THREE TIMES A LADY

When Ilze and I first came here seven years ago it was just a stop over to compete in the Istanbul 5 Day Orienteering. I was prepared not to like it much and I now freely admit that I got it so very wrong. Many people still do.

Lately I have become a student of the Roman Empire and with all its evils and demons I know that it has left us a legacy much to be admired and here I see the last and probably the greatest of their remaining traces.

When the Emperor Justinian decided to move his capitol away from Rome it was not for nothing that he chose to come here, where exactly “here” no one is sure because there was no great city then. The Greeks had set up further down the coast and the great Phoenician trading posts were over in modern day Canakkale and further south in Bodrum.

But here, at the choke point of world trade, is where in 532 AD he commenced the building a city and then named it after the Emperor Constantine. Constantinople was the original name that later turned into Byzantium when the Roman Empire split into east and west. It remained so throughout more than 900 years of turmoil that followed until April 1453 when it finally fell to Sultan Mehmed II who had succeeded in doing what even Darius the Great, Emperor of all Persia had failed to do, got his army across the Bosporus and breached the walls. Here then fell the last outpost of the Roman Empire, less than 40 years before the discovery of America.

It does not seem the least strange to see those great lines of oil tankers queueing up to sail the narrows, modern day silk traders on one of the world’s greatest trading routes all driven by modern day Empires and their Emperors. Alexander the Great came this way ,so did Genghis Khan even Napoleon and Hitler tried and later warlords like Putin and Trump can see shades of this in the Belt and Road plan of Xi Jing Ping.

Traders on the Silk road

But crouched on the shoulder of the Golden Horn there sits a great lady that has seen them all come and go.

She also has three name and they all become her. Saint Sophia, Haji Sophia, Aya Sofya.

When building commenced in the 550’s the Romans had not forgotten their craft, always masters of the barrel vault, cement and concrete that we still can’t match today. (some Australian high-rise builders should be made to come and walk barefoot under her dome in shame).

Three times a lady

She sits rather squatly under the morning sun and gazes across at that modern upstart, the more elegant Blue Mosque with her slender spires. She is showing signs of her great age but like all true beauties can still take the breath away and make the heart race. I defy anyone to walk in through the Emperors door and not feel the prick of tears.

At night she sits, lit in an ethereal light, during the day the wrinkles are showing but she gazes across the years like every Nona, scarf wrapped tightly about her and seems to say “I have seen it all before, take comfort here, you too can endure and this will pass”