Istanbul is like an artichoke...

Why did shopping in the bazaar leave me with the feeling I’d fallen for a gigolo, something an arvo at DJs never does. Yet the markup is the same. And in the bazaar you get to create your very own Closing Down Sale, or End of Season Sale every time you buy anything. Nevertheless.. in the hand to hand combat of Western Tourist v Wily Eastern Trader there’s always that sense of being just another hapless wood duck. In fact I felt that in many situations: the shawls flung gratuitously around our shoulders for a photo op, the friendly faces loitering outside every Museum, Mosque or Church waiting to lure us off to a rug lair, or the avowed adoration for all things Australian, and cries of ‘lady’, 'lady', ‘hello’, ‘you are welcome’ and endless glasses of apple tea pressed upon us from all sides. One fellow even managed to squeeze in a ‘fair dinkum’ before relieving me of an embarrassing pile of lire. It was all part of an exhausting contest one couldn’t win. But fun.

Yesterday Rosemary, in her determination not to buy a Turkish rug, accidentally got us into the terrain of Brendan Shanahan’s book “In Turkey I am beautiful” and into the heart of a rugshop owned by a man with the face and hair of a grand Vizier. While I waited he gave me Shanahan's book to read (spotting a reader when he saw one, or just another ego heat-seeking a target?). In case I skipped over them he pointed out the opening descriptions of his sexual magnetism, his amazing eyebrows and his success with multiple girl-friends. For the record - he was rather dashing:



After hours of watching rugs being set alight to prove they really were wool or silk, and hours of crawling across carpets to feel which was cool (silk) and which was warm (wool) Rose finally succumbed and bought a really beautiful silk prayer rug with an unusual black pattern. I think she did very well, but the whole afternoon was consumed by the struggle. Eventually we were taken into a kind of bluebeard’s room tucked away behind a secret door and the grand Vizier lay enticingly upon a pile of kilims.

On Friday it began raining, so some of our plans to explore the old Roman pathways of Istanbul had to be modified. But we did get to Hagia Sophia:





And also to the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art (the Ibrahim Pasha Palace). Ibrahim Pasha was the childhood friend of Suleyman the Magnificent and the first of his Grand Viziers. Sadly his friend the Sultan had him strangled at the behest of his powerful and jealous wife, Roxelana. The interior of the palace was as fascinating as the objects and carpets it displayed. The rooms and fittings have hardly been changed except for the obvious additions of electricity, and security cameras.



I began reading something of the history of Istanbul and was very taken with a man I misread as Basil the Bludger, something I thought all Emperors and Kings were by default. But Basil wasn’t a bludger he was quite energetic and a successful slayer of Bulgars. In fact he was Basil the Bulgar Slayer. Bludger Slayer has a pretty good ring to it as well.

We also went to an Ottoman village in the mountains near Bursa. This village is not only still inhabited but lived in without much in the way of a modern economy or modern technologies. The mountain runoff for example is dealt with by the simple means of curving the cobble-stones inwards down the middle of the street. There was also an Ottoman dog, with feet that turned out like carpet slippers and gave it a ballerina's walk. This may have been some sort of congenital defect of the sort I often saw in Istanbul. People with terribly clubbed feet or other physical problems which are remedied in our society were begging in the streets. I considered cynically that they're probably put out to work in this way as a bit of a cash cow around tourists and a source of ready money for the family.



The fish in Istanbul restaurants is wonderful. I’ve eaten it most nights. It tastes as though it's come straight out of the sea that day. Walking across the bridges at night you can see people lined up to reel in sardines, and I think also some kind of perch. The fish come intact to the table: head, spine, tail, everything. I’d forgotten what an art there is to eating a real fish. After my other brushes with permanent injury I was careful to eat very very slowly.



I'll finish with an out of focus pic - Rosemary and me eating, which turned out to be how we spent so much of our time.

I had the fish of course. I've been longing to put a cedilla in somewhere, because they're so pretty and so inescapable in the Turkish alphabet. So here you are:

Çıao çıao my friends. It's been a blast. Until we meet again..

Spaghetti with potato sauce

The Conference now being officially over I have nothing but sight-seeing ahead of me. On Tuesday I pre-empted myself by skipping the morning sessions for an exciting few hours of bargaining in the Grand Bazaar.





Negotiating a bribe last year on the Eurostar Italia intercity provided a useful first pass. I found I was open to reducing prices without a blush. At first the Bazaar seemed wondrous and exciting but after a few turns up and down the alley ways it was easy to spot the identical pirated produce from one shop to another. How fortunate our Intellectual Property session was the day after. I was able to purchase a Prada knock-off untroubled by the thought of the punitive fine or custodial sentence that might lie in wait.

The Conference itself has been excellent. Don’t worry I don’t plan on expanding on too much more of it, except to say that the IALL meetings distinguish themselves by focusing so clearly upon substantive law, and that an afternoon on recovery of stolen art (or Who owns the past?) was a particular pleasure. Stuart will recall some discussion we shared surrounding these topics. One question raised by an interested party was just how far back the statute of limitations applied. Do you return the spoils of war from the Romans, the Pharaohs, from Napoleon? There was also a really interesting overview of Turkey’s efforts to join the EU. Rumania got in pretty much straight away, Turkey hasn’t. The elephant in the drawing-room must be religion.



Dinner on the Bosphorus seemed so glamorous in imagination but disappointingly like a gathering of cousins at the Ipswich RSL. The food was even worse. My vegetarian meal consisted of a spaghetti mound (no sauce) three brussel sprouts lying like road kill in a pool of mashed potato (just add water). The Kookaburra Queen does a better job of waterborne dining. After a sufficient amount of alcohol the music was cranked up and the cousins got up and danced badly with one another. I remember ‘I wıll survıve’ before fleeing away into the upper deck cold and blackness of the passing night. In spite of the freezıng temperature the conversation was good (all the other introverts were there) and the passing scenery wonderful.








Some of us spent a glorious afternoon visiting a library housed in one of the Sultan’s lesser palaces. I think it may be funded by the United Arabs Emirate. Everything within it was beautifully appointed. Even the staplers and sticky tape had their own inlaid doors.



You can imagine how beautiful the map storage was. The buildings look Russian but the gardens Moorish. How nice to be a Sultana and wake up to an Istanbul morning from such a place.






There’s so much more to say but not enough time. Breakfast and then he Bazaar awaits me, and presents for the Libran arm of the family (practically everyone but me). We’ve formulated our first plan for getting around Istanbul on buses and trams. The ticket offices have a bit of a Soviet look:




I’ve loved every minute of being in Turkey even after losing a filling (practically a weekly event in my life), twisting my ankle (again), hitting my skull quite badly on a flight of steps, a bout of Istanbul belly and coming a little closer to sea-sickness than I cared to. Rosemary has requested this picture be placed en blog. I tried to look as long-suffering as possible. If you look closely you’ll observe a can of Sprite stuck into my sock. This was to help reduce the massive egg on my right foot. But help was at hand further in the day with a bit of pharmaceutical attention. I now have the most fabulous painkilling drug ever created. Don’t want to imagine too much what might be in it (opium, cocaine?). Fully anaesthetized I plan on lots of tramping across the ancient surfaces of Istanbul in my remaining couple of days here. More to come…

Drinking with the fishes

Yesterday was exactly the reason I came to this conference. In the morning there was much detailed discussion of the Turkish legal system by several thoughtful and eloquent academic lawyers; and in the afternoon we roamed around the Topkapi Palace, the Hippodrome and other remnants of the ancient world. But more of that.



Legal stuff - not for everyone

The legal stuff began appropriately with a look at Turkish history and the interactions with Europe which had the Ottomans at one point reaching Vienna. To this day Turkish people still go to Europe and particularly to Germany in large numbers, considering it in some way a natural place for themselves.

When lawyers discuss history they position governance squarely at the heart of their perspective rather than politics. So instead of giving reasons for battles and dissecting the deals done between powerful allies and enemies our view of the Ottoman Empire centred upon the means by which Turkey was governed and the place of European law within Turkey. The Sultans had a pluralist approach to governance. In instances of family law or succession law it was the particular religious practice which prevailed for an individual, whereas for trade and commercial purposes European law was used. And that situation continued until the Republic was formed under Ataturk. Now, just as in Australia, a religious ceremony alone does not make a marriage lawful. So Sharia law does not overcome state law.


Like Australia Turkey ‘received’ its law that is it did not grow organically from within society. However our reception of law in Australia came with the settlement of the British. Attaturk shopped around. For those still reading the basics are – the Criminal Code was drawn from Italy (I wondered if it was the same Italian code, the Zanardelli code, which Griffith used as his basis for the Queensland Criminal Code), Criminal Procedure from Germany; the Civil Code from the Swiss canton of and Civil Procedure I’ve forgotten. Wikipedia awaits you. Modern Turkish Courts still look favourably upon an argument a lawyer presents to them which draws legal thinking from the jurisprudence of these ‘mother’ codes although of course like Australia there’s a body of indigenous legal thinking that now applies. There was a throwaway observation from one of our speakers that Turkish Courts still don’t manage a proper equidistance between individual and State, tending to protect the state first.

Ataturk set about embedding the new legal culture into the Republic in a wonderfully opportunistic way. He recruited a great many of the Jewish academics who fled Germany during the Nazi regime and with their training and long background in legal teaching and thinking they established the great Universities which still teach not only law but all other major disciplines. One or two of our speakers had been themselves taught by the first wave of intellectuals who emerged from this process. (S - this process sounds like something PNG might have benefited from on its way to autonomy).


Someone raised the question of ‘defamation of Turkishness’, the charge which has been brought against (the novelist) Orhan Pamuk, and a matter still before the courts at least in its civil guise. The question of defaming the Turkish nation (or ‘Turkishness’) is as I understand it a criminal matter. The criminal charge was resolved in the Court of Cassation (Appeal Court) in favour of Pamuk. However in the manner of the OJ Simpson civil trials the issue has now been returned to the courts to be heard as a damages action by private individuals. This time the Court of Cassation has overturned the lower court decision and has found that such an action is justiciable (not sure if I’m using the term correctly in this context but the second sequence of court proceedings has been about standing i.e. whether or not only the state can bring an action in this instance, of defaming Turkishness, or whether private individuals can sue on this basis, which the Court has recently found they can). So Pamuk is still under threat from the legal system. As a reminder the facts of the case concern a one sentence allusion by Pamuk to the Armenian ‘genocide’ in one of his novels.

I found all of this tremendously interesting although I suspect not all of my dear readers will, so further ruminations on these points will cease.


Sightseeing

The Topkapi Palace reminded me instantly of the princely palaces in Seoul, with their large walled gardens and purpose-built structures dotted within : The Treasury, the Library, the Bedroom, the Kitchens, the Madrasa etc.









As you can see we were just some of a huge tourist contingent. We even had our own police force.






We toured (exhaustiıngly) the rest of Sultanahmet, checked out the Blue Mosque and the Hippodrome and looked from the outside at Hagia Sophia (it closes Mondays).






And we went down into the Basilica Cistern (laid out under Justinian in 532) with its little fish splashing in the darkness. They protect the water supply by dying heroically when it's contaminated. As we crossed the footbridge they rushed alongside, eager as sea-gulls at the sniff of a parcel of chips. Sadly I had to forego coffee at the gloomy Cistern Café, it wasn’t Fast enough.






At the end of the day we ate at the top of the Galata Tower (built 1348) the sort of building which seemed designed to imprison pretty girls with very long hair.




A number of these belly-danced for our pleasure, but after a short while none of it seemed terribly different from an evening at Caravanserai, except for the amazing view of course, across the whole of Istanbul. It was lovely to see my old mate Finola again. The last time we really talked we were stuck at the top of another stone tower in Novgorod and drank far too much. However last night I remembered to follow up with lots of water which, just like the Russian water I scoffed busily in St Petersburg , is not potable. Without a cistern fish to warn me I drank it anyway and woke up without a headache. It was almost midnight when we walked back, but all along the way there were hole in the wall shops still lit up, music pouring out and people sitting inside working and chatting.

Breaching the Marmara

While the lobby of the Troya is a testament to modern design, with the kind of chic minimalism you might find in any good New Farm restaurant, my room is the opposite, a nod to Jungian race memory. It is lavishly enfolded in massive glittery cloth and extravagant gauzes. Any of the curtains, bedspread or carpet have the makings of a pair of handsome Turkish pyjamas. I woke this morning with a fierce headache from sleeping too close to the brilliant orange curtains. Oscar Wilde is said to have joked on his death-bed in a French hotel “this wall paper has to go or I will.” I hope the Troya’s curtains don’t manage to do me in.



But the location here is wonderful, surrounded by tiny alleys filled with fruit and fish, and loads of little restaurants. It's European.. but it isn't.




My friend Rosemary is staying at the Troya, exactly four floors above me. We share the same interesting view, straight across the open space of a kind of atrium and into the mirror of an identical hotel room opposite. One develops a kind of turn by turn decorum about peering across at the other person’s daily activities. Prue will remember the fascination with which we gazed each morning upon a pair of crossed male ankles and the bottom half of an arm-chair, visible from our Paris apartment a few years ago. That and the ferocious fights of the couple in the next door apartment, one of which memorably involved breaking all of the bathroom glass in a spectacular krystalnacht of marital hatred.

Rosemary and I went out for a bit of a promenade in nearby Istiklal, inadvertently getting involved with a massive demo on our way to find somewhere to eat. There was an impressive police presence all around but in the end the crowd milled peacefully towards the bottom of the hill, a place we later re-visited several times in our efforts to return to the Troya. Amazingly it was I, with my famously non-existent navigational skills, who managed to return us to the hotel. Venice alarmed me terribly last year, for the same reason that Istanbul does. These very old cities have nothing but alley ways and back streets, without a single right angle to think back to. Weirdly I seem to be better at navigating places like this than those more logically laid out.





We found a lovely place to eat, with excellent fish, probably from the Marmara.



The drive in from the airport yesterday was fabulous, along the sea shore where ruined fortresses still try to guard the European part of the city.






And even before we landed flying across the Mediterranean and Nicosia and gazing down at the ancient-ness of it all was quite magical. You sensed there might still be a Roman galley or two wallowing somewhere in the water below. Istanbul was, of course, Constantinople for a while and the heart of the Christian church. I went to a local catholic service at St Anthony’s this morning with Rose. The singing was deep and fluid, almost Arabic, but with parts of the service still in the old Latin, the bits that Mozart and Schubert and Vivaldi and every other major composer has set. So the service remained intelligible because of the Kyries etc. And outside there was a charming statue of John 23, looking a little like St Francis of Assisi.




We took a bit of a Sunday arvo stroll along with the rest of humanity, caught the little tram from Taksim Square to the Tunel, stopped for Turkish coffee and generally pretended to be locals. I don't think I looked quite the part, but never mind. It was fun.




This is something of a scavenger blog today, some of the pix are blurred and my time for writing is a bit abbreviated. Wendy - thanks heaps for the Orhan Pamuk, a fascinating novel. And also for the Istanbul guides. Really useful. I've bought some Turkish music with all sorts of strange instruments. Maybe I've lucked out. I couldn't read the text to know what sort of music I'll be listening to. The sufi stuff interested me, but then I thought of Doris Lessing's books...