January 27th, 2009 
Turkiye 
I slept all night long very soundly. Breakfast was a tiny buffet in the basement with hardboiled eggs, Dried apricots, olives, sliced bread, very good tomatoes, some sliced fruit, and jellies (which is more like a cherry sauce). There were dried apricots, each with individual toothpicks. Not a lot of choice, but sufficient.
Rain today. I expect it will rain most of our days in Istanbul. We cannot let that stop us. Our first stop is the Archeological Museum. As it suggests, it is art from the various civilizations that have lived in what is now Turkey. Now most of us would expect to find the name of Heinrich Schliemann around the museum. Nope. Not even a reference that I could see. That actually makes sense for multiple reasons. First of all, in the eyes of the Turks, Schliemann is a thief. He found archeological treasures and smuggled them out of Turkey. Further what did he find? The remains of Troy. (Actually he found the remains of an older civilization, going right past Troy. But why is Troy important? It was made famous in a poem by a Greek. The Greeks are a nasty vicious people, as any Turk knows. Troy? Who cares about Troy?
As you enter you see the chunky god Bes seated on a horse at the door. Because it is all done in sort of a cubist style, it is hard to actually find the horse. Bes’s hair seems very curly. There is a sarcophagus with men and horses in a boar hunt, on the ends there are some nice sphinxes on one side and dragons on the other. Very nice. A sarcophagus on the other side features some very realistic battle scenes. Evelyn points out that while the painting was primitive 500 BC, the sculpture was very advanced and realistic. Much of the art is what we would think of as Greek.
It was strange to see statues of women wearing hoods, but the hoods were empty. It was as if we were seeing statues of the invisible woman. Apparently sculptors would do heads separately and then put them into the statue. That way a sculptor could change a statue of one woman into one of another fairly quickly. Another piece was a bust of a head with snap in noses.
The museum uses Turkish and English equally. Wherever something is written in Turkish it is also in English. Most places we have been are not so accommodating. Japan was not. Sweden was not. I think the Turks assume that few visitors will come knowing Turkish.
There was on allusion to the Trojan War. There was a children’s room with a nice Trojan Horse that children could climb up into. Of course Homer does not talk about the horse. I believe that story came from Vergil who was Roman, not Greek. The route you follow takes you past artifacts following the history through the 15th Century. Perhaps there would have been more, but much of the museum was closed off. Particularly of interest was the exhibit on the St. Sophia, when it was built, repaired, etc. We would be seeing the mosque just a little later today. There is a nice painting of the harbor in the 15th Century including the chain that blocked the harbor. A length of the original chain is there also. I cannot tell if so much of the museum is always closed or if it is just early on a Sunday morning, though Sunday would not be a special day.
There had been a nice piece on the building of the Saint Sophia Mosque. From the museum we went to the actual St. Sophia. Shortly before coming we re-watched Topkapi, but the night before coming we watched From Russia with Love which has an extended segment in the St. Sophia Mosque also called the Hagia Sophia. Luck of Leeper says that we would see the Hagia Sophia on a rainy day. I would imagine it would look entirely differently with the sun streaming in. Instead it is a dark man-made cavern built in 548. It was fairly crowded now and this is not yet the tourist season. Luck of Leeper also says that there would be scaffolding under much of the great dome. The scaffolding itself is something of a marvel. It goes right up to the great dome covering the center and a little more than a quarter of the circle. You see gold-leafed mosaics, but through most of the cathedral they have been painted over. Human figures are blasphemous.
The site had been the location of Byzantium’s Acropolis. The Emperor Constantine wanted it to rival the architecture of Rome. An earlier Sancta Sophia had been built on the same site but destroyed in 532 by riots. This one was completed in 548 and was the greatest church in Christendom until the conquest of Constantinople in 1453.
The mosque has much decoration in Christian style, most of which is covered up with Islamic decoration. Islamic art is generally non-representational and there are geometric designs and quotes from the Koran on what looks like shields that are stories high.
To get to the upper balcony, which in the Christian days was where the women went, there is a ramp corkscrews up. It is worth the climb to get a closer view of ceiling. There are a lot of groups there now and it is quite crowded climbing, it will be worse in the tourist season, which this is not.
It is nice having all this just a few blocks from the room. After the mosque we went back to room to get water and to write in the logs. From there we went to lunch.
There is a street with restaurants called Divan Yolu. We picked a restaurant, Meshhur Halk Koftecisi Selim Usta that looked good. Something about the restaurant reminded me of a White Tower hamburger restaurant. We ordered Shish Kabap ($2.40) and Kofte ($1.80), we shared a bean salad, and I got a Coke. The portions were small, but sufficient. We put the salad in the middle of the table and both tried to eat it. I don’t know exactly what was wrong with the salad or the fork or perhaps the land had a subsidence, but the salad kept falling off the fork before it got to our mouths. It was quite embarrassing. Here we came to Turkey as ambassadors of good will and instead we were just being messy eaters. At least we did not vomit on anyone. Honest.
From here we went to the Blue Mosque. It is much nicer looking than the other mosque. Outside it is about the same but the interior is far nicer. Sultan Ahmet built it in the early 1600s to rival the St. Sophia. It is not actually blue but has blue stained glass windows.
After the Blue Mosque we continued down the street looking at some other sights culminating in an outdoor market. We walked through looking at goods. We were beyond the areas where the tourists usually go. From there we decided to walk back by a different route and managed only to get ourselves gloriously lost. We wandered around looking at shops and walking. Among the things that are not built to last very well are the sidewalks. In some cases they just put hard tiles on top of dirt banks. Many places the sidewalks are all broken up and pretty messy to walk on. We spent what must have been a couple hours wandering the streets. We began to get clues that we were back in the tourist area. We were pestered by touts trying to get our patronage. Our Odyssey was worth the effort, but our shoes were muddy and we were tired. Finally we found the way to the Hippodrome and from there back to the room.
I worked on my log some more and took another go at my flashcards in the hopes that more would stick. I think that as I get older my memory is not as good. I know the words for an hour or so than they just go away… Well, some of them. More stick each time but then they just fade. It is like writing them on a steamy mirror. It just steams up again.
For dinner we went back to the area near the mosques and Divan Yolu. We picked a restaurant and liked it. The waiter was a Kurd and wanted to know if we had ever heard of Kurds. We said some superficial things about how they lived in the East and had a hard time. I was not sure how touchy a subject it was. I did not go into detail about having second thoughts about coming to Turkey because of the treatment of the Kurds. In any case we had a reasonable dinner, again for about $4 apiece. We are getting much the same sort of things each meal, grilled meat.
We headed back to the room after dinner. Well, there may be more to do in Istanbul, but we haven’t really found it. There was a woman behind the desk at the guesthouse. “Yirmi-iki,” I requested. She handed me the key for 22. “It worked!” I said to Evelyn. The woman grinned. “T’shekurlar” I said to the woman. “You’re welcome.” I am getting a little Turkish. It does not take much. I guess there is the belief that the Turks are and aggressive and unfriendly people. They have a reputation as troublemakers. Well, much of our culture came from Greece. The Turks might actually be among the nicest people in the Middle East. Frankly, if they wanted that title there would be very little competition. Even the Israelis whom I agree with politically I all too often find are pushy and rude.
We tried listening to the short wave. I got a program I really did not understand. It sounded like a strange language lesson. It sounded like a woman was trying to seduce a man with provocative language and then the same thing was said in a foreign language. Was this some strange ploy to make language lessons more interesting? I did not recognize the foreign language, but were they trying to teach people how to make love to a woman in their language? Fascinated I listened on. The announcer came back on, talking in the foreign language. Finally the mystery was cleared up. He said something about Def Lepard. Then played a song with the exact lyrics of the phrases I had heard. They were explaining what the song lyric meant for their listeners who did not know English.
Well, it is almost 11:30 and I am caught up on my log. Tomorrow begins another day. Evelyn has pulled out an article about Jews in Turkey. There are about 20,000 Jews living in Istanbul and who have lived here since they were thrown out of Spain in 1492. Turkey has one of the longest histories of tolerance for Jews. Of course Turkey is all tied up in one of the strangest stories of Jewish history.
It occurred in the 1660s when a demagogue arose from the Turkish Jewish community and had perhaps half of the Jews in the world at that time believing he was the Messiah. The man was Shabbatai Tzevi, a rabbi from Smyrna, what is today Izmir. He was born in 1626 of a wealthy merchant family and early on showed a fascination in religion and particularly mysticism. A bright student, he studied to be a rabbi and became one as a young man, but he also suffered from violent mood swings. Today we would probably call him a manic-depressive, but at the time he thought he was possessed by demons. His behavior became erratic and increasingly strange. He performed a marriage ceremony on himself marrying the Torah. And he claimed he could levitate. He ate non-Kosher food, and he feasted on fast days. Tzevi declared that he was the Messiah but, not surprisingly, could summon few followers. Finally his behavior became an embarrassment and the Jewish community asked him to leave. He wandered the Middle East, being expelled from Salonika and Constantinople.
Traveling to Jerusalem, he heard of another young holy man, Nathan of Gaza, whom Tzevi thought could exorcise the demons that he still at times believed possessed him. Tzevi sought out Nathan and asked to be helped in 1665. Nathan, however, interpreted Tzevi’s presence in a different way. It had been prophesied that the Messiah would come out of a period of great tribulation to the Jews. In fact this was such a period, as just fifteen years before had been one of the great pre-20th-Century holocausts for Jews. The Chmielnitzki Massacre was a furious holocaust in which Cossack troops in Russia and Poland had murdered over 100,000 Jews (out of a world population of about 1,500,000) in the most brutal and painful ways imaginable. Nathan had been expecting a Messiah to arise at this time, and Tzevi seemed to fit the prophesied description. He responded that not only was Tzevi not possessed by demons, but that Tzevi’s occasional beliefs in his own divinity was, in fact, accurate. The two began traveling together proclaiming that Shabbatai Tzevi was the Messiah at last arrived. And where they could not travel, Nathan’s writings proclaiming the Messiah could go. Tzevi’s weird interpretations of Jewish law became what many people took to be commandments from God. Tzevi declared that he would throw the Turks out of Palestine and that the Jews would return there. Tens of thousands of Jews were electrified by his message, particularly after the recent massacres. Jewish communities were split into Shabbateans and non-Shabbateans who violently disagreed with each other. Generally the Shabbateans were the less educated who mistrusted the more intellectual Jews of the community. Rabbis who opposed the new movement might find their houses burned to the ground by mobs of Shabbatean zealots.
In 1666 Tzevi, with many of his followers, sailed for Constantinople to demand from the Sultan the return of Palestine to the Jews. If the Sultan refused Tzevi claimed he would have the Sultan deposed. En route he was arrested and imprisoned at Gallipoli. Through bribery he was allowed visitors in the thousands of loyal followers. Meanwhile Nathan continued to travel and write spreading the word of this new supposed Messiah in imprisonment. Eventually the Sultan decided that even in imprisonment Tzevi was still dangerous and presented an ultimatum. Tzevi could be tortured to death or he could embrace Islam. Tzevi chose conversion and took the name Aziz Mehmed Effendi. The ever-loyal Nathan declared to the world that Tzevi had already given his message to the Jews and had converted in order to spread his message through Islam. This too, he claimed, could be foreseen in the prophecy.
Tens of thousands of Jews were bitterly disappointed in their hoped-for Messiah. To have this hope destroyed so soon after the Polish and Russian massacres was a bitter pill to swallow. Some Shabbateans converted to Islam themselves, others insisted that they should remain Jewish and that only their leader should be Moslem. Tzevi lived another ten years, dying at 50. Nathan of Gaza continued to proselytize for the man he believed to be a Messiah and survived Tzevi by four years. What was essentially a new religion survived into this century. Nazis exterminated a community of Greek Shabbateans in 1943. There is still a Shabbatean community in Mashhad, Iran.
Evelyn has asked me to point out that back when I was in the 6th grade my parents complained I was not studious enough. I would like to think that they have changed their minds, but I don’t know for sure.
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