Mosques and marble and mussels - oh my!

On Friday we enacted our familiar Istanbul ritual-Tim worked and I slept. I had booked a massage at the hotel-counting on a more sympathic masseuse-or at least one who wouldn’t tear me up in the name of medical massage.

I was right-although this lady didn’t speak English, she did speak “Happy Fingers.” Whether it was the new course of prednisone, a coincidence, or the massage, I didn’t have a backache-or a headache-for the rest of the day.Tim’s meeting let out at 1, so around 2 we headed out to do a little sightseeing.

We hit the Blue Mosque, one of Istanbul’s oldest, built in the beginning of the 1600s. It has six enormous minarets and seems to take up an entire city block, or more. The stained glass windows are lovely, although maybe not as inspiring to a Christian as ours with their Biblical figures. But Islam forbids the depiction of images of living beings-I think plants are OK-but not birds, humans, or animals. So the art is stylized and largely based on geometric figures or Arabesque Arabic script. Nevertheless, the effect of glowing windows, soaring echoing space, and the huge, huge scale of things conspired to work their magic on everyone.

I suppose all architects of ancient temples (whether to Zeus, Jesus, or Mohammed) knew that their mission was “shock and awe” – imagine normal living conditions back then. If you lived in a smoke-filled, rat-infested hovel, coming to church much have really seemed like a peek into heaven-something you should aspire to attain after your death. Now that we have air conditioning, Merry Maids, and pest control, what will our heaven look like?

We had to leave our shoes and I had to wrap up in my scarf in order to enter. Onc we were there, the call to prayer went out, followed quickly by calls for 3 or 4 other nearby mosques. Like a round that starts off out of synch, these chants never quite catch up with other to form a harmonious whole, but the dissonance combined with the plaintive minor tone carries its own kind of beauty.Only about 2 dozen or so worshippers made it in; mostly men, although it was hard to tell, as the women sat in the back or along the colonnaded sides, sometimes behind a screen. We were allowed to stay in the visitors’ area of the mosque and watch quietly, although I was slightly (and nicely) reprimanded for standing on a small platform to get a better look.

After the Blue Mosque we headed across the street to the Basilica Cistern. Apparently a basilica once stood on the hill near here, but all traces have long since vanished. The cistern was built in the 1400s, an enormous manmade cavern hollowed out under a hill, to store water channeled by a 19-km aqueduct from the nearby hills. As far as I could tell this massive project benefitted only a few-those people and plants who lived at Topkapi Palace on the next hill over. The people of Istanbul got their water from public wells and fountains-many of which are still around but this water was for the gardens and pools and hundreds of gorgeous girls who needed to keep clean and sweet-smelling in case their big chance with the Sultan should come up unexpectedly.

You paid your 6 lire and descended the stairs, which got progressively older and wetter as you went along. At the bottom, a massive manmade cave opened up, carved into the hillside rock, fortified with vaults and arches made of brick, held up with several dozen marble and granite columns that were salvaged from those pesky old temples left over by the nasty old dead pagans. Some of them have been matched to ruins that can still be seen today, but most are from unknown sources.

A wooden walkway runs throughout the cistern, which at its best could hold 100,000 tons of water (that sounds like many many gallons). Now there’s just a foot or so-maybe 2 or 3- and the water is filled with the fattest greediest carp you’ve ever seen just waiting for a handout from the “Cistern Fast Food Café”
The cistern is dark as a cauldron, except for a string of bare electric bulbs above each walkway and an atmospheric orange spotlight at the base of each column. There’s also some eerie Arabic-style instrumental music playing and it echoes off the wet rock walls.

If you make your way back far enough you’ll see two columns mounted on carved Medusa heads. No one really knows why they’re back there-the Christians postulate that they were lying around town somewhere polluting the local thought pool, and stuck them in the way-back … “out of sight, out of mind.” Another theory is that Medusa heads were sometimes incorporated into buildings as a kind of magic charm, to keep away evil destructive influences, like earthquakes (and pagans?). They’re hardly hidden now though, as hordes of tourists swarmed them with flashing cameras.

Disappointingly, I saw no one turned to stone, although with some of the pushing going on to get a good shot, I was kind of hoping it would happen.By the time we emerged, most of the sights were closing, so we didn’t get to see Hagia Sofia, the other mosque we were interested in.

Instead, we hopped the local commuter ferry over to the Asian side of the city for dinner. I’d scoped out a place called Ciya Sofrasi. It’s been written up in the NY Times, all the foodie mags, and Chowhound [of course], yet it remains largely a local place, probably because it takes quite an effort to get over there. You have to figure out the logistics of the ferry (40 minute ride) then follow the map on the website for a walk of about 10 minutes-far more than most tourists are willing to commit to.

On the walk we stopped by a stand for mussels-on-a-stick- some guy had a huge vat of mussels and was shelling them, putting them on skewers and deep frying them. I didn’t want to spoil my dinner so I got just one stick-the Turkish tartar sauce that topped the morsels off was a heavenly mix of yogurt blended with garlic and cucumbers. Ciya Sofrasi is all about casseroles, veggies and stews. The chef traveled around the country looking for old-time recipes that he considered in danger of becoming extinct, and he recreates them with at least a dozen different stews each night; the list changes every day. And vegetarians would be in heaven here-the salad bar is amazing. The standout for me was a kind of wild bitter green with tomatoes, onions pomegranate seeds and walnuts in a sweet-tangy dressing. Since hardly anyone speaks any English there’s a lot of pointing and laughing but we finally ended up with chunks of beef cooked with quince and a dish of little meatballs in a sour cherry sauce for dinner.

The walk back to the ferry was lots of fun, through a great happening neighborhood of pedestrian-only streets and alleys absolutely chock full of sidewalk cafes stuffed with starving folks enjoying a Friday on the town. We topped it off with a stop at a candy store where they make lokum (Turkish Delight), the famous gummy sticky yummy candy of the Ottoman Empire. I tried to get half a kilo of mixed, including orange, rosewater, mastic, hazelnut, pistachio and almond and ended up with a full kilo of the plain ones without nuts. So I guess I’ll have to buy MORE at the airport.When we got back to the hotel Tim packed and I blogged and cursed as Internet Explorer kept quitting on me and I was losing everything. Finally, at 2 a.m., Tim in no uncertain terms told me to quit as he had to get up at 4:30 to make his plane. I obliged, and three hours later I was on my own with a 3,000 mile trip and a week in Asia ahead of me.