Since arriving late Tuesday morning in Istanbul, our days have been full. From Serkeci station, we took the tram a short ride to the Sultanahmet stop, luggage in tow, and walked only a block to the Hotel Arcadia. We checked in, walked back up the street, and sat down for a light lunch at Pasha’s. Aside from having to look across the street at the ubiquitous McDonald’s facade, we had a pleasant snack al fresco (or whatever the equivalent Turkish expression is).
The rest of our Baylor group was en route from Amsterdam, but we had just enough time to walk three or four blocks in each direction from the hotel: down to the Sultanahmet Mosque (the Blue Mosque), over to Hagia Sophia, back up the main throughway in the direction of the Grand Bazaar. No sooner had we gotten back to the room than the phone rang. Cenk Eronat, our Tutku tour guide, was calling to let us know that everyone had arrived and that they were in the lobby checking in. How wonderful it was to be once more in the company of friends, to exchange greetings, relay news, and tell stories, and to find ourselves together at the beginning of a great quest spanning the next few weeks.
Before dinner, we met Scott Moore and found a shady watering hole to gather at, enjoy cold drinks, and catch up on our recent doings. Dinner, convened on the roof of the Hotel Arcadia, marked a welcome return for the Henrys to real dining. Having been on the move so much the previous week, we really hadn’t had a well-served, leisurely dinner in some time. The celebrated views from our hotel restaurant are not overdone. We have the best views over the old city, bar none. The whole Sultanahmet area lies at our feet, and with views of the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, the Bosphorus, and distant mountains across the Marmaris Sea–to say nothing of the company of friends, the meal proved truly lovely. A short evening stroll through the ancient Roman hippodrome over to Hagia Sophia and back capped off an early evening before bed.
Collecting my thoughts about Istanbul isn’t easy. From the minute we stepped off our train at Sirkeci, we fully appreciated the fact that we were in a place multiple degrees of difference from anywhere else we’ve been. The colors, odors, textures, and rhythms of everything convey the differences in a thousand little ways. Athens, by contrast, even with its non-Latin alphabet, strikes me as far more familiar. Here in Istanbul, where East and West meet, I am far more of an alien.
Yet at the same time, the city is far less “other” than I had imagined. Walking out the west end of the train station we stared down both of the two major U.S.-based hamburger franchises. (And yes, I refuse to credit them here with their proper names.) Any number of familiar cognates and transliterations of English words are there for the reading in every direction, and our environs are filled with so many countless English-speaking Turks, not even considering the tourists, that it’s seldom difficult to communicate what’s needed. And of course all kinds of far more banal, utterly stable features of ordinary human experience obtain: land is land, sea is sea, sky is sky, up is up, down is down, money buys convenience, and people are people, viz. they belong to the genus of bipedal mammals and are differentiated by way of their capacity for such things as language, reason, and the love of God.
So Istanbul confronts me at one and the same time with difference and sameness. Hagia Sophia provides an apt, though incomplete key to the complicated cipher Istanbul presents. Grandest and most capacious Christian church in the world for a thousand years, it’s surrounded by the Muslim minarets built around it after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. It presents the familiar visual tableau of a church built on a lavish scale, but with things slightly off kilter. Having gone inside it on our second day, I can make this claim with all the greater confidence. The mihrab, oriented toward Mecca, is in fact actually off kilter, angled as it is to the south of the east-west centerline of the church. The plastered over Christian mosaics and the large black roundels bearing the Arabic names of God, Mohammed, and later caliphs are even more conspicuous complications of an otherwise more familiar ecclesial geography. Much is comfortably recognizable; important and occasionally alienating transformations abound.
In those stretches of time when all seems ordinary–like now, in this passing minute of an hour’s respite in the hotel room–it only takes the amplified, echoing chants of the muezzins of a dozen nearby mosques, calling the Mohammaden faithful to render timely prayers to Allah, to jolt me back into a realistic appraisal of my surroundings.
“You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3) and “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4) come naturally to me. Really, I should say, they are words expressing convictions and commitments that come supernaturally to me. By contrast, lā ʾilāha ʾillà I-Lāh” (“There is no god except God”) sounds unnatural to my anglophone ears and comes awkwardly off my tongue. More crucially, despite a superficial similarity to the words of the Torah, they are also bound up with a tradition–a way of being, thinking, and doing–that gives them an altogether different sense. They are words that come to me neither naturally nor supernaturally, and hearing the muezzins’ Arabic call to pray five times each day, beginning before five in the morning and recurring until after ten in the evening, confirms how far we have come in arriving at this ancient-modern city cradled between Europe and Asia.
