So last night I heard a funny story. Well, slightly funny, at any rate.
I was standing outside the Rebetika Hotel in the Turkish town of Selçuk , chatting and smoking with the owner and his brother. It was our second time in Selçuk – a rather wonderful and beguiling little place from which some of western Turkey's best sites are easily reachable (several of them on foot or by taxi).
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GREEK GOD TYPE GUY & ORANGE TREES Selçuk, Turkey, 29.01.14 |
The cigarette was one of those that you really, really enjoy, because just moments before we’d succeeded in smashing apart the lock on the bathroom door in my hotel room, thereby freeing my two-year-old son who’d managed to trap himself inside. Accomplishing this had taken about 40 minutes. During that time several people had had a go at the door, which had proved impregnable to all manner of offensive tactics, including synchronised kicking, a variety of knives (one being of the Swiss Army variety), several other makeshift tools, and an ill-fated attempt to break the glass pane at the top.
When finally the owner turned up at the hotel, he was armed with a piece of metal that seemed specifically designed for our purposes. He had the door off in ten seconds flat, and my son came out from his hiding place in the shower recess and ran into his mother’s arms.
Not knowing quite what else to do, I shook hands with the Australian guy who’d come into the room part way through the ordeal, roused from his rakı-drinking session by my son’s crying and ready to assist in any way possible. Both of us had been treated to about 20 minutes of my wife telling Russian fairy tales – normally a very pleasant experience, but in this case the tales were shouted through a locked door to an intermittently panicking two-year-old, in a voice somewhat tinged with desperation.
So you see why this particular cigarette was a good one.
Not knowing quite what else to do, I shook hands with the Australian guy who’d come into the room part way through the ordeal, roused from his rakı-drinking session by my son’s crying and ready to assist in any way possible. Both of us had been treated to about 20 minutes of my wife telling Russian fairy tales – normally a very pleasant experience, but in this case the tales were shouted through a locked door to an intermittently panicking two-year-old, in a voice somewhat tinged with desperation.
So you see why this particular cigarette was a good one.
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ISABEY FROM THE STREET Selçuk, Turkey, 31.01.14 |
Anyway, as we were standing and smoking, I pointed at the Isabey Mosque – which stood about 50 metres down the street – and told these two Turkish gents that this building was the reason we’d decided to stay in their hotel. (I’ll tell you why in a sec.)
The ever-reliable Super Interwebs had informed me that Isabey was one of the first mosques of the Ottoman period, completed in 1375, and that it therefore featured a unique mix of Ottoman and earlier Seljuk (i.e. nomadic Turkish) architectural styles. Helpful Interwebblers had also pointed out that Isabey was constructed with stones taken from other sites in the local area, including the ancient city of Ephesus (which, when it was already a couple of thousand years old, had grown to become the largest conurbation in the Roman Empire aside from Rome itself – and hence, by the time the Turks got there in the 12th Century, a not-inconsiderable source of building materials.)
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COURTYARD FROM ABOVE Isabey Mosque, Selçuk Turkey, 29.01.14 |
My owner-brother-friend went a little further than this, however.
“You know”, he said, “this is one of the first mosques built by Turks. When the Turks came here, they saw big churches and temples around, and they said 'Well, we'd better build a really huge mosque'. But the problem is, they’d never seen one before. That’s why it looks like a church.”
[It doesn’t really, but I sort of got his point.]
“Also," the owner's brother continued, "they had no materials. So here there are stones from Ephesus, columns from the Temple of Artemis [a massive ruined complex just down the street, honouring the favoured goddess of the Ephesians] and St. Jean’s [a huge fuck-off medieval monastery sprawling across two adjacent hills].
"So the building is 800 years old", he concluded, "but the stones are more than twice that age”.
“You know”, he said, “this is one of the first mosques built by Turks. When the Turks came here, they saw big churches and temples around, and they said 'Well, we'd better build a really huge mosque'. But the problem is, they’d never seen one before. That’s why it looks like a church.”
[It doesn’t really, but I sort of got his point.]
“Also," the owner's brother continued, "they had no materials. So here there are stones from Ephesus, columns from the Temple of Artemis [a massive ruined complex just down the street, honouring the favoured goddess of the Ephesians] and St. Jean’s [a huge fuck-off medieval monastery sprawling across two adjacent hills].
"So the building is 800 years old", he concluded, "but the stones are more than twice that age”.
Listening to this tale, I couldn't help but form an image in my head of those men who had hatched their ill-thought-out plan on this street centuries ago. It was like a deleted scene from a Monty Python movie. In it, a whole bunch of Turks come riding into town (‘cause they were a race of horsemen back then), brandishing severed heads and enormous phallic swords, their every gesture faintly ridiculous in its macho swagger.
“So alright then”, one of their commanders says, “Anyone like to voice an objection to us taking over this whole town?”
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ISLAMIC CARVINGS Isabey Mosque, Selçuk Turkey, 29.01.14 |
The question is greeted with silence, since most of the locals are currently suffering from the kind of speech dysfunction that generally results from having an enormous, lovingly sharpened and roughly penis-shaped weapon held to your throat.
“No?” says the commander. “Great! Now, bring me the char-broiled head of your fattest sheep, and then let’s see about putting a big fancy mosque here!”.
At this point silence resumes, but now it’s a silence of a different kind. After several awkward moments, one of the horsemen asks “Errr, sorry to cut in here Oh Great Khan, but does anyone know how to actually BUILD one of those?”.
A confused murmur follows, until a single hand goes up:
“Just a thought, but perhaps we should get one of those architect guys in from Syria? I heard they’re pretty handy at building mosques and such.”
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FALLEN STONE Isabey Mosque, Selçuk Turkey, 29.01.14 |
Of course, the Pythons would then cut to a scene of the architect going “... and so, when we raise the beam over the main arch, a second team will bring in the stones from left and right to form the vertical support columns”. A group of rapt and excited faces would then turn downcast, as someone asked “Um ... stones? Has anyone ordered any stones?”
And so, that’s how the Isabey Mosque was constructed: by people who’d never built or even seen a mosque before, guided by an architect rushed in from abroad at the last minute, with whatever re-usable bits of rock that happened to be lying about in the area.
And yet, as I said at the start, this mosque (which I’m looking at now through a window) is the reason why we’re here tonight, in a somewhat smelly hotel that captures small children in its bathrooms and requires special tools to operate.
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PURIFICATION BY WASHING OF THE FEET Isabey Mosque, Selçuk Turkey, 29.01.14 |
There are lots of reasons, of course, some more obvious than others. One of them is simply that certain physical locations on this planet move me quite profoundly, and I like that feeling very, very much.
At times the attraction to a particular location is purely aesthetic – crank up the dial to a certain level of geographical or architectural pretty, and that’s all I really need to justify the $100s I’ve spent getting there. But there are also places which genuinely seem to convey a kind of feeling to the visitor (at least if said visitor happens to be me). It’s almost like a ‘charge’ of electricity that you feel when you enter, producing that childlike sense of wonder which travellers seem to find rather addictive.
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A LONE GRECIAN COLUMN Isabey Mosque, Selçuk Turkey, 29.01.14 |
The thing is, you can’t always predict when a particular place is going to to fall into the ‘childlike sense of wonder’category. You can sometimes turn up in, say, a huge cave with a 2,500 year old temple inside it, and find yourself thinking “Yeah, not bad, but not mindblowing”, then an hour later be completely swept off your feet by a crappy old marketplace. And you can't always know in advance which of the two are going to float your Little Traveller's Boat. So the best thing to do, given all of that, is to see as many places as possible.
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STALACTITIES Isabey Mosque, Selçuk Turkey, 29.01.14 |
In the case of Isabey, we hadn’t even planned to visit it. On Wednesday we were in Selçuk, walking between the two principal sites we’d decided to see that day: i.e. the Temple of Artemis and St. Jean ’s monastery, which I mentioned above.
Along the way we got distracted by some guys hawking some nice ceramic bowls and so forth beside the road. (“In Turkey
The mosque has actually been called "plain" by more than one Interwebbler, and in a sense that's true. Certainly on the inside, the decoration is sparse and it's all about having a serene, airy, spiritual space. And of course, the tile work doesn't compare to anything you'll see in central Istanbul. But here's what I like about it:
First, it's extremely peaceful. Outside, the hard bargaining continues while wads of tourists step off their long-distance coaches and mill about noisily, waiting for their tour guides to take them up the hill to the ginormous monastery above. But Isabey's courtyard is built of sturdy pilfered stuff, and inside its four walls, all is calm and tranquil. You don't hear any of that racket; it's like you enter through the doorway into another realm, and everything else simply disappears behind you.
Which is the whole idea, no doubt.
Secondly, after the Seljuk Turks had gone to so much trouble to put this thing together, nature leaned in some time during the 19thC and partially destroyed it, using one of its favourite techniques: the catastrophic earthquake. This brought a lot of the stones down, and destroyed the colonnades which the Grecian columns had been used to construct. The main minaret also lost its upper section, so that it now looks more like a chimney than anything else. Only the little loudspeakers around the top of its base give away its true function.
So if you go to Isabey today, this is basically what you see: columns holding up nothing, and large chunks of stone lying around the courtyard walls, each numbered by archaeologists according to their original source and their place in the building's design pre-earthquake. Sounds quite unappealing, perhaps, but it isn't at all: it's beautiful.
Surrounded by this silent stone catalogue, it's easy to imagine what the courtyard would've looked like just after the quake: a huge, chaotic collection of fallen slabs and fragments, all inscribed or decorated in an expression of some spiritual belief or other; the Grecian, Roman and Islamic carvings all lying together, mingling scripts and motifs in a pile of 'holy confusion'.
And this is the thought that most struck me: that through an accident of its construction, and with a bit of help from Ma Nature, Isabey has become a symbol of our attempts to 'get spiritual', as well as a prediction of how those attempts will ultimately turn out.
To put it as briefly as I can: throughout history, gods and their followers have come and gone, with others always rising in their place, only to have a similarly see-ya-latery fate befall them in turn. And of course, each spiritual tradition that comes along tends to fertilise the next one – as, for example, with the pagan roots that still peek through from beneath the skirts of Islam and Christianity.
And so, sifting through the rubble of previous efforts to understand our place in the universe by positing 'something greater than ourselves', we continue to gather up said rubble and put it back together again in a new configuration, trying to construct meaning out of what fragments we have, plus a bit of whatever philosophical artisanship is available at the time.
We then throw our existing customs and prejudices on top of the new edifice, and we start building laws around it, schools to inculcate it into our children and so on.
But each round of this game can only last until some catalyst comes along and says "Sorry, try again!". When that happens (as it does periodically), it sends us back to the square marked "1". At which point, the cycle repeats.
And there's your history of human spirituality in a nutshell ... or rather, in a bunch of fallen rocks, housed in a pretty little courtyard in western Turkey.
Oh, btw ... there was one other thing I learned from visiting Isabey: namely, that the people who tell me I "think too much" are probably right.
The mosque has actually been called "plain" by more than one Interwebbler, and in a sense that's true. Certainly on the inside, the decoration is sparse and it's all about having a serene, airy, spiritual space. And of course, the tile work doesn't compare to anything you'll see in central Istanbul. But here's what I like about it:
First, it's extremely peaceful. Outside, the hard bargaining continues while wads of tourists step off their long-distance coaches and mill about noisily, waiting for their tour guides to take them up the hill to the ginormous monastery above. But Isabey's courtyard is built of sturdy pilfered stuff, and inside its four walls, all is calm and tranquil. You don't hear any of that racket; it's like you enter through the doorway into another realm, and everything else simply disappears behind you.
Which is the whole idea, no doubt.
Secondly, after the Seljuk Turks had gone to so much trouble to put this thing together, nature leaned in some time during the 19thC and partially destroyed it, using one of its favourite techniques: the catastrophic earthquake. This brought a lot of the stones down, and destroyed the colonnades which the Grecian columns had been used to construct. The main minaret also lost its upper section, so that it now looks more like a chimney than anything else. Only the little loudspeakers around the top of its base give away its true function.
So if you go to Isabey today, this is basically what you see: columns holding up nothing, and large chunks of stone lying around the courtyard walls, each numbered by archaeologists according to their original source and their place in the building's design pre-earthquake. Sounds quite unappealing, perhaps, but it isn't at all: it's beautiful.
Surrounded by this silent stone catalogue, it's easy to imagine what the courtyard would've looked like just after the quake: a huge, chaotic collection of fallen slabs and fragments, all inscribed or decorated in an expression of some spiritual belief or other; the Grecian, Roman and Islamic carvings all lying together, mingling scripts and motifs in a pile of 'holy confusion'.
And this is the thought that most struck me: that through an accident of its construction, and with a bit of help from Ma Nature, Isabey has become a symbol of our attempts to 'get spiritual', as well as a prediction of how those attempts will ultimately turn out.
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DAMAGED MINARET Isabey Mosque, Selçuk Turkey, 29.01.14 |
And so, sifting through the rubble of previous efforts to understand our place in the universe by positing 'something greater than ourselves', we continue to gather up said rubble and put it back together again in a new configuration, trying to construct meaning out of what fragments we have, plus a bit of whatever philosophical artisanship is available at the time.
We then throw our existing customs and prejudices on top of the new edifice, and we start building laws around it, schools to inculcate it into our children and so on.
But each round of this game can only last until some catalyst comes along and says "Sorry, try again!". When that happens (as it does periodically), it sends us back to the square marked "1". At which point, the cycle repeats.
And there's your history of human spirituality in a nutshell ... or rather, in a bunch of fallen rocks, housed in a pretty little courtyard in western Turkey.
Oh, btw ... there was one other thing I learned from visiting Isabey: namely, that the people who tell me I "think too much" are probably right.
Bye :-)
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