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Published: January 13th 2015
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It was a slow start to the first day of the year although to be fair it had taken until 4am to remove the mammoth from the party! The snow appeared to have stopped but the temperatures weren’t any warmer, so having bundled up well we set forth for another inside tourist attraction. Woolly says – I like to move it, move it…… it was a great night and with balloons and sparklers everyone seemed to have had fun. The music, dancing and food provided were brilliant and even my request of a few snacks to keep up my strength were meet with bowls of pistachios, showing that you can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant! While Jo was mustering the troops I stuck my trunk out of the window to access the conditions and sat pondering if the hostel would notice me dragging my duvet with me for the day, this is Turkey why is it soooooo cold! With everyone suitably attired and Woolly sulking over the lack of duvet to keep him warm I had decided on a destination that was going to be a bonus for the fur ball, the underground cistern.
Woolly says – Oooooooo toilets, I like finding toilets on my travels, maybe I can get a picture to send to my bestest friend Sion who has similar tastes in discoveries. I trotted past the large obelisks situated at what was once the Roman Hippodrome that we had marvelled over on our last visit, but with my tusks starting to form icicles I wasn’t prepared to stop. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the cistern as I joined the queue but the information board caught my attention……. ROMANS yippee. The subterranean structure was commissioned by Emperor Justinian and built in 532 AD using 336 columns, many of which were salvaged from ruined temples. Mostly in Ionic or Corinthian styles, each measured 9 meters in length and are spaced at four-metre intervals, being arranged in 12 rows of 28 columns, that’s a lot of measuring! It was originally known as the Basilica Cistern because it lay underneath the Stoa Basilica, one of the great squares on the first hill of Istanbul and was designed to service the Great Palace and surrounding buildings, it was able to store up to 80,000 cu metres of water delivered via 20km of aqueducts from a reservoir near the Black Sea. The cistern was cleaned and renovated in 1985 by the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality and opened to the public in 1987. Why wasn’t Hadrian involved? Where had my hero been? Will I get wet?
With Woolly considering his Roman knowledge and wet paws we managed to pay our entrance fees and descend into the underground world. Woolly says – WOW, in fact double wow. It was beautiful, hundreds of columns and a bit too much water for my liking but the lighting gave it an outer world type feel. With Jo snapping away I considered the differences in the columns on show, some plain, some with intricately carved ceiling areas while others where decorated all over, clever Romans they always seem to get it right and how ingenious to re-use old parts of their previous buildings, Hadrian should have got in on the act. I sat for a while contemplating the whales swimming around in the water below my paws, Jo told me they were carp but given the size of some of them I think they must have been related to whales. The fish were huge and would have made an impressive feast. As we made our way further into the cistern itself the columns changed again, still in their regimented lines they now had far more carvings involved, with one having a finger hole in it where the tourists taking it in turns to place their own digits. Woolly says – the hole was a little small for my paws so growing bored of watching everyone else insert their extremities into the unknown I scurried along the wooden walkways to an area that appeared to be of great interest to one and all. Being short does have its problems but when it comes to getting through the crowds the advantages far outweigh the issues, as I navigated my way through the legs and feet I arrived in front of the bottom of a column with an upside down head on it, strange, why is it upside down, was the sculptor drunk when he did it? Was he an acrobat who worked whilst doing handstands? I looked quizzically at Jo for some explanation. It’s a good question and one that has never really been answered, the best guess is that the people who placed the stone believed that if the head was upside down, it would ward off evil spirits. Woolly was in for a treat as a few paw lengths later resides the second of the heads
which is sideways! Why one head is upside down and the other is sideways only deepens the question about their orientation. Speculation suggests that the builders felt that to place two heads in the same positioning would empower the evil forces living in the snakes on Medusa's head. Woolly says – Oh I’ve heard of her before and her ability to turn people to stone with one look, I starred at Jo but whatever gift Medusa might have had did nothing to stop my carer from talking! We continued along the busy walkway admiring the stone masons work and the restoration work that could be easily identified from the rather large bottomed columns situated in one area, the atmosphere was enticing and having stood just looking for quite a while longer it seemed a real effort to move back into the city itself. Woolly says – I gave a last lingering look at the underground world before climbing the steps in the search of food….. I’m sure I heard someone mutter something about Chinese!
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D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
Alice's restaurant
Woolly sure enjoys the new year but we think he should let Jo talk more. The stone work is lovely.