MPLS blog

There's a great post on the University website by Ozayr about our time in Rome and Istanbul. You can read it here:

http://mplsabroad.wordpress.com/2013/05/09/time-among-the-nomads-between-enchantment-and-logic/

Our trip was great.

We leave for home in the morning. I keep thinking that when we get back we'll see a lot of people and they will ask me how I am, and how our trip was. I just don't know how I could possibly sum it up within the boundaries of casual conversation. I will probably say that I am fine and that our trip was "great" because, you know, I don't want to be that person who goes on and on... What my heart will be saying, however, is this:

I have touched the Black Stone fragment in the Sokullu Mehmet Pasa Mosque. I have seen the Sistine Chapel. I have walked across beautiful rivers and straits like the Tiber, the Arno, the Bosphorous and the Golden Horn. I have seen the sunrise over the Cappadocian hills. In a hot air balloon. I have seen the sun set from the top of a han, listening to a dozen calls to prayer echo over the city. I have seen art and buildings and views that have moved me. I have seen in person works by Michelangelo, Bernini, Boticelli, Caravaggio, Sinan and more. I have contemplated how something so hard as stone can look as soft as satin, draping just as beautifully.

I have watched my daughter sit and sketch on a mountaintop. I have haggled for a good price. I have watched the boats on the water go by.

I have visited exquisite gardens. I have eaten gelato and pasta and pizza, kebab, muchver, and baklava. I have indulged on a daily basis in cappuccino, and then chai. I have climbed through caves, and slept in one. I have shopped in the Grand Bazaar and the San Lorenzo market.

I have accepted directions, advice and gifts from total strangers. I have gotten hopelessly lost. I have found my way. I have learned to say thank you in Italian and Turkish - it is the thing I have had to say the most often. 

I have had a spring that has lasted four months. I have ridden planes, trains, boats, trams and funiculars, and sometimes walked hours in a day, just to see more and do more - or just to visit a friend. I have lived the "quiet" life of being in a huge city, surrounded by people and not understanding a word that is spoken around me.

I have made acquaintances become lifelong friends.

So for now: I am fine, and it really was great. Thank you. (gracie, tesekkur ederim) 

Thoughts on Istanbul...

Our trip is coming to an end very quickly and I feel like there are many more posts that I wanted to write. One post I wanted to write about is why Istanbul is so great. Why it is so dynamic and vibrant, what is that "thing" that makes it so great? The second thing I wanted to write about is progress. Advancement, initiative, creativity of the people here.

Then I realized that maybe those posts were the same thing.

This idea started percolating in my mind near the beginning of our stay here. We spent an afternoon with a friend of Ozayr's who is an architect. He and his American wife run a practice here and they have a daughter who is 5 years old. Over the course of our conversation, Ozayr mentioned that the area we are staying in (around Beyoglu/Cihangir) was changing very rapidly. A lot of the older buildings were being converted into galleries, fancy shops and other "modern" amenities. Ozayr's tone was very nostalgic - he has been coming here for many years now and the city changes each time. He seemed to be saying "what a shame" because he felt the older way was somehow better, or more authentically Turkish. Our friend Murat looked at us blankly as we shook our heads, as if he had no idea what we were talking about. He looked so surprised that I asked him if he felt the same way. He said definitively, "well, no, not at all. This... this is progress. This is good."

Skip to a later conversation with friends over a delightful Turkish breakfast. We were discussing carpets. They were discussing a company named Dhoku who had recently put together an exhibitions of their carpets and kilims designed by Turkish artists and architects. I heard our friend Emre say, well, why does the Turkish carpet always have to be the same? Why does it have to have the same designs always, and the same look? Can't you keep the quality and keep the process (ie. handmade with traditional weaving techniques using quality Turkish materials) and show a NEW kind of Turkish carpet? That is what Dhoku is trying to do. We actually stopped by their shop today at the Grand Bazaar (where hundreds of sellers will try to sell you a typical looking Turkish carpet) and saw their stuff. They were beautiful...

I feel this instance with the carpets is a great metaphor for what's happened in the city at large over the last few years. I absolutely feel that if you are coming to Istanbul, you should visit the historic center and you should soak up as much of Turkey's history as possible, while visiting some AMAZING places, such as:

The Blue Mosque
The Hagia Sophia
The Basilica Cisterns
Topkapi Palace
Rumeli Fortress

These are classics, like the traditional Turkish carpet, it is always going to be a staple of Turkish culture and anchors its persona. But Istanbul is always growing, always changing. Its people are extremely resourceful and the population is very young (half of the population of Istanbul is under the age of 35), and now you are seeing lots of exciting new things along with the old. Such as:

Istanbul Modern
Velonottte International
The Museum of Innocence
Santral 
Panorama 1453
The Istanbul Film Festival
Salt

Whether or not these more modern sights are going to be a draw for the tourist who comes to Istanbul, I don't know. If you were going to buy a carpet in Turkey, perhaps you would want one that looks traditionally like a Turkish carpet, because that's new to you and that's what you came to Turkey expecting (and there's nothing wrong with that). But I do believe that these innovations and the creativity and the drive for progress of the people here have gone a long way in creating an atmosphere and environment that is layered and exciting. How the old and new are all intertwined (in all areas: architecture, food, cinema, culture, art, leisure) and the resulting atmosphere is really (to my mind) is what puts Istanbul ahead of other ancient cities who also have old monuments and historically relevants buildings. It is not a ghost town of abandoned relics, nor has the city wedded itself to the past. It has a paradoxical feeling of being "Old World" and yet dynamic and new. I think this is part of its "Je ne sais pas".

We met a very reluctant traveler in Kusadasi, an Australian named Julie. Her grown son is away at school for the first time, and her husband, the very charismatic Bill, had convinced her to visit Europe for the first time. She admitted that she hates traveling, and she did seem a little overwhelmed. Tentatively we asked what she thought of Istanbul. She said, "I should have hated it" and then with a big grin, "but I loved it!!"

Paradox, indeed!

The Museum of Innocence

While traveling I try to keep as many of my experiences as "in line" with my location as possible, and part of that fun is trying to pair my reading selections with where I am. Last year when we visited here I read a great book about a Turkish family just after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, called "A Portrait of a Turkish Family". While we were in Rome, I was reading "The Pope's Ceiling", about the painting of the Sistine Chapel, and "The Genius in the Design", about Bernini and Borromini, two dueling architects during the Renaissance in Italy. I recommend them all. The last few weeks here in Istanbul, I have been reading a book called "The Museum of Innocence". The book is set between the 1970's and 1990's in Istanbul, and the museum itself is here also.

My interest was piqued when Ozayr and his students visited the Museum of Innocence. I had heard about this place last year, and I knew there was a lot of fuss over it after it's opening, and that Orhan Pamuk (probably Turkey's most famous author, Nobel Prize winner) was involved somehow. I asked Ozayr if the students had enjoyed the trip and he mentioned something about "reading the book first". He went on to explain that the museum is the collected items of a fictional character in one of Pamuk's books. Well, this intrigued me even more, and I picked up a copy of the book "The Museum of Innocence" from the english bookstore on Istiklal Caddesi.

The narrator in the book is Kemal, and the book follows a duration of time in which he is in love with a woman named Fusun. Over the course of their knowing one another, he begins (playfully, harmlessly at first, then more obssessively) to collect objects that remind him of her. Sometimes those items held undeniable significance, other times they were objects she merely touched, or from her childhood home. Through the ups and downs of his life and their relationship, these objects - as he plainly relates in the text of the novel, sometimes referring to the object as if he were showing it to you, off the page - offer a certain degree of comfort and nostalgia, not just in the realm of this (fictional) relationship, but for the time itself: 1970's Istanbul. It's politics and societal dynamics are the ever-present backdrop of Pamuk's novel. The streets of Istanbul are constantly referred to by name and neighbourhood. Istanbul is like a character all of its own - a thrill for me, of course, as I was walking those very same streets every day.

Throughout the novel the narrator refers to the actual objects, and you start to understand that by the end of the book, Kemal has created a "museum" of sorts - keeping all his acquired pieces in Fusun's childhood home. Kemal considers himself a "collector", with as much validity as any other, since he believes every collector is attempting to fill an emotional void or salve a painful wound.

In the final chapters Kemal (the fictional character) decides to open it to the public. Kemal decides to record his life story, to be the accompanying text, to give explanation to the items on display for all those who visit. Hence we have the genesis of the novel. He includes a ticket to the museum in the book itself. The Museum of Innocence stands Cukurcuma Caddesi, just where Fusun's parents lived in the book.

From what I understand, Orhan Pamuk wrote this book over a number of years, and the idea of a physical museum to house these objects was always in mind. Sometimes he would write something and have to search for the object he referenced. Other times he would find an irresistible object at a flea market or something, and write a storyline to include it. You can read a Q&A with Orhan Pamuk on the Museum of Innocence website.

Now if the book had been horrible, or if the museum had been horrible, I would have immediately dismissed it all as quite gimicky - but it worked very well. The book was great (though long, 725 pages) and the museum itself was enchanting. It is reminiscent of the small, private museums you see sometimes like the Florence Nightingale Museum or the Sigmund Freud Museum. There were people there who had not read the book, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who have read the book without visiting the museum. I think you could do both, or either.

For me, seeing the objects, recognizing them, and reflecting upon the book was a delight. I brought my book along and got my admittance to the museum (see the stamp in my book below) and finished the last couple of chapters inside, so I still had that "glow" that you get after finishing a book where you want to bask in it for a little longer. This was the ultimate in basking in a book's world for a little longer. All together it was one of the most rewarding reading experiences I've had.

Geometry/Mosque

Once you cross over to Turkey, the aesthetic takes a radical change, also representative of the religion and culture it exists within. Statues and artistic representations of human figures are almost non-existent in mosques or traditional art forms and instead we see geometry, form and symmetry as the main components of art and architecture.

If art in the Christian church is supposed to remind its congregants of the divine, and there is no figural expression in Islam, that brings about the question: how to accomplish that same feeling in a mosque? Ottoman artists and architects would turn to space and form, colour and pattern to represent what is considered to be the unrepresentable. I have heard it said that the ever-repeating patterns are supposed to represent God's infiniteness, and show us that infinite pattern takes us beyond the visible, material world. Or that geometry is the perfect fusion between art and science. Regardless of its intentionality, the effect is stunning.

Art/Church

In both Rome and Istanbul we have spent a lot of time visiting churches and mosques that are famous throughout the world. Both countries and their religions have a gorgeous aesthetic all of their own, that is unique. Looking at our pictures now, from the very beginning, it's fun to reflect upon the differences and enjoy each.

The churches in Italy are heavily adorned - period. The craftsmanship of the different elements in every church is mind blowing. There is also alot of sculpture and statues. Christianity has, at its heart, a person, Christ - and in their sacred spaces, congregants are reminded of him and his story and other Biblical parables through artistic representation in form of frescoes, statues, stained glass windows, embroidery, architecture and mosaics. 

While walking through the Vatican museum's impressive collection and the Villa Borghese also (a collection of art founded by a Cardinal), I was struck by how closely aligned religion and art are in the Roman Catholic tradition. All the great artists from Italy, they all contributed art and architecture depicting or representing religious scenes and stories - Michelangelo, DaVinci, Raphael, Carravaggio, Botticelli, Bernini - often commissioned by the Pope or religious official. Not to mention the actual floor plan of virtually every church - a cross. 

So much of the great art I saw in Italy I was not allowed to photograph but I can say that as we walked through these spaces (galleries or just simple churches) we were moved by the artistic depictions of suffering, devotion and faith we saw.

Ephesus

I could not possibly do justice to a blog post about Ephesus. Suffice to say that it's the home of the Library of Celsus, the Temple of Artemis (one of the seven wonders of the world), and supposedly the home of Mary (like, THE Mary of the Bible, or Mariam in the Islamic faith). Its relevance spans several religions and multilple civilizations. The ruins are great and still carry a gravitas that can be felt to this very day. Inside the grounds, there is also an ongoing archeological dig of Roman terrace housing, which was one of the highlights of the entire trip. It was fascinating.

For a nice overview of our escapades on this trip, you should read Ozayr's awesome blog post on the UMN website: http://mplsabroad.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/panora-mania-or-our-trip-into-anatolia/

Kusadasi

The next leg in our cross country adventure was Kusadasi, a beautiful coast town on the Aegean Sea (the purple dot in the previously posted map). This was really just our home base for our trip to Ephesus, but it turned out to be a beautiful surprise. A small town, Kusadasi (KOOSH-ah-dah-SEE) is friendly and charming. You get the feeling of what it must be like to live in a real Turkish town, where you can greet everyone you pass in the street with salaam or merhaba, and their faces break open with a wide smile and a greeting in return. Our hotel was beautiful also, and it felt like a tropical oasis (especially since we were hearing frightening reports of snow in Minnesota - at the end of April!).

The best way to see... anything.

Many years ago, when Ozayr first took students to Turkey, he described to me the hot air balloons that fly over Cappadocia at sunrise. I made him swear not to go up in one, to wait for me. It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, I said, we would do it together one day.

Well, all these years later, that day had come.

We were picked up at 5:00 a.m. by a local balloon company and taken to the fields about 15 minutes from our hotel where a couple of dozen hot air balloons were being slowly filled. We found our balloon and hopped in!

[Aside: actually, we didn't exactly "hop in." At the last moment the children sort of balked. Ten feet from the balloon, Maymuna in particular decides this idea was "CRAZY" and wants to stay on the ground. This turns out to be one of the most surreal parenting experiences of my life - do you force your 9 year old to go on a hot air balloon ride??? Turns out that you sort of gloss over the resistance by pointing out some wild ponies in the nearby field and sort of usher her on before she can really think too hard about it.]

The basket is deceptively large, and holds about 20 people, almost all our students came along with us. The ride lasted about an hour, sometimes dipping quite low into valleys, or soaring high for the best views. It is an incredibly peaceful and quiet experience - when they are not filling the balloon with hot air, you are just floating in silence. You could hear birds chirping. We coasted over fields and homes of families just waking up to do their chores, with dogs barking. (I'm sure they are so "over" the hot air balloon thing, I remember thinking to myself...)

It was the ride of a lifetime. It was a beautiful sight to see.

Halfway through the ride, Maymuna decides to review the emergency landing information.

Caves & Climbing

Of course, the very best part of a place like Cappadocia is the infinite opportunity for EXPLORATION!