The Sultan of Byzantium (8 page)

At home that night I browsed my pile of poetry magazines. The rhythmic sounds rippling from the pages as I flicked them seemed a challenge to the night, cracking like a whip in the intensifying silence. I rose and went to the balcony to contemplate old Istanbul. I saw a horde of horsemen galloping across the plain bathed in the light of churches and mosques. In the forefront was a prancing white horse that seemed to be saying ‘Let’s go!’ to the commander it was waiting for. I was as thrilled as a child on his first trip to the amusement park.

*

Instinctively, I picked twenty-two Byzantine monuments that I hadn’t visited yet. I was a stranger to the names and faces of all but four of them. My excursion might be received by Nomo as an act of deception. But I had no private agenda for this safari, although I thought I might receive a sign of some kind while paying my twenty-two visits. One gift of Persian is the word ‘serendipity’: in the course of searching for one beauty, to end up with another …

It would have been disrespectful to chronology not to begin my trip through the time tunnel with the city walls: this ring of stone from Sarayburnu to Ayvansaray, from Yedikule to Topkapi, had made Constantinople the best-protected city on earth from the fifth to the fifteenth century. I executed a slalom on and around them both with and without a car. Iskender Abi drove the Lancia that I took out of the garage once a month. I knew he would ask ‘How long are those huge walls?’ at the first opportunity. I rewarded him with the information that they were a little over twelve miles in length and incorporated ninety-six watchtowers. I waited for the next question – ’What’s a watchtower?’

I felt the thrill of entering a foreign country without a passport as I passed outside the walls from Samatya, the only place whose name has remained unchanged since the beginning of Byzantium. There was once a wide moat in front of these walls, and on the other side of the moat another row of walls thirty feet high. Invaders who made it past those two obstacles would come back empty-handed from the ninety-foot inner walls. If you looked closely from the outside, the walls looked like heavyweight wrestlers standing shoulder to shoulder, whereas from the inside they resembled a troop of retirees who could hardly stand straight. This picture was an accurate portrayal of the Byzantium that was handed over to Palaeologus.

I walked along the walls, mentally skipping the ‘restored’ sections. I scrutinized them as if I were reading my own coffee-grounds, and interpreted the lack of insight as: ‘No obstacles on your road.’ It was mildly satisfying to see Iskender Abi watching me prostrate to the walls out of the corner of his eye as if he were reluctantly witnessing an outlandish and bizarre ritual.

Traversing the coordinates of the Imrahor Mosque (St John the Baptist Church), Molla Gurani Mosque (St Theodore Church), Fethiye Mosque (Pammakaristos Church), and the Gül Mosque (St Theodosia Church), I zigzagged from the fifth to the tenth, then the thirteenth to the twenty-first centuries. My guide to these mysterious and remote corners of the city was the Byzantine expert Cevat Mert. When he remarked that in the thirty-three years of his professional life this was the first time he had directed a tour like this, I explained that I was doing ‘preliminary research for a Selçuk Altun novel’. I’m sure he was convinced.

I thought of the most important playwright in history – Samuel Beckett – as I wandered in and out of the minimuseums and churches-become-mosques. His masterpiece,
Waiting for Godot
, was received with unworthy criticism when it was first staged in 1953. He made a gesture to the theater world by emphasizing that the whole play was a symbiosis. It was tragicomic how the sole clue he gave went unnoticed – in fact it could have been the stuff of a play within a play. Symbiosis is a biological term that means, ‘the interaction between two different species as they live together.’ If you take this into consideration regarding GODOT, you can see that the words GOD and (idi)OT are intermingled. It may also be easily understood that the leading characters, Vladimir and Estragon, were acting out ‘God’ and ‘Idiot’ and exchanged roles according to their zig-zagging moods to create an eccentric harmony. Beckett generously provided secondary clues via the nicknames of Estragon (Gogo) and Vladimir (Didi). Hence GODOT would never come; Estragon and Vladimir were GODOT. They were not waiting for anyone. While they were joking ‘absurdly’ with each other they were also setting a trap for the sleepy audience.

Suddenly a magpie landed on top of a nearby disused Ottoman fountain and crowed twice towards me, as if it was waiting for an answer. Perhaps it was my inner voice which said, ‘The symbiosis of a story and (hi)story is the most enigmatic.’ With this, the elegant bird crowed once more and flew off towards the Byzantine dungeons nearby.

The Byzantine monuments, which I was sure I was seeing for the first and last time, existed in symbiosis with their environment. They took a step forward to today while their neighbors took a step backward to yesterday, both of them meeting at a central point in time, looking like they were all wearing the same pale, faded clothes. For the time being they enjoyed the pleasures of quietude, but they were waiting for a sign. The few cars passing through the crooked streets did not honk and no children’s cries echoed. On the faces of the oldsters walking hesitantly along was satisfaction, something between happiness and unhappiness. It was clear that they were well aware of the fragrance of fig trees emanating from the overgrown gardens, the small Ottoman cemeteries which suddenly sprang up at the end of streets that curved about like narrow streams, and the barely standing wooden houses incongruously harboring pharmacies.

There were no traces of pretense in the stance of the buildings converted from churches to mosques. Were they more likeable with all those carpets on the floor and their new embellishments?

In the back streets of the Süleymaniye neighborhood a mustachioed young man idling in front of a barber shop shouted at me, ‘Hey, are you a tourist or a terrorist?’ It was obvious that he resorted frequently to this kind of behavior. I strode toward him, growling, ‘It depends on the day of the week.’

‘I thought you were a tourist, Abi,’ he said and ran inside. In case he had advanced instead of retreating, my trust was in the guards that Nomo had assigned to shadow me. But did I really want to put that possibility to the test?

I had a small surprise at the Fethiye Mosque as I stood outside listening to a lecture on the significance in art history of the ceiling frescoes inside. The mosque, lately turned into a museum, had been the seat of the Orthodox Patriarchate for part of the Ottoman period when it was still a church. Now the street in front of it was populated by women in black chadors, long-bearded men in flowing religious garb, and young men sporting turbans on their heads. A sign in a shop window said: ‘Our perfumes are alcohol-free.’ I felt like I’d suddenly stumbled onto the set of a film shoot in Afghanistan.

Architecturally the most attractive of these converted churches is the Gül Mosque near the mouth of the Golden Horn. A group of old-timers from the Cibali neighborhood were holding down chairs across the street from the building and focusing their gazes upon it, apparently experiencing the pleasure of being hypnotized. I was surprised at the intense interest shown by tourists as I waited in line at the door to take off my shoes and go in. The mosque, as a church, was thought to have provided the last resting-place of Constantine XI. In front of me was a group of lively and aged American women. A female passer-by wearing a villager’s baggy pants, who had probably never been to Taksim Square – the center of the city – in her life, observed unforgettably that, ‘These days you see crazy old women wandering around here all the time.’ The lack of proportion between the square footage of the floor and the height of the ceiling was impressive. I could believe the story that the floor of the ninth-century building shrank over time while the ceiling grew higher. For Cevat Mert an additional feature was that the church had served as an arsenal for the Ottoman navy after the Conquest.

The Pantocrator monastery – Zeyrek Mosque – was closed to visitors because of a wide-spectrum renovation project. But I walked decisively to an adjacent building, which had been built by the empress Irene, of the Comnenus family. The monastery, looking from the outside like a caravanserai, contained the tombs of Michael VIII, founder of the Palaeologus dynasty; and of Manuel II, Constantine XI’s father. The complex included a hospital, a retirement home and a small cemetery. I parted from my guide in front of a cistern wall that stood like a lacey screen between the city and Zeyrek. The guide believed that without knowing the life story of Fatih Sultan Mehmet, the conqueror of Constantinople, no one could understand the finale of Byzantium. The wooden houses on my route looked frail enough to blow away in the first strong wind. But those houses, now the color of coal, had survived who knows how many powerful earthquakes? It was odd that the most important monastery of the city was shrouded in sack-cloth for its restoration. I only hoped that it would not come out on the other end looking like a boutique hotel. In the annex was a café with more cats than customers. From the farthest table it was possible to watch the parade of Byzantine and Ottoman monuments; and impossible not to come eye-to-eye with the Galata Tower. I was a bit irked by its innuendo.

I drank two glasses of tea while going over my superficial notes and then ambled down to Atatürk Boulevard to catch a taxi home. The street nearest the Boulevard appeared to be an open-air ethnology exhibition. A row of butchers from Siirt, a region in the southeast, were busily cutting up sheep carcasses for local kebab, and a mélange of charcuteries offered delicacies exclusively from Siirt. Customers sat on low stools in teahouses conversing in Kurdish and Arabic in low voices and laughing in loud bursts. In the last one a rooster strutted about nervously.

On my right, a thousand feet away, the Valens Aqueduct shimmered like an oasis. We began to gravitate toward each other. This half-mile-long and ninety-foot-high structure straddled the avenue like a science-fiction giant, supported by six arches through which vehicles passed with appropriate respect and fear. Eugenio said about this fourth-century work that it had ‘broken away from the walls and marched into the city to hunker in the middle and serve as a warning’. Spying a couple of boys playing on top of it, I was spurred to exercise my right to walk across it. Where the aqueduct started up it was closer to the ground. Moreover, a small abandoned shack had been put there by fate. I worried that I would raise a laugh from the claque of nearby tire repairmen as I clumsily climbed first onto a garbage can, then the roof of the shack, and finally up to the aqueduct. It was slightly less trash-filled than urban beaches. I started off, swaying like an inexperienced tightrope walker. As I climbed upward my body cooled down. It was like being on a Ferris wheel; I was astonished by the feeling of spaciousness. In a small nook overlooking the boulevard two boys about ten years old were smoking cigarettes and throwing rocks at the cars below. They were surprised to see me.

‘What are you two doing on my grandfather’s aqueduct?’ I said half-jokingly.

‘I swear we didn’t know, sir,’ said the one wearing a T-shirt with ‘F.C. Köln’ written on it.

I attempted to befriend Sadun from Silvan and Hamdullah from Eruh, both eastern towns with beautiful names. All at once I felt sleep overcoming me, and suddenly decided to do the weirdest thing of my life. I informed the boys that I would give them twenty liras each if they watched over me while I had a nap. Their eyes brightened. One said, ‘God give you rest’; the other said, ‘May your life be long.’ I made a bed for myself out of the newspapers and plastic bags strewn around. When I go down in
The Secret History of Byzantium
as the first emperor to sleep on the Valens Aqueduct, I hope it will be noted that I had two guards, on my right an Arab and on my left a Kurd.

The one with the T-shirt that said, in English, ‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world,’ woke me as the evening
ezan
was just finishing. I gave them fifty liras each and they insisted on kissing my hand, then ran off in the direction I’d come from. I stood and started walking in the opposite direction. I was disillusioned at coming away empty-handed from this safari that I’d embarked on without knowing what I expected to find anyway. The descent from the Valens Aqueduct, which I’d climbed purely for the sake of climbing it, reminded me of Aztec temples where the stairs extended farther and farther as you went down and down. Just as I began to think that I was stretching my imagination, my feet touched the ground. I found myself in the rear courtyard of the Kalendarhane Mosque, once the Akataleptos Church. I’d visited this monument, which served as a dervish lodge during Ottoman times, on the first day of my safari. I felt a warm glow, as though I were back in a sympathetic labyrinth. Serendipity?

*

The common conclusion reached by history books, encyclopaedia articles, and internet sites was that Constantine XI was quite a liberal and straightforward emperor who became a martyr by heroically defending his capital city from the powerful Ottoman army. Yet there were others who were also instrumental in the fall of Constantinople: the Pope, who pretended to provide aid, and the Venetians and Genoese who offered symbolic support.

The Immortal Emperor
squeezed the life story of Constantine XI into 128 pages and listed 200 works in the bibliography. For the sake of being academic, the author, D.M. Nicol, was apparently determined not to deal with his inner world at all. I thought I should read this book exactly the way I would observe a game of chess.

… Emperor John VIII had no children. He had in mind that the oldest and most talented of his three brothers, Constantine, would succeed him. But on the day he died the other two brothers, Thomas and Demetrius, made moves of their own to take the crown. Thomas, the younger, reached the palace first. Demetrius, the Selymbrian despot who opposed the Orthodox church’s joining the Catholics, had a fighting chance as well. But Constantine was the favorite son of Manuel II’s widow Helen. She persuaded the avaricious younger brothers to yield, and succeeded in having Constantine installed as the last emperor of Byzantium. She informed Murad II, the Ottoman sultan, of this step and obtained his assent. Between Constantine and his brothers there always remained a chill. When the emperor was desperately defending his capital against Mehmet II with limited resources, his brothers were nowhere near him; and after the Byzantine defeat they continued as despots in the Morea by the expedient of paying taxes to the Ottomans. Over time the waning of their power kept pace with the waning of their honor.