By the way...

In case anyone apart from me actually reads this blog, and is wondering about what happened with that chartership thing I mentioned in the first post, there is news.

I passed.  Celebrated on a rooftop in Istanbul, as you do.

That is all.

Shining in the darkness: Byzantine mosaics

As I begin to write, I’m listening to the call to prayer and the sky is darkening over my little corner of Istanbul to reveal a full moon hanging in the sky.  This sound never fails to evoke an incredible sense of otherness for me: it’s a stark reminder of how far I am from home, repeated five times daily just in case I forgot for a moment.  Beautiful, though, as since I got back to the apartment the reddish haze in the sky has gone and Levazim and Ortaköy are twinkling again.  The best thing about this flat is the view, and tonight for the first time I’m sitting with my laptop on the little glazed terrace that capitalises on it.

The key thing about this place for me has got to be the light, or more precisely the effect that minimal lighting can have.  In the same way as the vistas across the Bosphorus really become magical as the sun goes down, it’s the shadowy interiors of the remaining fragments of Byzantium that really capture the imagination.

I couldn’t write about Istanbul without talking about the Aya Sofya (Hagia Sofia or Sancta Sophia in Greek and Latin respectively), which has been dominating the skyline of Sultanahmet since the 6^th century.  It’s widely considered to be more impressive inside than out, and aside from the size this is very much down to the mosaics…

I first learned about Byzantine art during A-levels and can recall that a) it was one of the earliest forms of figurative art from the Christian church, which had survived through the centuries because b) it was all about the mosaics, and tiles don’t rot and flake like paintings in Roman catacombs.  I also recall that these mosaics were special because of their tiny tesserae (tiles, to the layman) which allowed incredible nuance of detail and shading, and abundant use of gold and lapis lazuli laid not-quite-flat to catch and reflect the light and so give the images their lustre.

… so naturally I was excited to see the Aya Sofya.  It was a big part of my agreeing to this little easterly sojourn.  On our first free day I virtually dragged my long-suffering Spanish travelling companion to the door and into the lengthy queue to get in.  Then we stepped inside and I felt, well, no more than moderately impressed. 

It grows on you though.  Once you move away from the worst of the tourist throng, it’s possible to take in the atmosphere, reflect on just how old it is and begin to see the traces of the original decorations that have variously been plastered or painted over during the building’s life as a mosque.  That’s when the impact comes: imagining the place with shimmering mosaics on every surface in its heyday, just as Justinian saw it.  And now I find myself considering stumping up the entrance fee again for a second visit….

Mosaic in the Upper Gallery

 

Section of plaster removed to reveal mosaic

The Constantinople of Constantine and his successors is hard to find in modern Istanbul, save for the one show-stopping church-turned-mosque-turned museum, so it’s necessary to leave Sultanahmet in search of it.  A reasonably well visited alternative is the Chora, the 11^th century church tucked away in the west of the city.  No period of reflection is required here to feel its impact: the domes of the narthex glow, with mosaics more stunning and complete than those of the Aya Sofya.  I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

 

 

 

The Chora is just within the Theodosian walls, which cut across the peninsula and enclosed the city – preventing its conquest for a millennium as the last vestiges of Imperial Rome withered and died quietly within the empire’s eastern outpost.  These walls are in a terrible state of repair, and being well outside the tourist centre are largely ignored.  The shell of a fortress forming part of the wall (Palace of the Sovereign or Tekfur Sarayı in Turkish) prompted further recollections from school as I contemplated the end of empire.  This time it was Year 7 English lessons, and learning the poem that most will find more familiar from the Watchmen film character and his taste in interior design.  Of all of Shelley’s lines, it’s only the pedestal inscription and the sentiment that stick in my head:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

Despair indeed, ye mighty, not at the greatness of Ozymandias but for your being destined to share in the same fate.  Somehow, for me, Rome is most poetic at its bitter end.

(I also remember thinking that Bysshe is really a very strange name)

Language acquisition at the beach

My Turkish vocabulary now extends to at least ten words.  I can now ask for up to five of the following things:

1. Beer
2. Water
3. Tea
4. Coffee
5. Watermelon

I'm reasonably satisfied with the progress of this, but if I'm honest it's not a critical life goal of mine to become conversant in Turkish.  The project of the moment remains to learn Spanish, properly.

Some weeks ago I found myself on a bus full of Spaniards heading for the coast.  This was something of a step up in what I was expecting of myself in Madrid and represented a vague attempt at making some of my own friends in Spain.  Spanish ones.  I think through work I already know more Spanish people than your average guiri. English folk in Madrid generally tend to be language teachers, and consequently meet each other much more than locals, which impedes their own language learning and makes it harder for them to get to know locals... and so on.  I think I can hope for better integration than that, even in the short time I'm around.

So today I'd like to talk about language, or my lack of it in recent months.  With the level of Spanish I had on arrival I would never have dreamed of going on that trip - I couldn't even have read the website to find it.

Everyone who has put themselves through this process will be familiar with 'the silent phase' when you sit through evenings, lunches and meetings with a gradually improving idea of what's going on but without ever saying a word.  You feel like an idiot.  The Spanish phrase for someone who doesn't speak a language is simple, poetic and appropriate for this situation: estaba una chica sin palabras (I was a girl without words).

It's pretty hard going - my brother is convinced of the need to suffer to learn and language properly and I tend to concur to an extent.  He's maybe a little bit extreme in his views on the matter but it is really very hard to see another way to get beyond the 'tourist' level where you can ask for things and manage basic interactions but can't really engage in proper conversation.  It's perfectly possible to live for years in a country without achieving that higher level: people do and it's not always a problem.  It's just not for me.

I feel like I am beginning to come out the other side now, when people are patient with me and I'm not distracted by actually being in Turkey, that is.  In fits and starts and on comfortable ground I now have words.  It is still exhausting (another feature of living in a country and attempting to learn the language - sheer blind fatigue) but getting better.

On the Monday after my weekend of speaking no English it was as though everything had just clicked into place.  It was definitely worth going purely for the language practice, as I felt myself relaxing in conversation over breakfast.

The trip, incidentally, was my Spanish beach trip for the year - I found the group on the internet and liked the sound of a party on a catamaran as the sun set, followed by beach and hiking the next day.  Here's a picture.

Engineer on tour: Go East

I wrote a blog post on a plane again.  This is happening a lot (the being on a plane, more than the writing on planes). Outside the window what I assumed at the time of writing to be the lower reaches of the Carpathians marched northward toward the Bulgarian border as I crossed towards the Bosphorus and the eastern terminus of the Orient Express… going to Istanbul.  It’s a mighty range of mountains and a bleak and forbidding landscape, even the valleys between baked dry with their rivers nothing more than tracks of dust.  I’ve lost count of my recent plane journeys but I still love a good window seat.  I’m considering the purchase of a travel atlas for easier landscape identification.

The journey merits inclusion in the blog because it’s not just another holiday.  The vagaries of construction project workload in the current environment and a global employer has seen me sent East in search of gainful employment.  Turkey is busy and buzzing so we’re joining in.  I know little about what to expect, but will endeavour to record some of it in as articulate a fashion as I can muster.

As previously though, with a long flight and a laptop I have a chance to fill you in on something interesting I’ve recently seen.  It’s been a long time coming but I’m finally in a position to share my thoughts on the Herzog and Meuron talking piece that is the CaixaForum building, just off the Golden Mile of Art in Madrid. 

The building is sponsored by, fittingly, the CaixaForum, the charitable arm of a large Spanish bank, and was commissioned as a venue for art, music and general stuff considered good for society’s soul.  Entrance is free, and a visit worthwhile just for a trip up the first staircase which takes you – like a spaceship’s entrance ramp – up from the centre of the floating building’s undercroft through sci-fi brushed aluminium into the belly of the beast.

The building began life as a fairly unremarkable masonry construction, a municipal substation if I remember correctly.  The Swiss architects, or probably more likely some of their employees from the company’s office in Madrid, kept just the upper levels of this façade to raise up the building mass and open up a semi-subterranean plaza (which one might call an undercroft, if so inclined) beneath, complete with water feature and the aforementioned entrance experience. 

Above, the older building is topped with the architects’ favourite material of the last decade: COR-TEN (or pre-rusted metal to mortal men), which blends tonally with the brickwork as well as adding height and a nice bit of texture.  I like it.  It’s uncompromisingly modern without being shiny, and inventively turns an old bit of structure to a new purpose rather than tearing it down to start again.  There’s some great detail about the architecture on the CaixaForum website.

Once inside, vertical circulation is up through one of the concrete cores that provide support and stability to the structure, and the smoothly undulating, high spec exposed concrete makes it feel like the inside of a sculpture.

I was there to take a look, eventually, at the Piranesi exhibition.  I had a vague idea of his work, and knew it featured buildings and cityscapes but really no knowledge of who, when or where he’d been.  I certainly didn’t realise how inspiring I’d find the images, how redolent they’d be of a sense of place or have any sense of the level of their finely etched detail.  

A mostly frustrated architect in the 18^th century, Piranesi apparently took refuge in the imagined places of his etchings, drawing heavily from studies of Classical constructions for landscapes of ruins, surreal vistas and fictional cartography. The exhibition showed a broad range of his work, grouped more or less chronologically, and standouts for me were one small print of tiny people racing along in between the outsized tombs of the Via Appia and a modern video adaptation of his Imaginary Prisons etchings made 3D.  The video is available online, set to a Bach Cello Suite, and although one might argue the ethics of wilful manipulation of another, long dead, it doesn’t detract from the originals but draws you back to take a second look at the images so vividly brought to life.  I am also conceiving a real appreciation for the humble cello, I think.

The sheer enormity of the imagined edifices calls to mind every time I've stood in awe of an ancient (and they are always ancient if they have this impact - I think it's the contrast of scales between the fine details and the building size), monstrously large building and felt so very small.The work was about creativity, but also just about skill.  It’s a quality of representation that really makes itself apparent in the work. 

Just in case you were paying attention in the first paragraph: yes I was wrong about the mountains, but also sort of right.  The internet tells me that the mountains in that particular part of northern Greece are called the Rhodopes, which go up to meet the Balkan mountain range that covers much of Bulgaria and a bit of Serbia.  The Balkan mountains in turn do almost meet the lowest part of the arc of mountain ranges that form the Carpathians, but they’re cut off by the Danube.  So… I was right about what direction I was looking but not much else.  Like I say, must get that atlas.  There seem to be mountains in all sorts of unexpected places, as I intend to discuss at a later date…