After yesterday, today I signally failed to send off the documents back to Pakistan, as well as to do any work. Instead, I joined the GF (whp had the day off) on a trip to the other side of the Golden Horn. First was lunch in the Grand Bazaar, where I went for a grilled beef roll while letting the GF off to find something vegetarian (not easy in the Grand Bazaar, but I was fed up of not having the food that Turkey does best). I went to a busy little stall with a table set outside, and men chowing down seriously, adding handfuls of parsley, dill pickles and grilled peppers to their rolls and washing it all down with ayran. I hovered for a bit, wondering how to order, then found some tables along the wall where there was an empty seat. The man sitting across the table saw I was bit lost and volunteered to order for me – I accepted gratefully, though later I discovered he also paid for my lunch. We had a bit of a chat – he had a jewellery shop just outside the bazaar, but was based largely in Germany he said. I was a bit economical with the truth as my usual paranoia kicked in, but it was a pleasant lunch and also quite, quite delicious. It was just after the Friday prayer and the crowds swelled, largely consisting of men shouting frantically. The jeweller told me that they were all trading in stocks.
Then I went through the Grand Bazaar to find the GF at a very different setup, an old and quiet restaurant with a fountain, certainly no men shouting at each other and into their phones. The bazaar itself was very impressive – I had not expected to enjoy strolling through it, but I did. It was not at all crowded. There are few tourists around these days, of course, and perhaps there were fewer people because it was Friday just after juma. In any event, the architecture of the bazaar was very visible and it made me sad and envious that in Pakistan we have destroyed so much of what we have. Even travelling here was such a pleasure compared to going to Shahalmi or similar places in Lahore – a smooth, quick tram ride, stepping off right into the midst of things. I haven’t been on Lahore’s BRT service, but it’s a caged and crowded bus, I understand, and when I have gone it’s being driven through heavy, chaotic traffic to as close as possible, then taking a rickshaw to within a half kilometre or so, then winding through heavy traffic, dust, smoke and sewage until one gets to the bazaars of the old city. Wealth helps, certainly, but also a respect for heritage.
We stopped for Turkish coffee, examined a towel shop and then went on to the Byzantine cistern, dark, cool and immense. Near the entrance was a slightly ridiculous Ottoman set, with a young man wearing a glitzy turban and kaftan and a fake beard posing for photos. Rather out of place in a Byzantine site, but that is the way of the place. There were maybe about 20 people there, again very unlike non-COVID times, one imagines, and we wound through the dark dampness, past column after column. Stopped to examine the two gorgon head column bases, one upside down and one sideways, and then wound back out.
From here, after a brief unsuccessful side trip looking for a courier company which existed only on Google Maps, we went to the Hagia Sophia. It was sad and not-sad at the same time, seeing its recent conversion to a mosque. Inside the entrance, the mosaics of the Virgin and Constantine were covered with a cheap white rolling blind so one could not see them as one entered. Inside, there was a thick carpet in vivid green, one which appeared in every article about the conversion of the Hagia Sophia, for each fibre apparently points towards Mecca (two thumbs up, I guess?). Inside and outside there were sayings from the Quran purporting to foretell the conversion of the church. There was a women’s side of the mosque which did not get the new carpet, only a rather unpleasant felted thing, and on the ceiling the mosaic crosses were still visible. It made me think, however, that this is just one more episode in the long history of this place, and something that will be absorbed into that stream, or so I can hope. Though the damage to another idea, perhaps, is more permanent, there will be new ideas or old ones will return.
Then to the Blue Mosque which was fully enshrouded in scaffolding, with only tiny portions of tile peeping though, enough though to make me determined to return to Istanbul in a few years so I can see it properly.