Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [243]
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Walls
I don’t remember when I became consciously aware that I loved stone walls, but I know I have admired them for a long time. Actually, I love stone in general—whether smooth or rough; whether a building, walkway, tower, stairway, archway, bridge, aqueduct (and Istanbul has a stunning one, the Valens Aqueduct, built by Emperor Valens in AD 368, which carried water for fifteen centuries—up until the late nineteenth century—to a central cistern near Beyazit Square), whatever.
Readers who’ve been to Dubrovnik know that it is one of the world’s supreme stone cities. The evening passeggiata there, on marble that has known so many footsteps and has been worn so smooth, is an impressive ritual. When my husband and I were there, we met another American, Dave, who was actually earning a master’s degree studying the history of medieval stone walls. I was a bit jealous—it had never occurred to me I could study such a subject—but I quickly realized our good fortune in meeting him. I sure do wish he’d joined us in Istanbul, where the walls aren’t quite as well preserved, but are still awe-inspiring. Istanbul’s walls “form one of the most impressive monuments of the city, extending in a great arc, seven kilometers long, from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn,” notes Jane Taylor in Imperial Istanbul.
It’s not difficult to understand, then, why many people would want to restore the walls. But the current restoration work has been cause for alarm among many of those same people. In an article entitled “Istanbul in Peril,” which appeared in Cornucopia, John Julius Norwich describes the restoration as by turns “grotesque,” “a tragedy,” and “devastation.” He refers to the walls as “the most majestic urban rampart in the world,” and he refers to the restoration by saying, “Instead of leaving them to tell their epic story as they did so movingly in the past, the authorities have cheapened them, prettified them, and turned them into something little better than a Hollywood film set.”
You may judge for yourself when you see the walls, but I don’t mind allowing Norwich to have the last word. In A Short History of Byzantium, he reminds us that the Byzantines were human like the rest of us, deserving of praise and of blame much as we are ourselves:
Much should surely be forgiven for the beauty they left behind them and the heroism with which they and their last brave Emperor met their end, in one of those glorious epics of world history that has passed into legend and is remembered with equal pride by victors and vanquished alike. That is why five and a half centuries later, throughout the Greek world, Tuesday is still believed to be the unluckiest day of the week; why the Turkish flag still depicts not a crescent but a waning moon, reminding us that the moon was in its last quarter when Constantinople finally fell; and why, excepting only the Great Church of St. Sophia itself, it is the Land Walls—broken, battered, but still marching from sea to sea—that stand as the city’s grandest and most tragic monument.
Whirling Dervishes
The Mevlana Sufi order is a leading mystical brotherhood of Islam founded by Rumi, whose full name—Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi—means “love and ecstatic flight into the infinite.” Rumi was born in 1207 in present-day Afghanistan (then a part of Persia) to a family of theologians. The family fled the Mongol invasion and eventually settled in Konya, which was at that time part of the Seljuk Empire. By the time Rumi was twenty-four years old, he was already an accomplished