food

Today I had the first food on this trip which was diverged from something I might make in the direction of good (and it was all of 5 YTL = $3.50): cauliflower with orange and dill. I'm guessing it's fried in olive oil, with a tiny bit of carrot, let cool, salted, and tossed with orange blossom water and fresh dill. What I don't understand is how this can be a traditional dish - even in Armenia, how can oranges and cauliflower be in season together with dill? Anyway, it was really good.



Its sequel was tasty, and well-presented... and I already had the camera out.



The restaurant, "Bostana," was right next to a coffee house, which was so smoky I had trouble breathing when I mistook it for the restaurant (the sign for which was actually in front of the coffee shop). Walking back down Istiklal Cad., there were two distinct anti-Israel rallies. In one, they were singing. I couldn't help but imagine them singing the song from Borat.



In other news, which I unfortunately don't have a picture to accompany, I got scammed yesterday, and didn't even realize it until today. Yesterday, a shoe-shine guy dropped his brush, and I exclaimed until, on the third exclamation, he turned around and picked it up, thanking me profusely. I kept on walking, but slowly, and he caught up, and started talking to me, in a perfectly natural way (Most aren't natural at all - out of nowhere, people say "Where are you from, or more often in my case "Deutsch?" But "Yes. Please, hello." is my favorite faux salutation so far.). He was Kurdish, and had come to city to feed his kids, because his village had been bombed, so it was really important that he not lose the brush. So we walked and chatted halfway across the Galata bridge, at which point he looked as if he'd made a decision, and telling me that he wanted to thank me, he insisted on giving me a shoeshine (but without cleaning them first - I really didn't want him to), and I felt guilty enough to give him 3 YTL for it.

I only realized this was a scam when another guy tried the same thing; but he had jumped up four steps to make the brush fall off, turned the first time I exclaimed, and then wanted to thank me immediately. I almost wanted to tell him: listen, there's this Kurdish guy: you need to go study under him.

things in istanbul 2

This fragment of a grave stele seems to show a horse ready to eat a philosopher:



An Egyptian-style sarcophagus with Greek knees. They were in Sidon, so I guess they split the difference.


An apprehensive centaur:


A coy bull:



Relatively subtle emotion on a sarcophagus relief:

things in istanbul 1

This ("elephant foot") column in Sultanahmet, also known as the blue mosque, is one of four which holds up a largish dome all on its own. That's why it so grotesquely big. I like it.



I find it oddly hard to imagine the horses' noses actually intact on this column topper, but it seems like another example of awesome Byzantine innovation.


On the other hand, this sculpture really is why classical sculpture went to shit (it's 6th-century):


From the amazing Alexander Sarcophagus in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, a detail: the paint on the daisies survives!

Look, it's a fancy chicken, in the middle of the street! I felt bad for her - it was so cold, and she's one of those skinny sub-tropical sorts of chicken.



You might have to enlarge this to see it - one of the jillions of stray cats had clearly hit paydirt, in the form of the open bucket of kitty food on the steps of this pet store:



I went for a walk along the shore on the sea of Marmara side of the golden horn, today, and there was quite a line of ships waiting to go through the Bosporus. Probably none of them had been able to procure cattle yet, and so were unable to pass through the cattle-bearing strait.



I mentioned earlier that almost nothing of Byzantium or Constantinople (which reminds me that today I heard, blaring from a purveyor of belogoed spandex, a Turkish cover of Istanbul to Constantinople, or whatever that song by They Might Be Giants is actually called) is incorporated into Istanbul. This, for instance, is what's left of the hippodrome:

a hike

the chora church, while outside the earlier walls, was just within the later walls, which are remarkably well-preserved, as practically nothing else from Byzantium is. It's a striking contrast to Rome, where there are traces everywhere of imperial Rome.



I had walked there through some less than beautiful neighborhoods, and figured the walk back would be roughly the same. It wasn't: there are bits and pieces of shantytown here, with lots of angry looking young men who presumably would not want to discuss the finer points of international diplomacy in general, but who might be very interested in informing me of their opinion of the US and its role in helping Israel do such things as bomb schools. Did you know that only 7% of Turkish people have a positive opinion of Americans, according to our very own state department? I escaped by heading downhill whereever possible, and then hopping on the nearest water-bus back to eminonu. I wish I'd gotten a picture of the shanty town, but it hardly seemed like the thing to do at the time. Instead, I got a nice picture of a mosque on the way back on the boat:

chora

So today I wandered farther afield, all the way to the old city walls of Constantinople, to go to a church with some fantastic, but occasionally puzzling, mosaics. It was hard to take pictures, because there was a gang of vigilante children which would run up, giggling, and yelling "no flash!" Now, of course, I almost never take pictures with a flash when I can avoid it, and since mosaics are very slow moving, I wouldn't even *want* to use the flash, even if it didn't contribute to their disintegration. I'm not sure whether the children thought that "no flash" meant "no pictures," since the signs had crossed out images of cameras (with very small flashes attached), or whether they were just playing a game, but it meant that to take a picture I had to walk quickly around the church to lose them, and then quickly set the camera up somewhere to take a shot. Still, I managed to get a couple.

Joseph coming to get Mary from the priest. Why is she half the height of everyone else?



Mary with Jesus in her holy womb (they even turned the word mother into a nomen sacrum - that's the MP with a line over it to her left):


You'll have to enlarge this picture of the Temptations of Christ in order to see the devil; he's the little black minx.

Another nice naive fresco, totally out of place, outside a gate.


This is my favorite bit of polychrome tile work anywhere: