Turkish Letters #9 -- Iznik (Shiralee)

Back in Istanbul, we waited for Cade's visit with bated breaths - and not a little trepidation. She might hate the place. She might hate the plans I'd made for us. She might discover that we weren't the parents she remembered and that she hated us. We surprised her by picking her up from the airport. She surprised us by being by being a paragon of mature, thoughtful and self-aware adulthood. I briefly wondered whether aliens had stolen the real Cade and replaced her with a pod-grown clone...

We spent a day with her exploring some of the glories of Istanbul - the shopping and the food - and then headed off to Iznik early the morning after. Busbecq visited Iznik, although he knew it as Nicaea, on his way to Amazya. Of course it took him considerably longer in real terms to get there than it took us. Just for a start he didn't have the benefit of a ferry that zoomed between Istanbul and Yalova in only slightly more time than it took us to get from our hotel to the ferryport in Yenicapi (only 20 minutes walk away from the hotel but at least forty in a taxi at rush hour). In fact it took him a day just to cross the Bosphorus to Uskadar - now 15 minutes away on a commuter ferry -- and several more traveling overland to get to Iznik.

It took us just under 4 hours including the taxi - but it felt like at least a week. After the car-ferry to Yalova, once a fashionable spa centre but now a thoroughly undistinguished town, we scrambled on board the dolmus-from-hell to Iznik. The best bit was witnessing just HOW many people can be fitted into one small, airless and carbon-monoxide filled minibus. Especially when some of them insist on traveling with huge trays of bread, building materials and other useful but bulky objects. As it turns out, it's a lot. The worst bit was being on it.

The landscape between Yalova and Iznik was, as the guidebook promised, rather pretty if somewhat mono-agricultural. I guess, given the number of olives served at every opportunity, it makes sense that there has to be a correspondingly huge amount of space given over to cultivating them. Late autumn, as it turns out, is when the black wrinkling-on-the-tree-and-heading-for-overripe olives are picked #1. These are cured into salty little nuggets of super-intense olivey deliciousness.

We arrived in Iznik nearly hallucinating from oxygen deprivation and, assuming that the otogar would be on the outskirts, got off in the town centre. I had decided that we would stay overnight and, temporarily insane, had chosen a hotel from the LP guidebook. It took us quite some time (and the help of sundry locals), dragging our various bits, bobs and bags single-file like a team of sulky Sherpas, to find it.

When we did, I discovered I'd fallen for the oldest trap in the book - believing the goddamned book. I had taken the hotel's description as "the kind of eccentric colourful guesthouse every town should have" literally. You would think after a lifetime of decoding real estate and other advertisements I would have learned to read between the lines. 'Colourful' as it turns out means that the rooms are painted screamingly bright shades of green or yellow with bedding to match and lit by industrial-strength fluros. 'Eccentric' may have referred to the incredibly inept murals painted on the stairwells... or perhaps the odd and overpriced take on the standard Turkish breakfast in the morning. Or maybe the somewhat over-ebullient manager. Oh well, it filled the basic requirements and wasn't too expensive.

And the otogar was just a block away.

The thing that surprised me most about Iznik was just how small and self-contained it is for somewhere that figured so importantly in history. Its approximately 15000 population is almost entirely contained inside the ancient city walls - these have a circumference of about 5 kms and are still remarkably well preserved. In Busbecq's time, he records, you could stand in the marketplace and see all four gates -- today this is stymied to changes in the roads and taller buildings. We tried to walk around them from the Constantinople (now called 'Istanbul') gate to the Lefke gate but, after wading through the thick mud of several wood merchants' yards butted up against them, and then realising that we would have to clamber through people's back gardens etc, we abandoned the attempt.

The walls were originally about 10 meters high and included deep ditches on both sides of the land walls. The lake walls, now marooned on dry land, were originally in the lake, allowing the city to be easily provisioned in times of siege. There were only four gateways in the land walls making it easy to close off the city and more than a hundred towers dotted its length. Today, of course, the walls are pierced by numerous openings and much of them have disappeared - probably to provide building materials for the locals, but the main road still comes in next to the original 'Constantinople Gate' #2 which is remarkably well preserved, although obviously a little narrow for modern traffic needs. Busbecq commented extensively on the walls - particularly noting the triple arches and the numerous Latin inscriptions over the gates, many of which are almost as legible today. What he didn't notice - or least find noteworthy, were two howling sculptures surmounting the Constantinople Gate. Perhaps they were later additions - I have not been able to find any information about them although we did see a very similar carving in the British Museum #3. However, apart from a bas relief scene on the Lefke gate, they are the only remnants of figurative sculpture on the walls.

Perhaps they are just having a very bad hair day...

The lack of figurative statuary is perhaps not surprising (always excepting the ubiquitous Ataturk and war memorials); Islam has long forbidden the making or veneration of human images. Busbecq relates that during his stop in Nicaea some workman found a roman statue of a soldier in some ruins they were quarrying for building materials. Despite Busbecq's protests they quickly smashed it to bits, laughing at Busbecq who, as a good renaissance man, was enamored of Greek and Latin antiquities. "Did he want to get down on his knees and pray to it?" they sarcastically enquired.

Unrepresentative pictures from Iznik's backstreets...

The town was pretty extensively damaged in the War of Independence, but it has not been destroyed by apartment building blight so it remains very pleasant to stroll around despite the ever-present boy (tractor) racers. Newer buildings and old adobe structures blend harmoniously together whilst its pocket-Venus size and position between the lake and the hills means that 10 minutes walk and you can be well out of town. As usual, I focused on the more decrepit buildings and spontaneous junk collages, but actually there was an air of cheerful prosperity. #4 Fragments of antiquity casually decorate the environs, the museum obviously has an enormous collection if the plethora displayed in the garden is anything to go by.

The museum was, of course, shut until further notice. The nearby 'Green mosque', named after its splendid turquoise-tiled minaret, also appeared closed, but a worshipper who caught us photographing its lovely doorway ushered us in. It is one of the earliest Ottoman mosques and was very obviously influenced by Seljuk architecture; its internal spaces are minimalist and sturdily proportioned.

A romantic and well tended, although relatively modern, cemetery featured painted cypresses on its gravestones that mirrored the forest of real ones that had grown up between them. Nearby, on the other side of a stout stonewall and evocatively sited in an olive grove, we found the tomb of Candarli Halil Heyrettin Pasa - about whom we still know nothing else - he must have been quite a guy though, as his tomb was obviously still lovingly tended even though he shuffled in the 14 th century. Although we caught the sunset from the hills overlooking Iznik, we did miss a few things; the ruins of a Roman theatre and a caravanserai, an underground tomb... but all in all, Iznik is the model of a well-to-do and somewhat dull country town #5. I don't imagine that much happens to disturb its composure.

It wasn't always so. Iznik is of course more familiarly known as Nicaea, the scene of two fundamentally important church meetings that decided the basis of Christian doctrine and therefore the course of European history. The First Council of Nicaea (325 CE) was the first ever ecumenical council held by the church and was convened by Emperor Constantine, the founder of Constantinople #6. The Big C was a consummate politician -- himself not a Christian, although he may have hedged his bets with a deathbed conversion. The Council is best known for its formulation of the Nicene Creed, the earliest statement of Christian orthodox dogma, but it also recognized the emperor as head of the church as well as head of the state -- not bad going for someone who wasn't even baptized for fear of alienating his non-Christen subjects. The second Nicaean Council (the 7 th ecumenical council) was called by Empress Irene in the 8 th century to rule on the use and veneration of icons. The Eastern Church had been going through a period of extreme rejection of icons - one young emperor even had his eyes poked out (at his mother's behest! She didn't want him to catch her with her icons) in the battle of doctrinal correctness v. peoples' love of pretty pictures of saints etc.

The councils were held in the rather small, but imposing, edifice of Hagia Sophia Church, built during Justinian's reign to the same plan, although substantially smaller, as its namesake in Istanbul. Busbecq was to camp in its shell some 1000 years after it was first built. It became a mosque under the Ottomans with Suleyman's architect Sinan adding a dome and other modifications after it was substantially damaged by fire. #7 Today it is a museum, still apparently containing some of the original Byzantine mosaics and frescos as well as a myriad of other artifacts dating back to pre-historical times found in the local area. Not that we would know first-hand as, like every other thing that we tried to visit in Iznik, it was closed. #8 Its age however was very clearly attested by the amount of earth that has piled up around it over the centuries leaving it half-buried.

The town's historical importance was not limited to things religious. Its contemporary humble ruralness disguises a town that was once the capital of two kingdoms. First capital of the Greco-Roman kingdom of Bithynia, founded in 4BCE #9 by the Macedonian King Antigonus I, it eventually ended up in the hands of one of Alexander's generals who renamed the city after his wife Nikaea. Later incorporated into the Roman Empire, it lost political importance but continued to flourish economically, benefiting from its position on the major trade route from the east. As mentioned it regained importance under the Byzantines and its defenses were strengthened as well as several public buildings erected under Justinian in the 6 th century. Whilst its defenses kept out the marauding Arabs and Seljuk Turks who were steadily nibbling away the Byzantines' Asia territories, they were no match for Crusader treachery. Whilst Latin puppet kings sat on the throne in Constantinople, Nicaea became the capital of 'Byzantine in exile'. Of course the capital returned to Constantinople just as soon as the Byzantines could chase the Franks out -- although this did take some 60 years. The Byzantines didn't get to enjoy their victory for very long -- the first harbinger of their fall was the loss of Nicaea to Osman I, the progenitor of the Ottomans, who was successfully mopping up the fragmented Seljuk kingdoms of Anatolia. Soon the Ottomans had the Byzantines blockaded, their once mighty empire reduced to the city of Constantinople, and it was only a matter of time (about 100 years, in fact), before that had fallen too.

Meanwhile Iznik was finding a new identity in addition to its new name - as the acknowledged centre of ceramic artistry. Selim the Grim, Suleyman's father, conquered the Persian city of Tabriz and had its famed ceramic artisans forcibly resettled in Iznik. This resulted in an extraordinary creative efflorescence. Peaking, like so much else, during Suleyman's reign, Iznik tiles were used extensively by his architect Mirmar Sinan, and both tiles and ceramics of the time are considered cultural treasures. The recently re-established ceramics industry isn't a patch on the original, although the rather nicely restored kiln complex does have some very cute little shops - although all seem to sell more or less the same stuff.#10 And they were open, which was a surprise.

Examples from Suleyman's time...

As mentioned, nothing much else was, and it turned out to be remarkably difficult to find a good meal. So, despite the fact that we enjoyed wandering its streets and watching the sun set into the lake behind it, we were glad to catch the dolmus out of there.

That was until we actually got to Bursa.

#1 Or, as JB has pointed out, more precisely and picturesquely shaken, whacked, thwacked and otherwise coerced from the branches to end up on giant drop-cloths underneath where women in colourful skirts and/or baggy pants, headscarves etc gather and sort them into boxes.

#2 The new opening in the wall is called 'Istanbul Gate' whilst the original is now used by foot traffic and bicyclists and, I assume, is still called the Constantinople Gate.

#3 But I forgot to actually read any of the accompanying info about it. Dowh!

#4 I have to say the Cade and John were endlessly patient with me as I endlessly side-tracked us down promisingly ramshackle streets and drew incredulous stares from the locals to photograph peeling paintwork and crumbling walls.

#5 Its town motto is 'Clean town - green town'. And, if you don't count the pollution etc, they're pretty on the money with it - the Turkish equivalent of a 'Tidy Town'.

#6 He is also counted a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Churches - pretty good for someone so afraid of alienating his constituencies that he never publicly practiced Christianity.

#7 This may explain why Busbecq was accommodated in it - perhaps it was de-commissioned whilst renovation works were being undertaken.

#8 I suspect that the Turkish authorities just produce booklets about museums that have no relationship to the actuality - full of details of wonderful archaeological finds, Ottoman masterpieces, Byzantine frescos etc supposedly housed in them -- and then ensure that no one uncovers the truth by using the simple stratagem of never actually opening the museums to public scrutiny.

#9 There is some debate about this with some commentators positing an original founding date of around 1000BCE.

#10 I am constantly mystified by the Turkish habit of siting several establishments that sell the same object, type of food or service, generally at the same price and quality, together. I don't know whose interests this serves but it certainly isn't the consumers.

#PS There is a completely amazing lack of WTF moments in Iznik -- beyond the usual traffic chaos, town planning, pollution ones -- the best we found was the civic fountain insensitively sited next to Ayasofia Museum. Unfortunately it wasn't operational, but even without water its concrete impressions of wood were a wonder to behold... Pictured here with added Cade...