My (maternal) grandfather was part of the army of occupation in the old Ottoman Empire after WWI. He survived the Western Front, and was sent out to Constantinople as a motorcycle dispatch rider, having been a mechanic before 1914 in Ireland. He had a fairly exotic life for the standards of the time before returning home after the Civil War to a life of parochial conformity and respectability where his experiences and travel were always dismissed as tall tales, even by his children (my mother in particular). But I remember sitting at his feet and listening to him and it was the details that gave the stories veracity, like having to cut back the motorcycle handlebars to fit through the narrow alleys of The City (which sprang unbidden to my mind the first time I visited as an adult), rosewater, trays of pistachios and blinding hangovers from raki. They were given guided tours of the main sights and two things he mentioned stuck with me; the first was being put on a charge for racing with his friends around the Hippodrome on their motorbikes after being told what it had been used for (he nearly lost his stripes). The second was the awe that ‘the big yellow Greek church’ inspired for a provincial boy from a small Irish town who had never seen anything that big. He said that the sense of space going in was so intimidating that it felt like the hand of God pushing you to your knees. The space between Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque was somewhere open (and therefore safe) for the Tommies to congregate and goggle at the men in fezzes and to speculate what the women looked like under their bundles of clothing.
But back home after the Civil War, Ireland closed in on itself like a fist and the outside world disappeared for two generations; I remember my mother saying that when he tried talking about his life in the pub people would just look at each other out of the corner of their eyes and tap their heads.
I grew up being moved around the world as my father was a Flight Engineer and one time (when I was about ten I think) we had a layover in Istanbul for a day on the way back from Hong Kong where my mother kicked us out of the hotel as my younger sister was being difficult, my father walked me around what I suppose was Sultanahmet to wear me out. He was a bourgeois technocrat who was never really comfortable around people whose language he couldn’t understand (despite speaking four) and always detested traders and hustlers, so my memory is of an increasingly tetchy father yanking my arm to get me to keep up.
This is where my half-memory of the exterior of Hagia Sophia stems from as I got given a lolly in the park while he paid someone to teach him enough Turkish to tell people to ‘F**k Off!’, (a story he used to trot out in my teenage years). But I also remember the cats who stalked around like the Lords and Ladies of the city, how friendly the locals were to children (especially blond, blue-eyed ones) while the enormous buildings of a bygone age stared down at you like a stranger, wishing to whisper secrets in your ear.
When we got back to the UK my parents saw Peter Brown’s World of Late Antiquity in a second-hand bookshop and pushed me into spending my pocket money on it, mainly on account of the cover, and was left to try and puzzle it out for myself as these were the years when Gibbon’s view of Byzantium still held and no-one was interested. Even when I went to University to do Medieval History, it was difficult to find anything on it other than as peripheral to the Crusades.
Years after, having ignored my parents advice and got a job in aviation (but that’s another story), my future wife had to go home to see her mother and suggested I use my concessionary travel and go away for a week myself. Looking at the routes and the passenger loads, I saw IST (Istanbul) and thought ‘Why not?’, and everyone else thought I was mad.
This was about 1988 and I got a dolmuš from the old airport on a sunny morning and sat agog as the Walls appeared, marching up to the north, along Kennedy Cad. and being dropped up in Sultanahmet where I sat on my kitbag outside the Cistern of Justinian looking at (a rose-coloured) HS in the light of a spring sun and caught myself gently crying, for some strange reason feeling that I had come home.
After dumping my kitbag in a hostel around the corner from HS, I went back despite only having an hour or two left before it closed and as I crossed the threshold from the narthex into the body of the church I felt what travellers from Liutprand to my grandfather had felt, and had to steady myself from dropping to my knees, something I have only ever felt since in the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Is it me? Is it the building? Does it become a battery storing the emotions of generations that you plug into? A psychic generator that jump starts something deep within you? After all, it is just another old building; but, there is something there, something indefinable, ineffable.
In five days I came back another three times, sometimes exploring, sometimes just sitting. And in the fifteen times I have been back since, I have always made time to come to HS; sometimes to explore, but more and more often, just to find somewhere to sit and reflect.
And wonder was it really yellow, or did I imagine it?
November 2023
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