious institutions.  Here's his memorial.

A water distribution facility, recently restored.  It was staffed by two extremely nice young men, but they were not well informed.  We were told that taksim means "distribution".

street scenes
Istiklal Caddesi, the main shopping street.

fish

There's a lot of jewelry.

lamps

British Consulate

     One of our destinations was the Pera Museum, which was said to have a tile collection.  Unfortunately, that part was closed, but we saw paintings by a 19th Century Turkish Diplomat, Osman Hamdi,  including this one, of obscure inspiration, The Tortoise Trainer.

The museum also contained pictures and information about the work of European artists on the staff of European diplomats.

After stopping for mediocre boreks half way down a long steep hill and stepped street, we ended at the Modern Art Museum.

The collection was not exciting but the cafe was delightful.  We had coffee and sweets. Here's the view from our table.

Building across from Modern Art Museum.  We don't know what it is, but it's very nice.

Dinner at Samazen.  Doner kabob.  Yakut Ozkazgozu blend.

***

Sun. Apr 27

Topkapi Palace -- Long waits

Much of the tile work was beautiful.  We were surprised to find rooms of relics; we did not know that was a  Muslim practice.  Many items were taken from Mecca when it was conquered under Selim the Grim in 1519:  the rod of Moses, the cooking pot of Abraham, the tunic of Mohammed, the sword of David, many hairs of Muhammad's beard, the arm of John the Baptist, and so on.

Just outside the Topkaki is the former Orthodox Church of Hagia Eirene (Aya Irini), a Byzantine Church that was used mostly for storage after the Moslem conquest of Istanbul.

dinner at Kayikci:  lamb medallions , sea bass in paper.

Monday, April 28

We started the day -- a very wet one -- at Sultanamet Mosque (Blue Mosque).    It is very large and dramatic.  Here's a sunny day picture.   The use of six minarets (instead of four)was controversial; the architect, Sinan, had the strong backing of the Sultan.  Note how the minarets on the right do not line up.  Whether this is due to soil conditions or something else we have not been able to determine.

part of ceiling

the dome is held up by four gigantic columns

The tile is amazing.


Bruce went on a long walk; Leslie took a rest.
The Grand Bazaar is 450 years old and has thousands of little shops.

This tower was built to watch for fires; now it is a landmark in the middle of a university.

       
            The Suleymaniye Mosque is a few blocks further up.   The architect -- Mimar Sinan -- was also the designer of the Blue Mosque.
              

This one is a bit smaller and has more windows to allow light to come in.

The walk continued through a sort of light industry area.   There was a whole street of shops that dealt in belt buckles.

   Someone's falcon.

My walk continued over the Galata Bridge and took in the fish market.  But the camera batteries died.

***

Two notes on the hotel breakfast.

Honey is always available:

There is a corner with a sign "Children's Buffet":

The plate holds a variety of cookies.  The bowl that looks like a fruit mix is candy.  Other bowls are peanut butter and jelly.

Back to Matbeh for dinner.  The hummus was quite different, very stiff and seasoned with cinnamon.   Bruce chose the lamb medallions with lamb brains appetizer.  To our surprise, this turned out tobe slices of sausage.

It looks like (but definitely is not) your grandmother's gefilte fish.  Both are acquired tastes.

  

Main course a lam stew with apricots.  And the wonderful baklava.

Istanbul

April 23, 2014

Very aggressive taxi ride from airport.  Traffic a very bad problem here.

Sura Hagia Sophia Hotel.  Located on  a very narrow street, so the taxi had to back in.

The building itself is old and pretty.  But recent interior renovations are very trendy, with dark shiny surfaces, indirect lighting, and lots of mirrors.  (Just how many copies of oneself on the toilet does one want to see?)

   This stuff will look old pretty fast.

    Out our window, Ayasofia (Hagia Sophia):

   We're well located near the old stuff.  On the way to dinner, we found the Million Stone.  It was excavated around 1967 and was a mile post that marked the hub of the roads that went to the rest on the Byzantine Empire.  It was installed by Constantine in the fourth century, CE, when the capital was moved here from Rome, and was meant to emulate the Milarium Aureum in Rome.

Dinner at Matbah, a very nice place that reproduces historical Ottoman palace recipes. The date of many of the recipes is on the menu. The concept is interesting and fun and the execution excellent.  Grape Leaves with sour cherries and chicken stew with apricots, grapes, and almonds, flavored with honey and cinnamon, and baklava.  Unfortunately, they do not sell a cookbook.

April 24.  Slept in; took laundry down the street to save money.   Walking to the taxi stand, we passed a bookstore with this in the front window.

The author is a Marxist-turned-Islamist and is prominent enough to get a wikipedia page.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%B0smet_%C3%96zel   The google translation comes out "Note of Being a Jew," a long poem   The book cover has it right.  (Google translations are at best proximate and they cannot come close to doing poetry.   link )   This looks interesting; maybe we'll find someone to help understand it.

    Anyway,  we enjoyed a visit to the Chora Museum.  It is the surviving part of a former monastery, just outside the old city walls, the former Church of the Holy Savior.  Its Byzantine frescoes and mosaics are deservedly renowned.  The mosaics relate to the lives of Mary and Jesus.

The dormition:

Mary, Jesus and ancestors?

Fresco of the judgment with Christ giving a hand up to Adam and Eve.

Samezen for dinner.  Mixed meat platter.  Huge (9"x18") puffy lavash.  Picture in future post.

End of Vienna

First, a further note on the Messiah performance we previously discussed:

    In the program after the list of the music was a paragraph in German which we could not understand. Today, we found a translation some 25 pages on.  It seems quite conflicted with the optimistic message of Handel's Messiah:

   Today was Easter.  When we checked for holiday closings, we found much to our surprise that, unlike at home, museums normally closed Sunday and Monday were open Easter Sunday and Monday.   So we spent the day at the Belvedere Palace complex.  Besides the now-familiar overdone baroque rooms,

 the Orangery houses an exhibit featuring Albin Egger-Lienz and his work, famous here, Dance of Death:

The artist was so pleased with his picture that he repainted it many times, using slightly different colors.  And he painted also separate pictures of some of the heads.

The Upper Belvedere has Gustave Klimt's The Kiss, placed and illuminated like a church altar painting.  It is usually surrounded by an adoring crowd:

   There was a temporary exhibit gathering works from Berlin and Vienna.   It was meant to show the different personalities of the cities.  Ship of Madmen by Oscar Laske is very pessimistic take on humanity.

 Walking away from the Belvedere Palace, we came across the Soviet war memorial.  There are many Russian visitors here and a lot of flowers at the well-maintained site.

   The hotel put out chocolate eggs at the desk and when we returned this afternoon, we found that the Easter bunny had been here and left a small chocolate bunny, a cognac egg, and chocolate.

It appears the Easter bunny is very big here.  In the market, we saw cakes baked as rabbits.

   Music is an important part of Easter here.  The Missa Solemnis and Messiah we attended were part of Oster Klang, which seems to be a multi venue music festival.  (Klang is the sound that bells make; Oster is Easter.)  The hotel offered a short concert tonight, performed by a cello/piano pair of students from the National Academy, with Champagne at the intermission.

   We ate at a close-by Vietnamese Restaurant, which turned out to be surprisingly good.
**
Monday, Apr 21.

   Went back to the Kunsthistorische Museum to view the Italian, Spanish, and French paintings and the antiquities.

Caravaggio's David with Head of Goliath:

Roman Cameo from their major cameo collection:

   Grabbed a sandwich at the Natural History Museum.  That was not an expected stop, but the cafe at the Kunsthistorische was not available (Easter brunch) and this was across the Maria Theresa Plaza.  In the middle of the plaza is this large pile of bronze and granite to celebrate the Pragmatic Sanction:

   

The Pragmatic Sanction changed the law to allow a Habsburg daughter to inherit.  The results were the War of Austrian Succession and the long rule of Maria Theresa.

     We ended up spending the rest of the day a Natural History Museum.  It has the world's largest meteorite collection. They range from quite dull to beautiful.

  These are bits broken off of Mars:

  The 24,000 yr old, 5 inch, Venus of Willendorf is no doubt the most famous item in the museum:

 Went back to the Cafe Amacord for dinner.  Excellent wiener schnitzel, potato salad and rabbit stew.
 ***
Tues, Apr 22

      We had some luck.  We set off for the Hofburg Place only to find it closed.  (Yes, we did not check.)
What we ended up seeing was probably more interesting.

So we spent the day on foot, starting with the Secession Building.  Secessionist art refers to  "a number of modernist artist groups that separated from the support of official academic art and its administrations in the late 19th and early 20th century".  (citation: Wikipedia)

In the basement, they've installed a "frieze" by Gustave Klimt, the Beethoven frieze. Here's a bit; you get the idea.

This piece refers to the Ode to Joy.  A couple kissing in front of a choir of angels.

We visited the Minoritenkirche, which is very austere.  Note the columns have no capitals, a feature we cannot recall elsewhere among the gothic cathedrals we have viewed.

A light lunch at the Central Cafe.  The menu claims Freud and Trotsky were former patrons.

It was time to try Viennese specialities. We had coffee with apricot brandy (Bruce) and coffee with rum (Leslie).  And here is our strawberry-rhubarb cake cream pastry.

Then  several museums that are a part of the National Library.  There's a Globe Museum...

... and an Esperanto Museum.   Initially, the Espernto movement used a green star as a recognition symbol.  They switched to the ovals 50 years ago because the star had become too ideologically charged.  We learned that the language was spoken in the World War I p.o.w. camps of Siberia as the people there spoke so many different languages.

We finished at the Prunksaal, which is the historical main room of the National Library.  Very imposing and stately.

Like our Library of Congress in D.C., the Austrian National Library has changing exhibits from its archives.  Today, they had an extensive display of documents from World War I from the perspective of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  We knew about the Western Front, having visited sites in Belgium and France.  We also knew, from Hemmingway's Farewell to Arms, about the Tyrol Front.  We didn't realize that the slaughter was so high -- several million lives were lost in 7 battles fought there.  That war began after Archduke Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, was assassinated; it ended with the end of the Empire itself.

On this sober note, we depart.  Our next post will be from Turkey.

Dinner tonight at a local cafe (Sperl): boiled beef, potato pancakes, spinach.