Day 2 - Istanbul

I think a made a huge mistake today. I stayed in instead of going out for new years eve. In Egypt last year New years wasn't a big deal, and I kind of thought that it would be the same here. So I stayed in to get some work done and try and get a good nights sleep (I felt really jet lagged this evening). It's midnight and I've been listening to live Turkish music playing through my window all night and now I see fireworks and a huge flock of doves flying from the square where my roommate and some other people went for new years. Apparently new years is a big deal in Istanbul. I am absolutely kicking myself right now.

Oh well, on to today.

Today was our full day in Istanbul, we visited the Blue mosque, St. Sophia (also called Hagia Sophia, we had a change of plans), the Byzantine Hippodrome, the indoor Bazaar, and the Byzantine cistern.

Istanbul is a great city, it reminds me of Europe and it also reminds me of Egypt (but clean). It is a really old city, Constantine (who became the first Roman Emperor to become a Christian) moved out of Rome and made Constantinople the capital of the Roman Empire sometime in the 300’s AD. The section of the city that our hotel is in has tall apartments and shops that line narrow cobbled streets, really cool.

The Blue mosque was cool, it reminded me of the Alabaster mosque in Cairo. I think that the insides of mosques all kind of look the same. There are are definitely some differences, but generally it’s the same stuff: carpets, pillars, gold leaf calligraphy. Cool stuff, but it probably means more if you’re a Muslim or can read the Arabic calligraphy.

(The Blue mosque, inside and outside)

The hippodrome is mostly shops and buildings now, back in the day it was a giant stadium where they raced horses and chariots, it held somewhere between thirty to forty thousand people. All that is left now are a few walls and some monuments that used to line the center of the stadium. The coolest monuments were an Egyptian obelisk that dated from 1400 BC, it still looks new, and a brass monument of intertwined snakes. I guess the brass monument was built by the Greeks to celebrate their successful defense against the Persian invasion. It was inscribed with all 52 of the city states that fought against the Persians, but it hasn’t withstood the weather as well as the Egyptian obelisk has and the names are all gone (as well as the heads of the snakes).

(St. Sophia)

St. Sophia was awesome. It was the built in the 6th century and was the largest and most beautiful church in the world for something like 800 years. Then it was the biggest mosque in the world. When the church was turned into a mosque they decided to cover the mosaics and frescoes with plaster instead of destroying them, (they don’t allow any images in mosques, especially when the images are giant pictures of Jesus.) The plaster has preserved the mosaics really well, and since the St. Sophia was changed from a mosque to a museum, they have uncovered some of the mosaics of the early church. They are really beautiful. The inside is gigantic, the statue of liberty could stand under the center dome and not reach the ceiling.

(Inside St. Sophia, where the pulpit of the church would have been.)

I hated the Bazaar, we had two hours of ‘free time’ there, but it was more like two hours of torture. It reminded me two much of the guys hustling out of shops in Egypt. Lunch was good though, chicken kabobs and Turkish apple tea.

After we got back to the hotel my roommate Brian and I decided to walk down to the old Byzantine cisterns. They were cool too. They still had some water in them and yes dad there were fish. Not trout though, mostly big goldfish and suckers..

Tomorrow we are going to a few archaeological museums, the church of St. Bacchus, and then we are flying down to Antioch, where we get to really start checking out the early church sites. Antioch was Paul’s home base for his missionary journeys into Asia minor (modern day Turkey) and Greece.

Thanks for reading, tomorrow I’ll be posting from Antioch.