Tag: Constantinople

  • Constantinople is still a major trading link between Europe & Asia

    Constantinople is still a major trading link between Europe & Asia

    I was lucky last week to spend a few days in Istanbul. The place has changed rapidly since I was last there in 2007. It’s still a bustling, vibrant place with the pulse of trade and manufacturing coursing through its veins – you can nearly hear its manufacturing heart beating. But affluence appears everywhere – bigger cars, tinted windows, traffic jams, high heels and designer bags, full restaurants. The endless ships, bow to stern 24/7, ploughing from the Black Sea into the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean and onto the Mediterranean. Still the bridge between continents but no longer a ‘cheap’ city, I would say just as expensive, if not more, as London.

    My first visit was in 1962 and I clearly remember the Roman underground Cistern with the old city built over the top. When I went back in 1999 I noticed that the Romans had mastered Tier 3 with concurrent maintenance (about 2000 years before our data-centre industry!) – the Cistern was fed via the aqueduct from the mountains and had two tanks, each containing more than 8,000m³ of fresh water. When the water flowed fast in the spring from snow-melt the excess was used to feed the wells, pressurise the fountains and flush the streets. When the water slowed in the hot summers the tanks made up the shortfall. But the clever parts were the ‘transfer-switches’ at each end. Gates allowed one tank at a time to be drained for cleaning, concurrent with the other tank feeding the city above. Great availability engineering.

    However on this visit my attention was drawn to two major news items that made an interesting contrast to the UK. (Obviously not as vital as the artillery exchanges across their eastern border but I would not dare to make any comments about which I know little).

    The first was a quote from the Turkish Minister of Culture. They appear to have had a PR campaign running about ‘Made in Turkey’ and the Minister was questioning its success. My limited experience of Turkish manufacturing covers UPS and I know of at least one factory that produced top of the range units up to about 20kVA, even though it was located as it was in a city centre building of several floors of workshops. Their huge advantage back then was their low cost base, particularly labour. Everywhere you look in Istanbul you see workshops making all sorts, engineered products included. However the Minister was extolling a change to ‘Designed in Turkey’ and mentioned that this would not be so susceptible to low-cost competition from the Far East. Well my advice is based on my early days of selling motors and drive systems to manufacturing industries in our Midlands and South Wales during the late 70s. Nearly all now defunct, gone, exported and replaced by shopping malls, coffee shops with free Wi-Fi, charity shops, housing estates and unemployment. It’s simple; ‘manufacturing’ creates employment whilst ‘design’ generally does not. Our best example is probably Dyson – one of our best-ever product designers that now manufactures all those vortex cleaners and ball-barrows in low-cost countries but retains a few hundred jobs in the UK instead of creating thousands. We used to make washing machines and colour TVs in Wales, cars & bikes in the Midlands, trains in Swindon (OK, getting a bit Victorian now!). Now we even import slate from China instead of using the genuine Welsh stuff. So my advice to the Turkish Minister is ‘hang onto the idea of ‘Made in Turkey’ for as long as you can’. And when it comes to consider Turkey’s slow accession to the EU … best ask someone else!

    The second item was just as fascinating. Turkey is building a new nuclear power station but, at the same time, opening new coal mines. Yes, coal mines. The UK government may want to contemplate why? The motivation for Turkey is that they are 50% dependent on gas imports (mainly from Russia and North Africa) and they don’t think that this gives them security of supply. The plan is to increase the role of coal (is that the opposite of our ‘dash for gas’?) to higher than 30% in the grid. Sounds strange? Maybe, but here we are in the UK dependent on the same Russian gas, closing coal-fired stations that burn Polish coal and our old nuclear-fission stations whilst sitting on an island built on deep-coal seams with over 300 years of reserves. OK, if we try to forget Mrs Thatcher and Arthur Scargill for a moment and start burning our own coal it won’t last 300 years, but maybe it will bridge the energy gap we are facing without dragging gas across some potentially unfriendly landscape?

    I should visit Turkey more often – it taught to me to think better.

    via Constantinople is still a major trading link between Europe & Asia | Datacenter Dynamics.

  • A Story of The City: Constantinople, Istanbul – Schola Cantorum/ Ensemble Trinitas/ The New England Drums & Winds Mehterhane/ DÜNYA Ensembles – Dünya Inc. (2 CDs) – Audiophile Audition

    A Story of The City: Constantinople, Istanbul – Schola Cantorum/ Ensemble Trinitas/ The New England Drums & Winds Mehterhane/ DÜNYA Ensembles – Dünya Inc. (2 CDs) – Audiophile Audition

    A Story of The City: Constantinople, Istanbul – Schola Cantorum/ Ensemble Trinitas/ The New England Drums and Winds Mehterhane/ DÜNYA New Music Ensemble/ DÜNYA Ince Saz Ensemble/ DÜNYA Anadolu Folk Ensemble/ DÜNYA Fasil Ensemble/ DÜNYA Arabesk Ensemble/ Mehmet Ali Sanlikol, dir. – Dünya Inc. (2 CDs), 100:34 ***1/2:

    ConstantinopleAmazingly, these are Boston-based musicians who have attempted to trace the musical history of one of the greatest cities of all time over two discs, something that might seem an all too formidable challenge at first glance. But in celebration of the city’s status—and it is one of the most important in all of history, affecting the three main monotheistic religions and serving as the capital of the Roman Empire for a thousand years—it is well worth the attempt. Even though I don’t quite agree with some of the selections—it is highly unlikely that Phos hilaron (Joyful Light, one of the oldest Christian hymns) would ever have been played instrumentally, used here as an unlikely example of “Byzantine Palace” music (they could have chosen some more legitimate examples), overall the selections are well-paced and placed, and should provide much enjoyment for musical historians and those willing to stretch their ears a bit.

    Each disc takes as its theme the city itself—first Constantinople, and then Istanbul on disc two—and one could make the argument that the Constantinople section should have been longer as that name itself lasted three times as long, the Roman Empire finally falling in 1453 before the Turks took over—but this is a quibble on an otherwise fine production that stands as quite unique in the catalog. The sound is somewhat caustic at times but lowering the volume helps and ultimately it is not a problem with proper knob management. Performances are generally very good though with some of this music that might be hard to judge. This is not for everyone, but for many it will be a pleasing and ear-opening experience.

    —Steven Ritter

    via A Story of The City: Constantinople, Istanbul – Schola Cantorum/ Ensemble Trinitas/ The New England Drums & Winds Mehterhane/ DÜNYA Ensembles – Dünya Inc. (2 CDs) – Audiophile Audition.

  • Video: A Story of the City: Constantinople Istanbul

    Video: A Story of the City: Constantinople Istanbul

    Directed by Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol

    featuring,
    Schola Cantorum, Ensemble Trinitas, The New England Drum and Winds Mehterhane, DÜNYA İnce Saz Ensemble, DÜNYA Anadolu Folk Ensemble, DÜNYA Fasıl Ensemble and DÜNYA Arabesk Ensemble

    The many layers of communal memory in this program proceed through Greek Orthodox music, secular Greek music, Crusader songs, music of the Ottoman ceremonial and military ensembles, Ottoman court music, Sufi ceremonial music, Turkish folk music, Sephardic Jewish songs, urban music of the Armenians and Turks, and finally contemporary urban popular music full of longing and protest. On its own, each piece may communicate celebration, love, devotion or military might, but taken together, the mood of melancholy is unmistakable, which by now has been permanently woven into the fabric of this thriving cosmopolitan city.

  • Pilgrimage to Constantinople

    Pilgrimage to Constantinople

    The group Friends of the Holy Father recently visited Turkey. Dr Michael Straiton KCSG sends this report.

    Pope Benedict XV
    Pope Benedict XV

    Despite the systematic dismantling by the Ottomans of vestiges of Christianity in Constantinople, now Istanbul, there is still much to see. 40 Friends including seven priests, led by Fr Nicholas Kavanagh, made the pilgrimage in October. We recalled several famous popes who had had experience in the City and also recalled and honoured two Fathers of the Eastern Church, St John Chrysostom and St Gregory the Theologian from Nanzianzus. We celebrated daily Mass in some of the city’s modern Catholic churches, where we were kindly welcomed by the priests who described to us their work in these flourishing parishes.

    The buildings of Constantine have mostly vanished, to be replaced in the 6th century by the incomparable temples raised by the Emperor Justinian the Great. The most breathtaking of all, the Church of Haghia Sophia, Justinian’s triumph, built by him in just five years and consecrated in AD537, retains some magnificent Byzantine mosaics, whereas the church of Haghia Eirene – Holy Peace – has been stripped of decoration. The Great Palace has completely disappeared above ground, but one enormous mosaic floor preserved in situ below the Mosaics Museum, gives a glimpse of life in the Byzantine city when at the zenith of its power. The huge Column that Constantine raised to commemorate the foundation of his  ‘New Rome’ in 330 survives,  but is situated today  in a municipal coach park.

    One of the most beautiful of the Byzantine churches is Holy Saviour in Chora that was redecorated in the 14th century with unrivalled displays of mosaics and frescoes recounting episodes in the life of the Virgin Mary and her Divine Son, the finest such Byzantine works to be seen anywhere.

    Several popes visited Constantinople. The first was Pope Vigilius I (537-55) who was summoned there by Justinian for doctrinal debates. A few years in 579 Pope Pellagius II sent the monk Gregory, the Abbot of St Andrew’s monastery in Rome, as his ambassador to the Imperial Court to seek military help to withstand the threat of the pagan Lombards who were endangering Rome. He stayed there for seven years but the embassy was ultimately unsuccessful and he returned to Rome. He was elected Pope in 590, later to be acclaimed as Pope St. Gregory the Great.  For centuries after there was no papal visits to Constantinople.

    Pope Benedict XV served his pontificate in search of peace and the relief of suffering during the First World War (1914-18), sending representatives to both sides in the quest for peace.  He helped to establish a hospital on the Turkish-Syrian border where wounded Turkish soldiers were treated. On the Pope’s death in 1922 the Turkish State raised a large bronze statue in his honour in the courtyard of the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in Istanbul with a dedicatory plaque to the ‘benefactor of all people, regardless of nationality or religion’.

    Mgr Angelo Roncalli, later to become Pope John XXIII, was apostolic nuncio to Turkey during the Second World War, 1939-45.  He learned Turkish and used it in the liturgy and in official documents which earned him the respect of government officials. Turkey remained neutral and Istanbul became a centre of international intrigue and espionage. The nuncio was well placed to carry out the instructions of Pope Pius XII in the cause of peace and the relief of suffering millions. He worked closely with Chaim Barlas, the director of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee in Istanbul, in sending the Pope’s interventions to many countries under Nazi domination. He used private couriers, Turkish diplomats, truck drivers and businessmen to carry messages and money across war-torn Europe. He sent thousands of Turkish visas, Palestinian immigration certificates, even ‘temporary’ baptismal certificates to Hungarian Jews to enable them to join those who were fleeing through Turkey to Palestine.

    Pope Paul VI was the first pope in centuries to meet the heads of various Eastern Orthodox faiths. His meeting with Ecumenical Patriarch Athenogoros I in Jerusalem in 1964 led to the rescinding of the 1054 excommunications that led to the Great Schism. They met again in Istanbul in 1967 and on that occasion, on entering Haghia Sophia,  the Pope dropped to his knees in prayer. This caused a  furore as the building had been recognized for years as a secular museum.

    One of the first visits outside Rome by Blessed Pope John Paul II was to Istanbul in 1979 to meet the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Demitrios I.  The two announced the establishment of dialogue between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, the first such deliberation since the Council of Florence (1431-45).

    After a visit to Haghia Sophia during his stay in Istanbul in 2006, Pope Benedict XV joined the Grand Mufti in prayer at the Blue Mosque, the second Roman Pontiff to visit an Islamic house of worship; previously Pope John Paul had visited the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.

    We called at the Cathedral of St George at the Ecumenical Patriarchate in the Phanar district of Istanbul, where we followed the tradition of kissing the icon in the atrium and lighting a candle before entering. We venerated the relics of two of the most important of the eastern patriarchs,  St John Chrysostom and  St Gregory of Nanzianzus, both 4th century Archbishops of Constantinople. Their relics had been in Rome since the 8th century and were returned to the Patriarchate by Pope John Paul II in 2004.

    One of the most famous railway lines built in the 19th century connects  Paris and Venice to Istanbul for the Orient Express.  We had lunch at the terminus, the marvelous Sirkeci Station, and later went to the Pera Palace Hotel, the fabulous destination of the rich and famous, including King Edward VIII, King Boris of Bulgaria who insisted on driving the train himself while it passed through his country, Ernest Hemingway, Greta Garbo and Agatha Christie. Finally in the Orient Bar we sipped and savoured our pre-prandial cocktails to the strains of evocative 20’s music.

    A wonderful cruise on the Bosphorus ended at a waterfront restaurant in Üsküdur on the Asian side of the channel, where we were able to survey the magnificent skyline with so many domes, minarets and palaces of this great city – an unforgettable memory of our pilgrimage.

    For more information on Friends of the Holy Father see:

  • A Masterful Voyage through the Musical History of Istanbul

    A Masterful Voyage through the Musical History of Istanbul

    Dünya

    A Story of the City…Constantinople, Istanbul (Dunya, 2011)

    Dünya  A Story of the City…Constantinople, Istanbul (Dunya, 2011)
    Dünya A Story of the City…Constantinople, Istanbul (Dunya, 2011)

    One of the most interesting releases scheduled for November 2011 is the two CD set titled A Story of the City…Constantinople, Istanbul. The Turkish city has one foot in Europe and another foot in Asia, in an area sometimes called Asia Minor. Before Istanbul, the city was known as Byzantium and later as Constantinople. This rich and turbulent history has made Istanbul a musical crossroads, where western music meets the sounds of the Middle East.

    A Story of the City…Constantinople, Istanbul has a hard cover book format and contains two CDs and an extensive booklet. The musicians behind the project are Boston-based Dünya, who are joined by Schola Cantorum and Ensemble Trinitas.

    Disc 1 focuses on the Christian period, when the city was known as Byzantium and later Constantinople. The musical selection includes atonal transformations of ancient Greek music, mesmerizing sacred music from the Greek Orthodox rite as well as Crusader ballads.

    After Constantinople fell, it was named Istanbul by its new rulers. Disc 2 offers an overview of the rich heritage found in Ottoman Turkey. This includes Ottoman court music, folk music from Anatolia, mystical Sufi music and the sounds of the Greek, Armenian and Sephardic Jewish minorities.

    “I think that the rich diversity reflected in this album will be appreciated by Americans,” reflects Mehmet Ali Sanlikol, musical director and co-founder of Dünya. “Through that appreciation, I am sure the American view of the Near and Middle East will change.”

    The booklet will explain which musicians are involved in different parts of the album. Dünya has various ensemble formats and musicians vary accordingly. The liner notes also describe the musical history and instruments used.

    A Story of the City…Constantinople, Istanbul is an extraordinary recording that provides a contemporary vision of the rich musical traditions of Istanbul and ancient Constantinople.

    The album is available at dunya.bandcamp.com

    via A Masterful Voyage through the Musical History of Istanbul | World Music Central.org.

  • Can’t Go Back to Constantinople

    Can’t Go Back to Constantinople

    Claire Berlinski

    Can’t Go Back to Constantinople

    Istanbul’s history deserves preservation, but at what cost to development?

    CJ 21 2

    Anyone who has ever sat in one of Istanbul’s endless traffic jams, listening to a taxi driver blast his horn and curse the son-of-a-donkey unloading a moving van in front of him, will agree that the city’s transportation system leaves much to be desired. City planners meant to solve this problem when they began construction of a $4 billion subway tunnel beneath the Bosporus. Then, to the planners’ horror, the project’s engineers discovered the lost Byzantine port of Theodosius. Known to archaeologists only from ancient texts, the port had been sleeping peacefully since the fourth century ad—directly underneath the site of the proposed main transit station in Yenikapı.

    The tunnel-digging halted, entailing untold millions in economic losses, and the artifact-digging began. An army of archaeologists descended upon the pit, working around the clock to preserve the ancient jetties and docks, while Istanbul’s traffic grew yet more snarled. Newspapers reported that Metin Gokcay, the dig’s chief archaeologist, was “rejecting all talk of deadlines.” It’s not difficult to imagine the hand-wringing that those words must have prompted among budget planners.

    The planners no doubt considered throwing themselves into the Bosporus when the excavation then unearthed something even better—or worse, depending on your perspective—underneath those remains: 8,000-year-old human clothes, urns, ashes, and utensils. These artifacts stunned historians and forced them to revisit their understanding of the city’s age and origins. The discovery posed a fresh moral problem, too: excavating the top layer might damage the one above it—or vice versa. So the decision was no longer, “Should we conserve these remains?” It was, “Which remains should we conserve?”

    The subway project, originally scheduled to be finished in May 2010, is now at least six years behind schedule. The route has been changed 11 times in response to new findings, driving everyone concerned to the brink of madness. The government is desperate to finish the project but well aware that the world is watching. No one wants to be known to future generations as the destroyer of 8,000 years’ worth of civilization.

    Decisions like this are made on a smaller scale every day in every neighborhood of Istanbul. Istanbul’s population—by some estimates, as high as 20 million—has more than tripled since 1980, enlarged by decades of migration from Turkey’s poor rural regions. The city desperately needs better roads, subways, and housing. Its infrastructure is archaic, a problem illustrated in 2009 when flash floods gushed across the city’s arterial roads, killing scores. The catastrophe was widely ascribed to inadequate infrastructure, shoddy construction, and poor urban planning.

    But building the city’s future will assuredly destroy its past. Thriving human settlements existed here thousands of years before the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires. If you look under the ground around Istanbul’s Golden Horn, it’s almost impossible not to find something archaeologically significant. Developers covet these sites today for precisely the geographic features—for example, natural ports—that made them equally desirable long ago. The more economically attractive the location, the more likely it is to have significant remains, and the more likely it is that someone will have an economic motivation to make those remains disappear.

    Government-backed developers, for example, were determined to expand the Four Seasons Hotel in Sultanhamet, even though it sat atop relics from the Palatium Magnum built by Emperor Constantine I in the fourth century ad. Dogged local investigative journalism and the threat of international opprobrium put a halt to those plans. On the other side of the Golden Horn, when it became obvious that the construction of the Swiss and the Conrad Hotels in Beşiktaş would destroy significant archaeological artifacts, the local government objected, pointing to Turkey’s laws on historic preservation. The developers went over their heads to Ankara and appealed to the laws on promoting tourism. Parliament decided that Turkey needed foreign direct investment, and the tourism laws prevailed. There was an irony in the decision, of course: Istanbul’s heritage is precisely what attracts tourists. Then again, if there are no hotels, there’s nowhere for tourists to stay.

    There is no way to resolve the tension between letting this megacity develop economically and protecting its priceless archaeological treasures. Obviously, you can’t turn an entire city into a museum where no new construction is allowed. According to some archaeologists, that’s exactly what you’d have to do to protect Turkish historic artifacts—leave them all in the ground, untouched, since even careful excavation might destroy them. But Turkey is not a wealthy country. It’s hard to feel morally confident in saying that Turkish citizens need Neolithic hairbrushes more than they need houses, factories, ports, dams, mines, and roads—especially when they’re dying in flash floods.

    So something has to be destroyed. But who decides which part of the city’s past is most important? Legally, Turkey’s monument board has the authority to decide what to save: in principle, if more than 60 percent of a neighborhood is more than 100 years old, it cannot be touched without the board’s permission. The board deals daily with a massive number of requests and decisions, but it has neither the time nor the resources to ensure that its decisions are upheld. For example, it reviews all plans for development in sensitive areas. The plans then get sent to municipal government offices for approval—but often, the plans submitted to the board are different from the ones that go to the local government, and the board is none the wiser.

    Further, the process of evaluating a preservation claim is often slow and bureaucratic. Sara Nur Yildiz, a historian at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, recalls noticing a distinctive earthen mound at the edge of a construction site in her upscale neighborhood in Cihangir. She suspected immediately that it was an archaeologically significant well. “I told them to stop digging,” she says, “but they ignored me.” She filed a petition with the monument board. Ultimately, the board agreed with her and halted the construction. But by the time the board finished studying the case and relaying its verdict to the workers, half of the structure had been demolished.

    In general, Ottoman Empire relics fare better than Byzantine ruins. In the minds of certain officials, the latter sound a bit too much like Greek ruins, which aren’t, after all, part of their history. Archaeologists associated with TAY—the Archaeological Settlements of Turkey Project—have compiled inventories of priceless endangered sites. They report a “persistent and intense threat” to Byzantine remains throughout the city from the construction of roads and modern housing. The Edirnekapı and Topkapı sections of the historic city walls, they lament, vanished during the construction of Adnan Menderes Boulevard and Millet Street. Another problem: there is “almost no coordination,” say archaeologists with TAY, between the government departments charged with preserving cultural heritage and those responsible for public works.

    Many academics have worked to draw up conservation plans for the city. So has UNESCO. But they don’t have the power to enforce them. UNESCO, claiming that the Turkish government has disregarded its reports, has threatened to embarrass Istanbul by putting its cultural treasures on its endangered list. But on the historic peninsula, rates of return on investment in development are among the highest in the world—exceeded only by those in Moscow. For developers, the amount of money at stake is phantasmagoric. They’re willing to spend a lot to make legal and political obstacles go away. Archaeologists can’t compete.

    So come visit now, while it’s all still here.

    Claire Berlinski, a City Journal contributing editor, is an American journalist who lives in Istanbul.