I would have slept if jet lag permitted. Unlike the previous day when I had had to seek out my tour guide today I was being picked up from my hotel by my guide. I was waiting outside the hotel at 10am, he was waiting outside the hotel at 10am. Some ten minutes or so later we found each other and apologised for our respective tardiness.
Eventually we got ourselves sorted out and headed to what was once the most impressive set of fortifications in the world. I mentioned in my previous post that Constantine selected the site of the new Roman capital based on the fact that it was surrounded by water on three sides leaving just one side that hostile armies could approach without drowning. To address the dangerous gap in the defences on the fourth side a subsequent emperor arranged for the landward approach to the city to be sealed off with a massive defensive wall that stretched from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn. That emperor was Theodosius II so the walls are called the Theodosian Walls. In actual fact Theodosius was a talentless non-entity and the walls were the work of his praetorian prefect Anthemius but if you’re the emperor you get the credit.
It has to be said Anthemius did his emperor proud. A triple belt of fortifications stretching from coast to coast. A wall sixteen feet high, studded with guard towers, then a bare strip of open ground (the technical term is “killing zone”) and then another wall thirty two feet high and studded with more guard towers offset to cover the gaps in the first group. Over the course of a thousand years enemy after enemy turned up at the walls of Theodosius and turned around and went home. Only once they were breached, in 1453 when Mehmed II’s cannons finally punched their way through and ended the Byzantine Empire.
And they’re still there. Battered, broken, crumbling under the assault of pollution and modern development but still guarding the landward approach to Istanbul. My guide was delighted to find someone who wanted to see the walls. Apparently not too many people do. Most of those who do are retired American military gentlemen.
Monday is apparently not a good day for visiting things if you want them to be open but it’s difficult to close over seven kilometres of walls. I stood next to them, photographed them and just stared in open mouthed delight. Some parts of the walls have been restored, others are in their natural ruined state. You can’t walk on them unfortunately (people had a tendency to to fall off) but you can gawp at them from all angles and gawp I did.
Once I had been surfeited on walls my guide took me to the Chora Church. Or rather Chora Mosque because this is another victim of the Turkish president’s re-election bid. Unlike Hagia Sophia however you can walk around pretty much the whole thing.
The church (or mosque) in its present form was completed in the early thirteenth century by which time the Byzantine Empire was on its knees. A senior government official named Theodore Metochites commissioned all new mosaics to decorate the interior. Here were the mosaics I had hoped for at Hagia Sophia. Breathtakingly beautiful and covering the walls and ceiling with depictions of the life of Christ and the Virgin Mary.
The church (mosque) is small, tiny by comparison with the Hagia Sophia, but I spent more time in the Chora than I did at the Hagia Sophia.
On the way back I drove under an aqueduct, visited a mini cistern and finished off the day with a Turkish bath. OK Istanbul you’re off the hook because that was pretty damned special.
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