The Big Ones and Local Knowledge

Meredith arrived the evening of my second day in Istanbul. She and Darius and I went out for dinner but Darius had to work the next day so Meredith and I started to see the sights on our own. We took a ferry up the Bosporus to see the ruins of a Milanese castle perched on a hill on the Asian side, overlooking the Bosporus and the Black Sea. We enjoyed some spectacular views and ate some calamari and fried mussels in a little fishing village below the castle.


On day four we saw a lot of the big historic mosques and palaces along the Golden Horn on the European side. We started off at Topakapi Palace, former home of the Ottoman Sultanate and current home of numerous historic objects, royal jewels (including the 5th largest diamond on earth) and many Christian and Muslim relics (including a bit of the prophet Mohammad's beard, his sword and banner, and the jewel encrusted arm and skull of John the Baptist). We also saw some spectacular mosques including Sultan Ahmet's Mosque and Suleyman's Mosque. The highlight for me however was the Hagia Sophia. First a byzantine cathedral, later turned into a mosque, the Hagia Sophia is now a museum that showcases its own unique history, including Christian frescoes dating from as early as the 5th century and massive discs of beautiful Arabic calligraphy displaying words like "Allah" and "Mohammad." The Christian frescoes survive because, rather than destroying it, the Ottomans had the good sense to simply cover the abundant Christian art with plaster when they turned Hagia Sophia into a mosque.

That evening we had the opportunity to meet up with a Kurdish friend of Darius's named Zeki. He is interested in learning English and wanted a chance to practice with some native speakers who couldn't fall back on their Turkish like Darius can. We talked about differences between the U.S. and Turkey. He told us about how Istanbul is not Turkey, much like New York is not the U.S. and Paris is not France. He talked quite a bit about the oppression and marginalization of the Kurdish people in Turkey. They represent 20 million of the country's total population of 70 million. He tolds us that the Kurds (spread around Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran and a bit of Europe) are the largest population of nationless people in the world. We talked about how the potential, however unlikely or distant, acceptance of Turkey into the E.U. might help the Kurds. Zeki agreed that European influence had led to improvements in the condition of the Kurdish people in Turkey, but seemed to think that a civil war in Turkey was a more likely than Turkish ascendence to the E.U. It was extremel interesting and eye-opening to talk to him about social and class conflicts on a massive scale of which I was completely unaware.