aggienaut | The Apinautica - Ch 10 Pt 2 - The Holy and Underworldly of Istanbul

Okay here's he next installment of the "Apinautica." Recall our protagonist had gotten in a fight with his Turkish girlfriend and set out on his own.

July 12th, 2013 - I find myself standing in the serene vastness of the Hagia Sophia, the basilica turned cathedral turned mosque turned museum that for a thousand years was the largest building in the world. High above on the lofty ceiling gilded quotes from the Qur’an in Arabic seem to glow golden in the dim light, and above that, the inside of the great dome itself is elegantly covered with painted scenes from the Bible in soft pastels. On an upper balcony I find the Viking graffiti the Norse-men the Byzantine emperors had employed as guards had left. Bored and far from home, did “Halvdan” lean against that parapet, some warm July evening, looking out with jade green eyes on the same sea, thinking wistfully of his home a world away? As a cool sea breeze rustled his rust-red beard, did he contemplate impermanence and set to carving his name with his axe-blade? Or was he thinking about some far distant Erika with braided hair whom he’d last seen years previous as his boat pushed off from the banks of the river Göta? Did he dream of seeing her again and wonder why he couldn’t just settle for the convenient local girls? Or was he thinking about nothing nearly so interesting, just extremely bored with a monotonous shift at work?
   From the Hagia Sophia I continue on to the nearby palace of the Ottoman Sultan. Deep amid the geometric architecture and grassy courtyards I come to the tiled pools and baths of the legendary harem of the Sultan. For centuries this cloistered place titillated Western imaginations – dark haired circassian beauties luxuriating by the pool, nubile odalisques plucking exotic string instruments, coy looks in large brown eyes, fleshy curves, tender caresses…
   The voices of tourists echo harshly off the elegant tiles. A fresh salty breeze clears the steam of one’s imagination -- from this corner of the palace hill the open air pool looks out across the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmara. A small black-hulled tanker leaves a wake like a snail-trail as it makes its way into the narrow strait known as the Bosporus, which leads to the Black Sea. The days of tender caresses are over.
   Later I stand outside the ancient Land Walls of Constantinople, still huge and imposing, though now a highway pierces through them. It is said that when the crumbling Byzantine Empire was in its very last gasps, and the Ottoman Turks finally got one of the gates open, the last Roman emperor tossed aside his purple robes, unsheathed his sword, and personally ran into the breach, disappearing forever into the melee. For a thousand years before that the city had defied all invaders. Not only were the walls impregnable, the city could hold out forever, reprovisioned by the sea. No hope waiting for her to give in. I decide it’s time to move on.

"The Terrace of the Seraglio" by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1866 (He apparently managed to see the actual harem pool at Topkapi Palace because this is it, note the same star-rail as appears in the below picture!)

Into the Underworld
   I always wanted to go to Cappadocia in the center of Turkey, so I decide to head there. I catch a small bus on a nearby corner, and it winds through the narrow streets of the old city collecting passengers from various stops. Eventually, the main terminal looms ahead, a vast windowless tomb-like edifice, that swallows us as we drive down a ramp right into its dark gullet. Stepping out from the shuttlebus I find myself in a cavernous parking garage with whole freestanding ticket offices whose roofs don’t touch the dripping concrete ceiling above. Buses lumber out of the darkness like mythical beasts. Crowds of people wait in the eternal night, like some dystopian underground city. The people here are almost entirely Turks — this isn’t how tourists get around. Kebab carts vent greasy smoke into the black abyss, surrounded by plastic chairs and tables, as if on a grassy lawn rather than underground oily pavement. I ping-pong through with a few well-placed questions to people who look like they know their way around — “Pegasus? Pegasus?” I ask, and they point off into the darkness. I splash through puddles in the gloom and find the office and buses of the Pegasus line.
I climb the steps into the bus and enter a bubble of light and civilization in the gritty darkness. Soon we roll out of the catacombs, back into the gathering twilight of summer evening. Onto the highway, and soon we are rumbling through the purpling dusk, from Europe to Asia across the Bosporus Bridge, with sweeping suspension spans like the Golden Gate.
   We fly down the highway through the night, and I’m mostly able to sleep on this comfortable bus, interrupted twice by rest stops during which most of the passengers exit to stand about in the cold night air gasping out acrid cigarette smoke — not quite the fire breathing chimera Bellerophon sought when he rode the original Pegasus in legend. The sun rises over undulating hills and occasional blocky villages of small apartment buildings.
   Suddenly, around a bend, a town comes into view that looks like it was hewn right out of the face of the hill — stone houses project from the cliff face, but the windows continue up the rockface itself! Rock spires rear up above the buildings, dwarfing the man-made minarets. We are in Cappadocia!

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Notes
I have never actually succeeded in finding the Viking graffiti but it is well attested and allegedly find-able. Only "Halvdan" is legible. I plan to directly parallel the imagined scene of Halvdan on the river Gota with his Erika in a later chapter when I'm in Goteborg, on the river Gota, on a boat, with a Swedish girl I'll rename Erika. ;) Also, though I still haven't worked in a physical description of the protagonist, the rust red beard and jade green eyes could well apply.

I'm assuming when I originally wrote in the black hulled tanker (parts of this are from a piece I wrote many years ago), I suspect I was intentionally homaging the argonaut, commonly referred to as "the black hulled argonaut" throughout the Argonautica, which had sailed through the Bosporus in the eponymous work.

"Not only were the walls impregnable, the city could hold out forever, reprovisioned by the sea. No hope waiting for her to give in. I decide it’s time to move on." by now you've probably gathered I absolutely love hidden meanings even if no one else will ever get it. Recall from previous sections I'd gotten in a fight with my Turkish girlfriend "Deniz" and was now traveling on my own -- the cause of the fight being that she wanted to get married immediately, and an unstated dimension was that she was dead set on not having children as it would hinder her career as a seafarer, so you can see how this sentence very subtly alludes to that.

I like the contrast between the soaring beauty of the Hagia Sophia and underworldly depths of the bus terminal in this section.

Pegasus as I recall was the actual name of the bus-line, fortuitous for the allusions I am inclined towards! Recall also several chapters ago I was on a ship named Pegasus (renamed from the actual Unicorn, though not a stretch, we called the Unicorn's smallboat Pegasus). Splashing through puddles was accurate to events but also serves as yet another overly-deeply-obscure reference to Pegasus being an offspring of Poseidon.

While looking for art representative of "tittilated western imaginations" I came across the art of Robert Walsh and I adore it. It's all in the public domain so maybe I'd use elements of it to illustrate the Turkish chapter: