Photo Dump: Hagia Sophia

Merry Christmas, Anne! Told you I wouldn't forget! (And thanks for the reminder...). A warning: not at all dial-up friendly. Not anything-friendly, actually. Images are full-resolution. This is going to take a while to load. Anyway.

Hagia Sophia has had a long and varied history. Originally constructed as a church between A.D. 532 and 537 by Byzantine Emperor Justinian, it was the largest cathedral in the world for nearly 1000 years, until the completion of Seville Cathedral in 1520. In 1453, the Ottomans conquered Istanbul, and Sultan Mehmed II ordered it converted from a cathedral to a mosque. A few architechtural adjustments were made, relics vanished, and the cathedral's mosaics were plastered over. In 1935, President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (great guy) ordered Ayasofya made into a museum. You'll notice an abudance of scaffolding in various pictures; Sophia is undergoing a long and painstaking restoration. Care is being taken to balance the original Christian iconography and later Muslim additions. Quite unfairly, Sophia has suffered severe earthquake damage, and it's estimated that another severe quake could possibly destroy her.

These photos are from a Rotary trip in late September. Apologies for taking so long to post them, and claps on the back to Anne, for yelling at me until I did.

Christmas!

I took this picture out my bedroom window in Christmas morning. I love the color schemes of buildings here. In the Great State of Suburbia, where paint colors are limited to a few decidedly boring(/ugly) beiges, you'd never see a striped house. And I live across from two stripey apartment buildings. It's pretty cool.


Wrapping paper here is a bit expensive, and anyway, I didn't a full roll of the stuff, so my host parent's gifts were wrapped in artistically-transformed graph paper. Host Mom's gift (Mamma Mia DVD) was covered in little doodles of Christmas lights. Host Dad's gift (Iron Man DVD) was a bit less organized, more of a mishmash of Christmasy pictures, as well as Death Star and TIE fighters on the back (I got bored). The gift for both of them (Once DVD) was covered in "yeni mutlu yillar!" (happy new year!) and little starbursts.





They have me a matching hat/gloves/scarf set. All of which were attached by the same little plastic thingy.


I believe this is what's known as "chemo patient chic."

Then Host Mom had to go to a meeting that happened to be conveniently close to a shopping mall (not that anything's far from a mall in this city), so Host Dad and I gave her a lift, with the intention of going to a movie while she was working. Unfortunately, the movie didn't work out - no English shows were playing, and the Turkish one I'd wanted to see wasn't in yet - but on the way over, I did get some pictures of the snow that hadn't quite managed to melt yet.




See? There was snow on Christmas!

Turkiye doesn't celebrate Christmas - for obvious reasons - but they still decorate for it, and multinational chain stores still stock Christmas stuff and have Christmas sales. Turks have reconciled this by moving most of the hustle and bustle associated with Christmas to the New Year. My class is doing Secret Santa, but we don't exchange gifts until next week. Anyway, the mall had apparently figured that any excuse to decorate was a good one.



Host Dad and I wandered the mall for a while - I nearly bought a novelized copy of Star Wars: A New Hope in Turkish before he suggested that we might find it cheaper online. When Host Mom's meeting ended, he went to pick her up to go to another meeting, and I took the metro to Taksim. There's a lovely church hidden away off the main street (Istiklal Caddesi), as well as a couple bookstores, and I still had Secret Santa shopping to do.

Also, Taksim's pretty photogenic.



This is the church, dedicated to St. Anthony of Padua. It's quite beautiful. Candles can be purchased and lit for a small donation. After my grandfather passed away in October, I came here and lit a candle for him. It's quite multinational; if you look closely at the mass schedule, you'll notice listings for services in Polish, English, Italian, and Turkish. Unfortunately, I didn't make it to any of the masses, but I did manage to sneak some photos while inside.









Afterwards, I went to a bookstore further down the street and bought myself a Christmas present. You can't see the title, obviously, but it's A People's History of the World, coming in at just over 700 pages. I'm about a hundred pages in now, and really wishing some of my books from home were here; I'd love to do some fact-checking... ah well.



The bookstore where I bought it - Robinson Crusoe 389 - is the most dangerous store around. It's exactly what a bookstore should be, small with narrow aisles and tottering piles of books and the over impression that you could find anything if you looked long enough. Books are reasonably priced - converting from lira to USD, the prices pretty well match up to what I'd be paying at home.

And there were Christmas lights, so I threw in some pictures of those, too.



I have no idea how this one happened. Clearly I moved, but I spent five minutes trying to replicate it and couldn't do it. Huh. Pretty cool, though.





I'm periodically frustrated by my camera (or rather, my lack of proficiency with the camera, but it's easier just to blame the camera); it (or I) has a great knack for missing some incredibly good (and easy) shots. But then it pulls off something like this, which was through the extraordinarily grimy window of a moving bus:


It was a good day. Happy Holidays, everyone.