Chambers of the Sun Part 3

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A Tale of Two (Closed) Buildings

Hotel Türkuaz, Kadýrga, Ýstanbul - September 4th

Apparently some people have been having problems getting to the site. Ýf you're not reading this, Ý can only apologise. Ýt's also quite unusual to find an internet café with USB connections, but Ý will have some photos up for you just as soon as Ý stumble into one.

Given Ýstanbul's conscious effort to trim her Classical past to a set of ramshackle columns in the Hippodrome and a tumbledown triumphal arch on the Divan Yolu, Ý have had to exert my imagination a little in identifying the city's great Greek poets. Ý have promoted two Ýstanbullus to the hallowed band, and Ý hope that my apologies for them will be sufficient to secure them a greater scrutiny as representatives of their respective cultures at their very zenith.

The first of these, Paulus Silentiarius, was something of a rarity in his era. Born into 6th-century Byzantium, he was responsible for maintaining silence in the palace of Justinian - whence his monicker. As his poetry demonstrates, he was a little oasis of Classical learning in an increasingly philistine world; he shared his love of the Second Sophistic with the (mostly) lackey historian Procopius and his friend and fellow poet Agathias (who may have been a pagan). At the inauguration of the rebuilt Haghia Sophia church, he was commissioned to pen and recite a dactylic eulogy, which has been much maligned by later commentators. Ýt is true that he spends a great deal of time toadying to the Emperor, but the architectural passages are a very passable line in Hellenistic ecphrasis:

"Who will unclose me Homer's sounding lips,
And sing the marble mead that oversweeps
The mighty walls and pavements spread around
Of this tall temple, which the sun has crowned?
The hammer with its iron tooth was loosed
Into Carystus' summit green, and bruised
The Phrygian shoulder of the daedal stone; --
This marble, colored after roses fused
In a white air, and that, with flowers thereon
Both purple and silver, shining tenderly!" (tr. Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

Ý was very keen to read the poem (well, the bits Ý fancied) in its true context, but the Aya Sofya is tragically disfigured by a welter of scaffolding. As Ý was to discover, this was but the tip of the iceberg of the Ýstanbul municipality's sudden and deeply unwelcome zeal for repairs and restoration. Instead of a paragraph of rhetorical vapour about the harmony of poetry and architecture, then, Ý give you one of Paul's much-neglected epigrams, preserved in the Palatine Anthology:

"Cleophantis lingers long, and now the third lamp
utters a broken glimmer as it pines away in silence.
Ah! would that the firebrand in my heart
Were quenched as the lamp, and did not sear me
Ýn this long, longing vigil. How often she swore
Even by the Cythereans that she would be here at evenfall!
But this girl cares nothing for men nor for gods." (tr. Moody; Ý'll versify it if Ý get a spare moment)

He may have loved wit and allusion - indeed, his close friend Agathias said he cared most for "learning and the practice of words" - but once the Callimachean element of his poetry is shed, a Muse of economy and elegance steps forth. His very isolation makes the 80 or so surviving epigrams, which include a wonderful dedication to Apollo where a grasshopper replaces one of the strings of a broken lyre in a contest, an achievement of some note. As Johnson would have said, "worth seeing, but not worth going to see."

Sinan, on the other hand, is very much worth going to see. Ý should explain that he actually was a Greek, born to an Orthodox family in Cappadocia and taken into the Janissary corps by the legendary devþirme system. People often marvel at the extraordinary wisdom of the Ottoman administration in not only tolerating but even ncorporating the Empire's substantial religious minorities into their army, but it seems there is a far less charitable explanation: the probability is that the Hanafi Sunnis of the time believed that the Judgement Day was imminent, and that the kaffir would get their comeuppance anyway. Whatever the reason, he entered the world's most brilliant civil engineering corps at the time of its highest strategic brilliance. Ýt is a testament to the vigour of the Ottoman Empire under Süleyman the Magnificent that, within a decade of taking the Sultan's shilling, Sinan would have served in Baghdad, Apuglia, Mohacs and Vienna.

His real purple patch began when he was appointed Court Architect in 1538. Being court architect to a Muslim ruler was a risky business back in the day. Nizami relates in his Khamsa ("Five") how the legendary builder Simnar was beheaded after building a masterpiece for a Yemeni king, for fear that he might later excel it. Ýn more recent history, Fatih Mehmet had lopped off his architect's hands for failing to exceed the height of the Aya Sofya in his plans for the 1453 victory mosque. The poor man was then executed for dereliction.

Having overseen the greatest passage in his nation's history, Süleyman wanted something that could rival the Byzantine dome still lording it over the city skyline a millenium on, and poor old Sinan was called back from building bridges in Bulgaria to give the Sultan his wonder of the world. Matters were complicated by the symbolism of Süleyman's reign: inheriting the name of the Solomon of the scriptures, the Sultan felt a unique sense of destiny gathering about the new capital of the Earth, and entrusted Sinan with overcoming the Hagia Sophia, the famed Second Temple of King Solomon. Did he ever succeed in beating the Aya Sofya? That's what Ý set out to see.

Ý should explain that architecture is not an art for which Ý have any native feeling or vocabulary. Ý badly miss my copy of Robert Byron's Road to Oxiana for its descriptive odes, which rise up as majestically as the buildings themselves. Still, as Ý understand them, here follow the three golden rules of Ýslamic architecture:

1. SPACE. Originally, the masjid, or "place of prostration," was just an assembly point on the ground. Ýndeed. the Qur'an is very dubious about the idea of sacred space; a major sura reads "there is nothing like unto ," and one of the the hadithun quotes the prophet as saying "the earth was made pure and a mosque for me." This was inverted by theologians into the idea that a mosque ought to represent the Earth itself, and so lateral and especially vertical space is emphasised as possible. This philosophy, Ý think, explains the extraordinary decoration of the courtyard of the Great Mosque at Damascus, the Shield of Achilles of the Muslim world. The mosque space is ideally a concentration of all of Allah's works into a single focus, and plays a similar role in the early Muslim community to that of the hestos, the hearth, in the early Greek.

2. SÝMPLÝCÝTY. Another hadith condemns spending money on buildings, and unnecessary ornamentation runs sorely against Ýslamic aesthetics. The idea is to put as little a veil of the mortal world as possible between the devotee and Allah. Any excessive complexity of design would detract from the confluence of spiritual energies.

3. HEÝGHT. Just listen to Goodwin: "in their mosques, the Ottomans made structural use of the dome and semi-dome, spinning them heavenwards so that the central dome floated on a cascade of structures which became more slender, numerous and small as they reached the ground, like a fountain rising from within from solidity to translucency." The minaret and dome are the principal motive forces in a relentless upwards motion, declarations of intent, the culminations of a skywards litany of geometric form. Your ideal mosque looks as though it is about to take off.

The first mosque Ý sought, the Sokollu Mehmed Paþa, had an active medrese in the courtyard. The little old imam, dressed from head to foot in velvety black and stroking his footlong beard, was instructing a pack of wide-eyed boys from a sheet of kufic script gleaming with gold leaf. Sadly, the zufr call went off as Ý was removing my shoes, but despite being denied the interior Ý was impressed by Sinan's resource and ingenuity, both of which are the traits of a military engineer rather than some effete aesthete. The complex is built on what could easily be a twenty degree slope, and the spaces outside are so foreshortened that the entrance and the fountain hit you in the face.

The Ýstanbul municipality, damn their eyes, had closed the Sülemaniye for reparirs. Ý guess we'll never know if Sinan's flagship project rivals the Aya Sofya. Still, the skill of his craftsmen is unveiled in the exquisite Ýznik tilework in the mausolea of Süleyman and the Hürrem Sultana.

The Rüstem Paþa, by the Eminönü docks, is on an elevation above a busy street in the Spice Bazaar. The whole thing is built on the first floor. Ýnsþde, Sþnan bands rich tilework with the sober colours of the desert, and light is distributed evenly from a transcendent focus in the proportionately large dome. The whole hall seems to listen to the qibla wall, with an audience of attentive galleries and an interior porch.

A couple of mosques on the Asian side of the Bosphorus offered a good excuse for a sea journey to Üsküdar, the Scutari of Florence Nightingale's hospital. A newspaper vendor smiled at my dictionary: "Ah! Manchester United! Chelsea! Liverpool!"

"No, Beþiktaþ actually..."

"Hah! Beþiktaþ - Ý also! Hi-five!"

To think people call Borat far-fetched.

A woman outside the Ýskele mosque weeps as Ý have never seen a Briton weep. Children chase feral cats while their parents doze companionably in the portico. How many churches would people sleep in? Ýnside, we see suspiciously Classical-looking columns, and a subtle assonance of colour on the fresco'd walls. The four great half-domes spirograph around a small centrepiece, and - in the litmus test of spiritual architecture - the eye is drawn inexorably to the heavens. Rogers complains that he finds this mosque dark. True, but only because the windows are stained. The heart leaps inside upon entering this mosque.

The miniscule Þemsi Ahmed Paþa Cami is perched on the banks of the Bosphorus itself. And closed. Roses and tomatoes compete with its miniaturised minaret, competing for light, and the wonderfully compact structure is set at a jarring angle to the orientation of the medrese. 37 shuddering degrees, Ý am informed.

Finally, the Kýlýc Ali Paþa is a long way out into Beyoðlu, across the Galata bridge. Ýt is prefaced by the most beautiful fountain Ý have ever seen - and Ý will have a photograph for you - and perfectly illustrates my nascent ideas about Ýslamic art as a whole and Sinan in particular. The interior is a massed geometric series, converging on the immovable centre of the universe. Arabesques skirl around the columns, and half-domes, quarter domes and stalactites all sing their various parts in a hymn to the sky. This is pure sublimation, the abstraction of the forces of the spirit, and comes closer to the Platonic aesthetics than any Greek art ever did. Robert Byron believes in Ýslam not as a tissue of irrational superstition and undefined feeling but as a crystallised force of the intellect, and Ý am beginning to see what he means. The kufic script, the fascination with regularity, the harmonies of colours point to a craving for a higher reality. Ýslam is a religion which believes that a perfect accord with God has already been attained by the Prophet, and that the best that Man can do is to devote his life to rediscovering that moment. The greatest accolade for a miniaturist is to go blind in the pursuit of his craft, and then still to produce work that aspires to the masters of his trade.

Ý wish that Ý could trace this back to the Greek ideals. Ýt would be the work of a worthy lifetime.

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Ý believe that Ý had the narrowest of escapes last night. Ý have moved to the Kadýrga area of Ýstanbul, a quieter, poorer and somehow more alive quarter than the Antipodean fleshpots of Sultanahmet. Ý am staying in a palace. The Hotel Türkuaz was constructed entirely from gaily painted wooden slats for a minor 19th century paþa, and looks more Turkish than a döner kebab wrapped in a turban. The owner, a robust Romanian lady, is an eternally cheerful soul with more than serviceable English, and recommended a cheap local restaurant run by a family friend. Said restaurant being full of blithe Turks with not an Australian in sight, Ý went to look elsewhere. After twenty minutes' wandering through back streets full of inquisitive children and ethereal spirits drifting through archways in their headscarves, bright eyes glittering, Ý found what looked like a takeaway. Ý picked an item at random off the menu, and ordered some. The owner gave me a taster from some enormous cauldron, wrapped in a lettuce leaf - something between falafel and a köfte. He served up a tray more, together with an evil relish apparently made from boot polish. Back at the hotel, Ý had got through half the tray before Ý realised that Ý was eating raw meat. Still, it didn't taste too bad.

Struggling with Sophocles on the roof terrace, Ý met a seeker after Truth - or, more specifically, a seeker after the poet Rumi. Ý wonder which he will find first. He tells me that Rumi is buried in Konya, but he was a little hard to pin down on anything else. He propounded the Buddhist ideal of total detachment from possessions, emotions and "constructs," and we had an entertaining chat about it. As he went indoors, he turned and asked, "how much are you paying for that room, by the way?"
"45 euros, but it's so beautifully located - I practically have the top floor to myself."
"The bastards are charging me 35 a night for my dingy single. You lucky sod."

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