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Days in Istanbul…..
The small bar was set along one of the ubiquitous side cobble streets of Istanbul. My host David Cornwell (from Belfast), who directs the studio Jahangir Yoga with his Turkish wife Zeynep, was my guide and we climbed into chairs at a small table. Fortunately there was no smoking within the café. In Istanbul it is difficult to be free from the scent of burning tobacco. For instance, the air was stifling in the yoga studio today and so the windows were open. Accompanying the blaring sound of Turkish television in the adjoining apartment building, the smell of smoke wafted upward from the street below and in through the open window.
This evening troupe of musicians started up in the café, all men in their mid years played traditional Turkish music. There was a violin, zither, two musicians playing hand drums and the clarinet-like wind instrument. The horn sound was plaintive sounding, invoking the desert and nomadic wandering. The horn and dumbek drums were layered one atop the other, as a distinctive Middle Eastern sound emerged‹one that brushed the bottom of the heart, a sound of longing and search, excavating the soul.
Istanbul is a living archeological urban-scape. Remnants of the Roman era when the city was Constantinople, skirt the fortresses or the Ottaman Empire and the Arabic rein of the sultans. Today the city is has the cosmopolitan feel of Paris or London blended with the look and feel of a traditional working class and religiously inclined population.
As the band played on a group of women began to dance in swaying circular movements. Their undulating turns suggested a kind of mesmerized trance that pulsed back though centuries and suggested the migration, conquest and diaspora of multitudes of people throughout this middle east region.
May 29th:
The fading sunlight over Istanbul gave the densely clustered homes and apartments a glow of red embers. A veil of grey pollution draped over the city muting the light and giving the rooftops a worn, burnished look. The cries of seagulls mixed with the blasts of freighters out in the sea. The din of the city was constant, a city of 13 million people packed along the strait that links the Aegean Sea to the south and the Black Sea to the north. We are fortunate to be staying just a 25 minute walk from the old city and the view of the megalithic mosques –the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque– can be seen from good vantage points in the neighborhood. Istanbul feels to be a city that is a hybrid between Mumbai and San Francisco. The vistas overlooking the Bospherus Sea to the “Asian side” of the city are like views from the Marina in San Francisco over to the East Bay. It is like Mumbai, for the streets are littered with traffic, horns blaring, taxi drivers racing at the edge of life and death, vegetable hawkers push their carts through narrow cobbled streets, metal scrap collectors calling to homes for used appliances, the smell of stray cat urine, elderly couples idle on park benches, and the sound of Turkish pop music blares from neighborhood loudspeakers.
Unique to the city are exquisite neighborhood mosques that are embedded within thickly populated high-rise apartment buildings. These are the local mosques that unload the plaintive call to prayer from tin megaphones, set atop one or more of the spire-like minarets. We visited the royal mosques, built by the chief architects of the sultans in power in the 16th century.
The Hagia Sophia has a formidable presence. On the exterior the mosque is somewhat drab, and yet on the interior the concave dome structures feature elaborate, colorfully rendered mandalas. Floral patterns wrap like vines along side stylized Arabic calligraphy and ornate tiles (in the Blue Mosque) ring the perimeter walls. Looking upward into the vaulted ceiling is a delightful aesthetic experience and a mesmerizing display of splendour.
Prior to entering the mosque all remove their shoes (Eno liked the idea of carrying his shoes around the mosque¹s interior in a recycled plastic baggie) and the women cover their heads. Prior to entering, I coached Eno on what we were going to see‹or rather what we would never be able to see. “This is where people pray to the God that you can never see his face. In churches where there are pictures of Jesus Christ they believe that God could be seen, but here in the mosque, if you see the face of god then something really scary could happen.” This drew Eno into the story. “What could happen?” He asked.
“Well, it would be dangerous”, I said. “if you see the face of god it would be really frightening. However one time, someone said they just saw the back of him, just a little bit of his long capes but no one has ever seen his face.”
The interior mosques are even more resplendent than the interior of the Christian churches, I think, given that Allah is celebrated without representation. The circular patterns on in inside of the onion shaped domes resembled images of chakras or granthis (energetic knots) in the yogic systems of practice.
The small bar was set along one of the ubiquitous side cobble streets of Istanbul. My host David Cornwell (from Belfast), who directs the studio Jahangir Yoga with his Turkish wife Zeynep, was my guide and we climbed into chairs at a small table. Fortunately there was no smoking within the café. In Istanbul it is difficult to be free from the scent of burning tobacco. For instance, the air was stifling in the yoga studio today and so the windows were open. Accompanying the blaring sound of Turkish television in the adjoining apartment building, the smell of smoke wafted upward from the street below and in through the open window.
This evening troupe of musicians started up in the café, all men in their mid years played traditional Turkish music. There was a violin, zither, two musicians playing hand drums and the clarinet-like wind instrument. The horn sound was plaintive sounding, invoking the desert and nomadic wandering. The horn and dumbek drums were layered one atop the other, as a distinctive Middle Eastern sound emerged‹one that brushed the bottom of the heart, a sound of longing and search, excavating the soul.
Istanbul is a living archeological urban-scape. Remnants of the Roman era when the city was Constantinople, skirt the fortresses or the Ottaman Empire and the Arabic rein of the sultans. Today the city is has the cosmopolitan feel of Paris or London blended with the look and feel of a traditional working class and religiously inclined population.
As the band played on a group of women began to dance in swaying circular movements. Their undulating turns suggested a kind of mesmerized trance that pulsed back though centuries and suggested the migration, conquest and diaspora of multitudes of people throughout this middle east region.
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