JUST UNDER YOUR FEET: Drawing in the Corridors of Lord

Posted on May 21, 2013 by tricivenola

I understand that Dan Brown’s new book Inferno takes place in tunnels under Hagia Sophia. Here’s my experience with one of them. From the archives, remastered and enhanced.

The bridal processional walks singing along Akbiyik Street, trailing clouds of incense. Between rows of arches and marble columns, through hotels and hostels, bars and cafes and shops, the grand company spirals up through the bad bald renovation of the Stairway of Lord, chanting with every step, and continues on toward the Four Seasons Hotel. Heavy silks and pearled brocades sweep through groups of backpackers drinking beer and smoking nargile, tourists haggling over carpets and ceramics, hotel check-ins and waiters juggling trays, as the Empress and her attendants and priests walk from her marriage, in the Church of Lord, to its consummation in the Imperial Bedchamber of the Magnaura Palace. Sometimes I spend so much time drawing these antique ruins that the past becomes superimposed on the present.

THE PALACE UNDER THE CARPET SHOP

: I found this place back in 1999. I’d heard about the Byzantine palace they’d found but couldn’t get in anywhere to draw it. I was out on Kutlugun Street in Sultanahmet across from Four Seasons Hotel, crazy, thinking about them building on the ruin before I could draw it. A guy stepped out of a carpet shop. “Do not cry, Madam,” he said, “we have the Magnaura Palace in our basement.”

What they have is a section of the Corridor of Lord, part of the Magnaura Palace Complex. Every structure on the street is built over a chunk of the Corridor. But the Basdogan family at Asia Minor Carpets spent half a million dollars digging out theirs. I started drawing it that day, and I’ve been drawing it ever since. It’s a spectacular ruin. You can see it under Asia Minor Carpet Shop and from the back of Albura Kathisma Restaurant. Don’t walk where the floor is wet! I love it so much I wrote a story about it. Here’s an excerpt. For our post, I’ve included my Plein Air drawings of the place and some photos.

(Fall 1999) …As lights came on I began to see dim walls of pitted stone blocks. At the bottom of the wall to my left was a low arch. One of the electrical cords traveled along the wall and into this black hole. It lit up suddenly. The wall was so thick it was almost a tunnel. I stuck the sketchbook under my arm, bent double, and went in.

It was a little irregular room with a tall vaulted ceiling. Amid the stones of one wall was a broken terracotta pipe. A bath?

Across was the entrance to another archway. I crowded through it into a narrow passage, rough stone walls going up into shadows, iron prongs sticking out from the stones above my head, hammered into them in some forgotten necessity a thousand years ago.

I walked down the passage on warped wooden planks. The orange electrical cord looped along ahead of me, buzzing, strung here and there with glowing yellow bulbs. At the end of the passage it disappeared through a tall opening in the stone wall. I followed the cord through this opening. I smelled damp earth and age. The yellow lights made aureoles in the dusk.

I was in a big dim space, looking down the wooden catwalk at a brick archway about fifteen feet high, plugged almost to the top with rubble. Between the rubble and the arch was a black hole going back forever. The walls on either side were stone. At the bottom were cement sacks and a shovel. Above was a dome made of small red bricks in a spiral pattern. To the left and right of the arch were more pitted brick archways, at right angles to the one in the center. Each led to another spiral brick dome over another archway, each full of rocks and dirt that went off into the shadows. In the center arch, next to the black hole, was a bright square yellow lamp. The electrical cord swooped along to this and stopped. End of the line. I was in Byzantium.

In this early attempt at drawing old stone. I just outlined every brick. After so many centuries, each one has a separate personality. The cat clearly said, “What are you doing here?”

The Basdogan Family finished their excavation, three full rooms and the Passage, plus a small cistern behind that broken pipe.They installed two staircases and a plywood floor and topped parts of the ruin with glass, and put in a cafe with a large sign over it: Palatium. In 2005, obsessed, I drew a schematic of their excavation. Here it is.

In the story above, I went into the first room at the bottom of the drawing, up through the Bath and Passage, and into the Dome Chamber at the top, which is Kutlugun Street. The bottom is Akbiyik. Both run parallel along the Marmara slope of Sultanahmet. The shape of the streets is determined by the shape of the Corridor. See?

Here on Google, that big dome conglomerate at the top is Hagia Sophia. That Four Seasons, now gorgeous, was the actual Midnight Express prison, built on the ruins of the Magnaura Palace. You can still see graffiti from prisoners there. The Magnaura was the Imperial Palace from the 4th to the 8th centuries. The galleries were still around in 1200, as this CGI take from Byzantium 1200 shows:

Behind hotels along Akbiyik street you can still glimpse tall pointed arches and old stone. Here’s what Byzantium 1200 thinks the inside upper gallery looked like.

Corridor of Lord CGI ©2007, Walking Through Byzantium. ©byzantium1200.com. Used by permission.: According to various sources, including one that quotes an 8th-century Book of Ceremonies, the Empress’s procession walked to her marriage, her ceremonial bath, her bedchamber and back again. I wonder if the actual consummation was witnessed as well.

Drawing down under the street I wonder about a lot of things. There’s the dripping of water, great silence and a sense of waiting. Ghost stories seem sensible here. I heard of something in tall boots that told the carpet shop tea lady to move along, and one night watchman tells lurid tales of spooks running up and down the stairs. I myself saw only a black cat-sized shadow detach itself from a black doorway down there, skitter across the floor and evaporate before my very eyes.

In the Corridors of Lord ©2008 Trici Venola

The best story was from an old lady in the neighborhood. In Kathisma Restaurant, next to the entrance to this excavation, there’s a tunnel tricked out to look like a wishing well. The old lady said that when she was a kid, they used to go in there and come out on the Marmara Sea. An adult tried this in the 1960s, but he got stuck and died, so be warned.

THE DISAPPEARING BISHOP

Gennadios II meets Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453

I remember that Bishop of Constantinople in 1453, coming in full pomp with all his attendants to meet Mehmet the Conqueror. He handed over the keys to the city, and, according to witnesses, walked into the wall of Hagia Sophia and disappeared forever.

There are these small doors in Hagia Sophia, and many, many tunnels. That must have been quite a processional, all those priests quick-stepping down through secret passages to the sea. They would have worn their best to meet the Conqueror, and carried all their jewels and all their prayers to avoid meeting their Maker.

Red and blue and gold, furs and plumes, torches, little lamps. The Pilgrim Foot was a common Christian theme. Fantastical creatures pre-date and permeate Christianity throughout the Middle East, a tradition now echoed only by those gargoyles on Notre Dame. Perhaps the hurrying processional carried small ivories like this Madonna or the angel at the top of the page.

Or reliquaries with bas-reliefs similar to these silver ones of Apostles Peter and Paul. After all they were running for their lives.

I drew these little images in museums, most of them in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, a magnificent evolved place that allows me to wander with my sketchbook and my mind, in the wake of the grand processional of history. It continues to wend its way along these streets, sun lancing in the arched windows, reflected flames gleaming in the surfaces of old marble bowed with the collective weight of panoply and prayers.

Just under your feet, steps recede into the earth, domes push up weeds, arches bear up under traffic. Forty fathoms below that the goddesses are pagan, the angels’ wings come out of their hips, the lions have nearly human faces. Down and down and down go the passages, the great processionals in a honeycomb of antiquity. Workmen with iPhones jackhammer away, following the pipedream of progress, but they have never found the bottom of Sultanahmet.

– All drawings Plein Air by Trici Venola, from the Drawing On Istanbul Series. All full drawings done in sketchbook format: 18 cm X 52 cm, drafting pens on rag paper. We appreciate your comments!

This post originally appeared early in 2012 under the title: THE PALACE UNDER THE CARPET SHOP: Drawing In the Corridors of Lord. I’m closing in on finishing a new book, so instead of the usual week I took a night and upgraded this for you. It’s one of my favorites.

KAPADOKYA / CAPPADOCIA 2: Drawing in the Echoes of Faith

Posted on April 29, 2013 by tricivenola

THE HEART CHURCH I sat in chill near-darkness at the bottom of a natural stone formation shaped like a fat rocket ship about to take off. I felt perfect peace, and the silence sang. I felt veins of power surging up around me from a point in the bones of the earth directly below, throbbing up to converge again at the point in the sky. I thought of those ‘Sixties pyramid people, claiming that a pyramid shape brings together mystic geological forces. I believed them for the first time.

I was down in the bottom chapel, below ground, in a rock formation that has been a church since early Christianity. Someone long ago painted the darkness white with little red hearts on it. It was almost too dark to draw at all but I tried. There were graves cut in the floor, their occupants long gone to dust. I could lie here in the dark, I thought, in this singing silence, feel my bones become one with the earth, content for all eternity. But –like that line in Gladiator– NOT YET!!

I can’t die yet, there’s too much to draw. Much of it here in Kapadokya, the central steppes region of Turkey, a spiritual refuge. Everyone else in the world spells it Cappadocia and pronounces it with a soft final “c,” but since the original name– Katpatuka in Old Persian– means Land of Beautiful Horses, and Kapadokya sounds like a galloping horse, and that’s what the people who live there call it, I use Kapadokya.

Those hearts, by the way, look like a natural abstraction of apricot leaves. There are a lot of apricot trees here.

First-time readers might enjoy the previous post, which is an overview of Kapadokya’s history and my first trip to the place in 1999. I loved it on first glance and have continued to come back for close-ups, like this one of a kid with a Biblical name become Turkish, in a ruined rock church with a vanishing saint.

Spring is here and there’s so much to be done. High Season is upon us here in Istanbul: hotels filling up, all the monuments jammed, monstrous cruise ships blocking the views, throngs trooping through the bazaars. Some of my friends, in shops and hotels, don’t sleep again until winter. There are all kinds of projects to finish immediately, and only me to do them. And all I can think about is that just about now, in Kapadokya, beneath the sheer rock walls punctuated with caves, the high grass in the bottoms of the canyons is shooting up green, and the drifts of cottonwood blossoms on the ground can be combed with your eyes. So fooey on all these Istanbul distractions. I’m back to Kapadokya, and I’ve got you with me.

Nine AM, and the sun full in my face. The air sharp and glittering, little flies everywhere. Only the drawing kept me from going nuts with them. I squinted into the white under a giant scarf rolled like a turban, and drew and drew.

While Kapadokya is full of former tourists who fall in love with the place and buy up all the caves, the locals mostly want to move into cheesy apartment buildings just out of town. Some families still live in caves.

I climbed up the mountain above Urgup one morning and was struck with an obviously occupied cave complex. A seamed dark woman, shaped like a pillow tied in the middle, came out to hang up her laundry. Awhile later, a young beautiful echo of her stumbled out sleepy into the morning and found me drawing her house and her mother.

After the two-hour drawing session they invited me into the house for tea. Inside it was big and clean, with plastered walls, electricity and plumbing, lace curtains at the little square windows cut in the hill. I imagined all the empty caves I’ve seen, filled with lively people. Friends who grew up in caves describe scooting up and down the ladders between, calling between the caves, the cosy enclosed feeling of a cave with a fire pit, the way every little thing has its own alcove. I know I sleep better in a cave than any other place, deep perfect sleep all the night long.

The View from Uchisar ©2007 Trici Venola

GREEKS AND TURKS This land is beyond ancient. A thousand armies have trekked through here:. Hittites, Romans, Armenians, Seljuks, Greeks. Arab raiders in the 7th and 8th centuries drove the Christians into underground Hittite cities, converting chapels to pigeon coops and painting designs all round the pigeonholes.

Christians came up from underground and repainted frescoes in the cave chapels before decamping a few centuries later. Some Greek Christians stuck it out until the population exchange in the 20th century, building square houses of embossed brick like this one in Mustafapasa.

The Christian monasteries here were Greek, and the Byzantine Christians were the genesis of what we now know as Greek Orthodox. All across Anatolia the Greeks left their buildings, temples and myths; a few of their descendents are still here as Turks.

The 20th century brought about a great dissolution of the centuries-old relationship of Greeks and Turks in both countries, scars which are still healing. Reading Louis de Bernieres’ Birds Without Wings broke my heart but fed my understanding. Two governments, two faiths, but one people. It’s everywhere: in the music, the food, the way the people look and the way they dance. I hope that this century brings about greater harmony than the last.

THE BIG CHURCH Are you ready for this place? It was March 2006 and cold enough to numb your hands in gloves, but there wasn’t any question of missing these drawings. Now called Durmus Kadir after its owner, this great stone basilica is a premier example of Goreme’s legendary 1001 cave churches.

Like all cave chapels Durmush Kadir’s interior is carved out of the rock all of a piece: a sculpture of a church to emulate the diverse columns, alcoves, domes, altars and pulpits in a conventionally constructed church elsewhere.

This one gets a lot of action. Months later in Istanbul, a woman looking through my sketchbook suddenly let out a yelp and pulled out a photo of herself getting married on this very podium. Today the area in front of Durmush Kadir is much spiffed-up, presumably to make it attractive for events. Across the valley is this apartment, replete with carvings.

Spacious inside, It looks like a VIP suite to me. During the Middle Ages, Goreme was the seat of enormous ecclesiastical power. Ecumenical councils were held here. Pilgrims journeyed from all over to convene here.

Thousands of monks tilled these fields, tending the huge flocks of pigeons. Valued for their dung, which still fertilizes all the food grown here, and for their messenger abilities, pigeons are treasured here still. Below Durmush Kadir’s church is a refectory, where hundreds of cowled monks sat for their supper. The drawing below was done through a chain-link fence. That modern wall marks the present property line.

IN TOWN Pat Yale, justly famed for her wonderful travel books about Turkey, lives in Goreme with about nine cats, and in 2006 I was lucky enough to house sit. Not only did I get all these swell drawings, but two of the cats kittened while I was there, giving us a grand total of fourteen. The cats midwifed for each other, too.

Something about the details in the monochromatic landscape makes Kapadokya perfect for the kind of work in this series, and I can’t stop drawing. So I sat in the street and drew this:

I had company in the street. For two hours she watched me draw those two hats, and then she posed unblinking, glinting up at me, until I had her, including that fabulous shadow of the oya scarf trim on her face. “Gotcha,” I said, and showed her. She nodded violently and vanished. On one of Pat’s walls is an antique pink cotton quilted jacket, very worn. It’s a classic Kapadokya jacket worn by a woman who lived and died here long since. I picture it on someone like this.

PAINTING IN THE DARK: THE GENESIS OF MONASTIC LIFE Kapadokya has been protected since the advent of Tourism in the 1980s. Preserved from destruction-by-development, the land here can be observed shedding itself, sloughing off and renewing. Caves last a long time, and then one day they collapse, or erosion finally eats them away. It’s the nature of this rock to shed. Dust is a part of life here. If you move into a cave, stabilizing the walls (with the help of a local expert) is a good idea. Some of these chimney chapels are so old they’re almost gone, with only the keyhole-shaped alcove or window as a clue that here is a witness to so many prayers.

The monolith above was once a chapel at the intersection of the main road with the path leading down to the river. Below, Laura Prusoff and her partner Nurettin look across Pigeon Valley from their Palace in Ortahisar. Over the years I’ve drawn their view quite a few times. My reward is that I can close my eyes and see it in all its grandeur. The shadows paint a new shape every few minutes, making a drawing of several hours a very different thing from a photograph.

I didn’t realize that the whole of Pigeon Valley was a monastery. It took a long time of looking, and then I could see it.

The Christians were here from the beginning of Christianity. St Paul came through Kayseri– once Caesarea– on his way to Ankyra, now Ankara, carrying Christianity with him. It found fertile ground in Kapadokya, now full of ecclesiastical ruins, abandoned by the Christians around the 15th century in the teeth of Islam. This bas-relief figure is the only one in Kapadokya. “It’s a devil,” said my friend. “But it looks like an angel,” I said. “No, it’s always my whole life been called a devil,” he said.

Now It's Called A Devil ©2011 Trici Venola

Goreme sits between two valleys full of natural stone formations, many with Early Christian cave churches, part of a vast monastery complex with influences reaching across oceans and continents. By the 4th century, the Cappadocian Fathers were an ecclesiastical force to be reckoned with, forming much early Christian philosophy.

The very template for monastic life was cut in these rocks by St Basil, a highly educated 4th century cleric who renounced a promising career in Constantinople and Athens to become a monk. As such he became a hermit in Kapadokya, where he was joined by Future Saint Gregory of Nazianzas. I like to think of these two wearing down the stones under their knees, sallying forth in cold and snow and scorching sun, tending the fields, the flocks and the Word. They were joined by many others.

A FIeld of Sunflowers ©2011 Trici Venola

In 370 Basil became Bishop. A charismatic leader and great organizer, he reformed the Liturgy, established hospitals, and fostered monasticism as a way of life: chastity, dedication, seclusion, submersion of the single in the whole. These ecclesiastical troglodytes made the land their church. Cells, offices, stables, kitchens, cafeterias, dormitories, chapels, churches, wineries, hospitals: all were caves.

The Hospital Monastery 2011 Trici Venola

THREE MORE CHURCHES Yusuf Koc is in a cluster of chimneys out in Goreme Valley, just outside the town. A local family lives in them and tends the churches as they always have.

Goreme Valley Longshot ©2006 Trici Venola

Before the advent of Tourism, folks just sumped out their own caves. Now they police them as well, with assistance from the State.

Another Freezing Jesus ©2006 Trici Venola

Boy, was it cold in there. I wonder if the monks had braziers or if they depended on crowds for warmth. This chapel had columns, but was pressed into service as a pigeon-house in pre-tourism. The columns were broken off, but the frescoes preserved with only a little graffiti. See the pigeonholes built into the window?

This was painted after the 9th century. The monochromatic and geometric painting in many caves is Iconoclastic art. The Iconoclasts, like the Muslims, proscribed pictorial art. They were around for about 100 years, in the latter 8th and early 9th centuries. But this is pictorial and multicolored. and the state of preservation tells us it’s post-Iconoclast. Here are two archangels on horseback. See the wings?

I love this Naive Byzantine painting. Anatomically it’s more symbolic than realistic. Artistic anatomy peaked with the late Roman period, when the body was a still a temple. Medieval Christians were suspicious of the body, seeing it as a fount of temptation. The monastic life was about eschewing physical pleasures in favor of devotion to the divine. This is reflected in the art of the time: bodies lost under cloth or armor, an insouciant attitude towards proportion and gravity. Then again, considering that these caves are pretty darn dim inside, I wonder they could see to paint at all.

Up top in Pigeon Valley is a Black Church: fire has blackened the inside. Notice the bas-relief cross on the sooted ceiling to the right, revealed by the erosion at the window.

I crawled up through this opening and crouched on a big old earth spill up under the domes to get this next drawing. We know that this chapel was carved after the 6th century because of these domes. Hagia Sophia’s great dome, so big it was considered proof of the existence of God, was completed in 537 and influenced the entire Christian world. Henceforth we see domes everywhere in Christianity, including here.

Inside the Black Church ©2006 Trici Venola

This next one isn’t the last church in the valley, it’s just the last one I could get to before dark.

There are hundreds of hidden chapels in the rocks. Locals know and don’t tell, and this makes me happy. I like to think there’s some mystery left in the world. Here’s the inside. I had twenty minutes until dusk, did what I could, took a photo and finished from that.

Inside the Last Church ©2006 Trici Venola

This geometric Iconoclastic painting was done in cochineal –insect– blood. It’s still red, And is that an Egyptian-type Eye of God there above the doorway?

FAITH IN HUMANITY It was Nurettin who got me to put my sketchbooks in Koran covers, clear back on my first visit in 1999. “You should do something,” he said through Laura, “to let people know how important, how precious, this work is.” This was after the wife of a local politico grabbed my sketchbook and left it open and forgotten in her lap while she drank tea and chattered and I sat angry and anxious and afraid of offending her until mercifully they left and I took back the sketchbook. “Why didn’t you say something? People are ignorant,” said Nurettin, “They don’t understand original art.”

On returning to Istanbul I took his advice. In the Grand Bazaar I found a pile of Koran covers in all sizes and colors, each pieced together by some shepherd or caravan housewife to keep a Koran covered, as all precious things are in Islam. I still buy as many of the right size as I can find, and they hold the original sketchbooks to this day.

Faith is a powerful force. If enough people believe in a certain way, it can change things. St Basil saw this, encouraging young men to subvert their individuality and become monks: cells in a great working mechanism of faith. The land he chose was already hallowed. It’s been holy land since the beginning of time, and I swear you can feel it. It likes us. The air is good. The water keeps you healthy. The caves offer comfortable shelter, staying around 72 degrees Fahrenheit winter and summer. The rock is easy to carve. The land yields, providing soil, fertilizer, minerals, and an absence of earthquakes. Something about the place focuses faith, whatever that faith may be.

There’s a sense of humor. The ancient gods are still here, laughing at us. In this region that was filled for centuries with young men trying mightily to ignore the blandishments of the physical, the land looks like nothing so much as the bared and hairy hillocks, planes, rolling curves and startling appendages of a great body, a constant reminder that we are humans on earth, our home. Kapadokya seems to conspire to strengthen this sense of belonging and inclusion, for this is the one thing we all have in common regardless of belief: our humanity.

Balloon Over the Valley ©2007 Trici Venola

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All drawings Plein air. All art from the Drawing On Istanbul™ Project by Trici Venola. All photos © Trici Venola. All art sketchbook format, mostly 7″ X 20″ / 18 cm X 52 cm, done with drafting pens on rag paper. The Drawing On Istanbul Project is independent of any institution. Regular readers of this blog will feel vindicated on learning that InterNations is including us in their recommended expat blog section in Istanbul. What an honor! Thanks for reading. We love your comments.

KAPADOKYA / CAPPADOCIA: Drawing Over the Rainbow

Posted on March 28, 2013 by tricivenola

DISASTER On my second trip to Turkey in 1999, I lost a nearly-full sketchbook. Not only did it feel like a miscarriage, but the whole trip was contingent on producing drawings for my website to boost tourism, as a big earthquake earlier that year near Istanbul had scared people off. The travel company I was working with was sending me to some place called Kapadokya. Numb with shock, I pulled out a blank sketchbook and got on the plane. I had no idea what to expect. The resulting experience changed my life and took my work to a new level. I have always loved this first look at Kapadokya, a place immediately familiar despite the fact I’d never suspected its existence.

OVER THE RAINBOW

The plane landed at night. The airport shuttle hurtled through a black unknown, glimpses of dusty roads in the headlights. When I got into my room I fell asleep the minute I lay down.

I woke up in a rock palace. Breakfast was being served out on the lawn. The air glittered. Far up on the smooth rock face of the hill behind the hotel was a small square black hole, my first glimpse of the famous caves of Kapadokya. I drew the hill, the hotel balcony, an apricot tree. The air was full of tiny flies. I wrapped a scarf around my head and shoulders against them. A slivery woman with bright blue eyes showed up and started unloading jams and jellies, chattering in German with the tourists at the next table. “I am Sabine,” she said– she pronounced that final e–“You must come to our new hotel and draw it. It’s an energy center.” I did feel energized. The place was full of natural vitality. “Yes,” she said seriously, “All Kapadokya is a center of energy.”

I’ll say. A TV crew came and filmed me drawing this, friends in Istanbul saw it! I even met the mayor. We were in Urgup, a wonderful little rock town punctuated with the dots of caves. Kapadokya is Turkey’s central steppes region. High and rocky, populated with small towns, famous for its pure air and water, history, surreal natural stone formations, and the ancient caves in them which dot every landscape. The Greek spelling, Cappadocia, means Land of Beautiful Horses. I love that Kapadokya sounds like horses galloping.

Sabine invited me over for later and arranged for me to ride around with Mevlut, the manager of the hotel, to see the land. Still mourning the lost sketchbook, I closed the new one over the new drawings and got in the car.

I had never seen such country. All around us rose giant rocks in amazing shapes. Some looked like enormous erotica, others like trolls. Mevlut stopped the car. “Look! Men in hats!”

We drove further. “Camel Rock,” he said. There were many donkeys. All the women I saw were wearing shalvar: long loose trousers gathered at the waist, and loose vests, clothes that seemed to celebrate billowing hips and breasts. The commonest headscarf was a gauzy pale green number, scalloped on the edges and sparkled with green glass beads. When we got to Red Valley, Ali Baba the groundskeeper told me the local scarf code. It’s all pretty much optional, more fashion than fear.

“When the Christians went into the caves, the caves were here,” said Ali Baba, “See? Matthew, Mark, Luke an’ John…” pointing out frescoes of the Apostles in the Grape Church, a Medieval chapel in Red Valley. The path to the church was through gold and peach rock laced with the bright green of apricot trees. On it I had a happy epiphany: I had been here before. Over the years since, this feeling of personal familiarity has only intensified.

These cave churches are small cheerful places full of light. This one was gated against vandals, but Ali Baba unlocked it and left me for two hours. It was my first sense of what Christianity had been, a refuge and a comfort from Old Testament and Roman atrocities. The Apostles looked homey, like favorite uncles. Only their eyes were damaged. I learned later that, before tourism and subsequent governmental protections, children playing in the abandoned caves had been frightened by those staring Byzantine eyes and had scratched them out. Me, I felt closer to the original teachings of Christ here in this golden cave than ever I had before.

GOREME

In The Name of the Rose, when those monks were on their way to a 13rh-century confrontation between the worldly Dominican and more aescetic Franciscan ideologies, Goreme– pronounced Gore-eh-may– was where they were going. Its monastery, arguably the most powerful in the Middle Ages, is still there, preserved as the Open Air Museum, part of the legendary 1001 cave churches of Goreme Valley.

Every single structure here is hollowed out of a cave: dormitories, offices, refectories and chapels. All the architectural elements were carved out of a single piece of rock: pillars, benches, altars, arches, crosses and, after Hagia Sophia in the 6th-century, domes. So we have a sculpture of a church, which was then painted, and nothing is harder to render in pen and ink.

ST BARBARA’S CHAPEL

This drawing took about five hours, spread out over two days, freezing sessions with grit blowing in the open door and roughening the page. The geometric paintings were done in the 8t-century during the time of the pictorial art-destroying Iconoclasts who took the Second Commandment quite literally: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image of anything… See the dome at the top? Look just below it to the left and see a little stick figure on the top of something like an oil-derrick. This has got to be an Ascension. Up in the dome, some of the figures fade into dots, presumably because they have already Ascended.

All of this geometric work was painted in cochineal blood, still red twelve centuries later. A cochineal is like a big cockroach, and this little figure at the bottom is either a cochineal with blood coming out its behind or the devil on a broomstick, depending on which guide you hear. Two centuries after the Iconoclasts, the area behind the carved stone altar was overlaid with paintings of Jesus and a few saints, in a Naive Byzantine style I love. Think of those artists: natural light or torches, local paints, the occasional master coming through from the great cities. And over the centuries the glory growing in the caves.

TEA IN A CAVE

The first day I drew St. Barbara’s was cold but the second day it rained. The guards took pity on me and invited me into their cave for chai. They had a wood stove in there, a fine view of the caves opposite which look like black windows in sorcerers’ hats, and a samovar.

The chai was hot and substantial. Osman, at far left, had peculiar writing all over his hands. He told me that they itched horribly, and that a healer had written all over them in purple ink, and that it cured the itching. Another guard told me he was crazy, but two days later, when I came back to draw more, the hands that had been purple were clean and the itching was gone.

WALKING WITH SABINE

At the tip of a tower of rock was an ancient cave door, two hundred feet above the floor of a canyon. “The land is sunken,” said Sabine, “Was once much higher.” We climbed up into a cave apartment house, where the rock had sheared off, leaving the long-abandoned cave houses exposed. Above several of the doors were many little declivities in rows. “Pigeonholes,” said Sabine. Actual pigeonholes!” I said, delighted. “Yes,” she said, “everything here is still fertilized with pigeon dung.”

So it turns out that most of these caves either are or were eventual pigeon caves. The people go in the bottom and rake out the precious pigeon poop, spreading it over the fields as they have done since ancient days. Arabs in the caves, monks in the monasteries, pagans in the rocks, all scraped and spread and planted and prayed, and flocks of pigeons still fill the skies.

Away along the rocky trail, through a valley of breast-shaped stone formations, we came upon a tablecloth-sized patch of dark red earth combed to the consistency of velvet. In the middle stood an apricot tree, and near it a grapevine. This was part of someone’s farm. It was here that we left money– under the bark!– for grapes we had eaten off the vine. In those palmy days this was customary. I was amazed. “Do not worry,” said Sabine, “we have left far more than the whole grapevine would bring.”

That afternoon I was hunched over my sketchbook on a scrap of carpet for two hours in the cold October light drawing old Greek buildings. My hand was stiff and even my bones were cold. A plump lady in traditional Kapadokyan dress appeared carrying a laden tea-tray. She smiled and jerked her head in invitation. She had sapphire eyes. I followed her into a house I had just drawn. Although the walls were stained and the floor uneven, she had lace curtains and nice china. I forgot I had been cold. I tried to draw the food before I ate it but lost out, it smelled so good. She called out the window, and up came a little girl I had just drawn, Fatma, who told me that my hostess’s name was Zeliha. Such elegance. The things that matter– like children, food, and curtains– were all immaculate, and the things that don’t matter– like the walls– just didn’t matter.

THE CITY IN THE HILL

Honeycombed below a hill behind a dusty little town is the huge underground Hittite city of Kaymakli.

It’s like a giant dark honeycomb, dry and dessicated, bleak with piped-in halogen lights. Many Kapadokyans say that the whole land is connected with tunnels between the many underground cities. There are no earthquakes here. When persecuted Christians went underground, this is where they went. Attributed to Hittite construction in 1640 BCE, Kaymakli has been co-opted by everyone since who has needed a place to hide. This has got to be the genesis of the term underground to mean covert.

I sat in a four-thousand-year-old winery, a stone chamber twenty meters down, drawing in the cold stillness and the faint buzzing of the lights, and thought about burning rags soaked in oil. I wondered how their vision was, what they looked like and what they wore. I thought about looms in the dimness, cooking fires, smoke, talk, laughter in the hive of kitchens, prisons, infirmaries, chapels, wells, toilets, forges, baths, food storage, wine presses, birthing and embalming chambers, all in the constant dark.

I was allowed two hours to draw, and very grateful I was for the light. They slept ten to a room and hung the sling for the baby in the center, you can see the hook there in the ceiling. The rock is so soft that any little household item had its own little declivity. Hammocks were popular, and alcoves held clothes. Food was stored in this vast common chamber on the third level. There were jars of water and oil and wine, animals, small people hurrying through the stepped corridors between levels. My guide Mustafa capered through the cramped labyrinthine passages, laughing over his flashlight, he said, to encourage me, “in case you are claustrophobe.”

Once it was so crowded here, and the passageways so tiny, that the stocky little people went one-way only. Small as they were they still had to bend double to get around, so that to prevent miscarriage pregnant women stayed near the surface, where you could stand up.

These guys below told me there is still a tiny band of Hittites in Kapadokya, worshiping their ancient gods and small enough to navigate comfortably through the tunnels of their Iron Age cities. I’d love to believe them.

THE PALACE AT ORTAHISAR I’d heard of an American woman who bought part of a village to renovate into a home here. Sabine took me to meet her. We walked through the fields and came out onto a plateau on the edge of a steep gorge. Across from us was a mountain, all by itself on the steppe. It was honeycombed with arches, caves, walls, square Greek buildings, stone ruins and tunnels all the way to the top, where a flag waved above a brick wall. This was the Castle of Ortahisar.

“There she is,” said Sabine, pointing to a tiny waving figure halfway up the Castle. Laura, the woman we had come to meet, was sitting out on the terrace of her Palace, a sprawl of terraces, buildings and fifty-two caves she was renovating with her partner Nurettin. We walked a narrow path along the face of the gorge, all the way down to the river below and back up again.

On the terrace I looked across to see where we had been. A hundred abandoned caves looked back at me, some with painting outside their doors, some with elaborate staircases carved in front, some with walls and trees and pigeonholes. Laura was sitting next to a giant Hittite stone lion.

Still in renovation, the Palace terrace looked like this. I got drunk on both views and had to draw them. Laura and Nurettin invited me to stay awhile. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The top of a Roman arch stuck up through the asphalt of a courtyard nearby. Years before, I’d spent many hours drawing things out of my art history books. I’d put myself to sleep at night picturing ancient Egypt, Rome, Greece– cultures I could only imagine in countries I had never seen. Now after a year around Turkey I still almost wept at the proximity of so much old stone and I had to sit right down and draw it.

One day I wandered around in the ruins down from the Palace, sat down on a pile of rock and started drawing the tumbled piles of masonry and weeds. I had taken to wearing a brown leather jacket over a thick silk sweater and a huge scarf. I had discovered why local women wore them. I wrapped it around my head and shoulders against the cold and other times against sun and flies. The wind fluttered the fringe as I hunched over the sketchbook, holding it flat to keep the pages from blowing.

As I drew it grew colder and the wind howled lonely around the mountain. It felt like the end of the world. Under that bleak feeling was joy that at last I could render stone. I continued to draw under the gray sky until I had finished. I stood up and shook out my drawing hand. Stiff and chilled, I walked around the mountain and stopped in shock. There was a street, cars and minarets and telephone booths, people selling potato chips. A voice behind me said in brisk British, “Excuse me, but would you like a cup of coffee?”

That was how I met Una and Crazy Ali. While he made coffee I admired his store full of curiosities, stamping my feet to get the circulation going, before the three of us sat down at the stove for Turkish coffee. I love it now, but drinking it used to be like gargling sand. This was thick hot elixir. Ali gave me a poem which he composed on the spot, and Una told me that she had come out from Ireland years before, put on a scarf, and could not take it off.

A cave store, not Crazy Ali’s,. Out of focus, but look at those colors!

While I was there came the Call to Prayer. Una and Ali started telling muezzin stories. The muezzin is the singer of the Call, and in Turkey he is electronically amplified. One muezzin’s rendition, they said, was so awful that every animal for miles would join in: honking donkeys, howling dogs and screeching roosters, the people walking around with their faces scrunched up and fingers in their ears, and by the time the prayer call was finished the entire village was a raucous cacophonic hymn.

A BALANCE OF ENERGY Sabine invited me to stay at Gamirasu, which was the name she had given to her hotel, renovated from Hittite and Byzantine ruins in the little town of Ayvali. Still dispirited from losing the sketchbook I gratefully accepted her offer of energy-balancing therapy. Not only that, but I was able to work on the drawings for three straight days, sitting out on the terrace in the good light, facing the caves and looking down on the rose garden and the lawn, letting go of the lost sketchbook with the development of this new one. The energy session came last. Sabine worked with a cat, who she said helped direct the forces. There was certainly some kind of force at work. I was to rip up my nice life in LA and move to Turkey, and to become increasingly close to my new friends and to Kapadokya. I will always be grateful to Sabine for her introduction to this magical, weirdly familiar spiritual home. We lost her in 2011. I expect she is now one with the energy she so understood.

LOVE VALLEY On the last day Laura dropped me off in Goreme to draw this house right out of Tolkein. I drew for two hours from the site of the Roman tomb opposite, the property of a German expat who enthusiastically told me all about renovating the tomb, which had been occupied by goats, shepherds and wayfarers long after its original occupant had turned to dust.

That night we all rode out happy under the huge October moon. We racketed through the bright night, the shapes of the rocks in dramatic relief, silver on one side and black on the other. We pulled up under a tree. I got out of the car and stared in amazement, for above the tree, all around and as far as I could see loomed the fabled clusters of stone phalli massive under the full moon. All across the hilly landscape they rose, in groups and pairs and awesome sentinels, as tall as buildings, every variation but all big and all graphically phallic.

“Makes you humble, eh Nurettin?” said the German. We hiked along a narrow gorge full of bushes and rocks. The ground began to change as we walked, until we were walking among great rounded humps of rock as wide as houses. “I think we’re past the really big ones,” said the German. “Hey, maybe these are the really big ones,” said Laura. “Maybe just the tops of the big ones.” The moon burned silver and the stars pounded overhead, millions in the huge dark sky glimpsed between the moonlit towers of stone. I thought of the Romans marching through here, the Persian armies, Alexander the Great, Mithridates, Hittites, Christians and Muslims and Genghis Khan; pictured the great slumbering masses of history billeted among the knobby shadows and gullies, all through the silent grasses, under the sentinel stones.

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All drawings Plein Air. All art © Trici Venola, from The Drawing On Istanbul Project. All the drawings here are from one sketchbook, Kapadokya 1999, save for Peacock Pigeon Roost which was done in 2011. All art done with drafting pens on rag paper in the sketchbook which measures 18 cm X 52 cm when open. We love your comments! We love your Likes! Follow us and find a blog post in your inbox just when you most need it. Thanks for your participation in this project.

ROCKING THE CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION: Drawing On The Hasankeyf Train

Posted on February 19, 2013 by tricivenola

PRECEDENT

Around 1830, beloved literary giant Victor Hugo learned that the old Gothic pile in the middle of Paris was to be pulled down. A crooked filthy church like a brokeback dragon, built piecemeal over centuries, it had been badly damaged in the French Revolution and blackened in great fires. The government planned a big new development there on the Seine once the eyesore was gone. The eyesore was Notre Dame. Horrified, Hugo set about creating something that would make everyone love the place as much as he did, enough to let it live. He wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and saved the cathedral. He told it as a story, and afterwards there was no question of its being destroyed, for all the world had come to love it. Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France, is one of the most visited places in the most visited country on earth. Oh would to the gods that I could be as Victor Hugo, as influential in his time as Steven Spielberg is in ours. There are so many things I would save. I would start with Hasankeyf.

THE CRADLE Imagine a place in the land of beginning. A place shaped like a cradle, in the Cradle of Civilization. All civilization, not just Middle Eastern. This is the Fertile Crescent; Sumeria, Mesopotamia: the birthplace of writing, cultivation of food, domestication of animals and other cornerstones of life as we know it. Earliest examples of writing are from the third millennium BCE, in nearby Ur, just across the border in Iraq. Cities then looked like this.

But people were much the same. Writing was invented to keep track of temple contributions, and there was undoubtedly some poor schmo accountant working overtime in some ziggurat, as shown here in Mac clip-art as comparatively ancient in computerdom as the scene it shows.

Thinking in these terms, it’s only yesterday: In a vast golden valley the road winds through gentle hillocks, many pierced with ancient caves.

Soft swells blend upward into one horizon. The other horizon is a fantasy landscape of canyons and cliffs carved by the Tigris over hundreds of thousands of years. At its most spectacular point sits Hasankeyf.

Ur was a great trade center of the plain, buried for centuries. Hasankeyf is a small lively hill town of caves and artifacts that have accumulated over time through many civilizations. Nothing prepared me for the jaw-dropping sight of the massive monolithic ruins rising out of the green water, caves and arches and one enormous rounded tower next to sheer cliffs soaring up from the edge of the river, everything ruddy gold in the late afternoon sun.

I first saw Hasankeyf in 2007. I was the only foreigner on the Hasankeyf Train, a four-day excursion to protest the drowning of this cherished spot by the Ilisu Dam Project.

Do you know who took this photo? Tell me so I can credit them!

Hasankeyf’s execution has been stayed many times, yet the dam has begun and progresses. People must have their electricity, and dams are the mode of the day in Turkey. This dam will last about forty years. Hasankeyf has likely been around for about 9,500 years, according to testing of artifacts found last summer in a Neolithic mound at the end of the ancient bridge.

This means that Hasankeyf, an ancient town on the Tigris River in the southeastern corner of Turkey, has been around, and likely occupied, through the various reigns of Sumerians, Assyrians, Hittites, Mesopotamians, Arabs, Byzantines, Romans, and everyone before and after and in-between. At present, it’s of particular significance to the Kurds, and most of the present inhabitants are Kurdish.

That jaw-dropping initial sight of the town has been mitigated in recent years. New highway and bridge constructions mar the pristine setting, with a huge dirt pile dumped in front of an ancient tomb. This zigzag staircase I so loved has, I am told, fallen off the cliff.

Across the valley they’ve begun the new town. Everyone in Hasankeyf is to move into it. I’m told it looks like a college campus or new projects; in short: generic group housing. It’s probably okay. It just doesn’t look like this:

A Street in Town Yes, despite all the upheaval the old town remains a place of immense charm. Three elements: green trees, carved golden stone, and the reflections in tranquil water.

People have left part of a castle, piers of a bridge, a giant cave, a zigzag staircase, a huge Muslim minaret, carved writing, tombs and many, many caves. Most important, the place is still alive. This isn’t Aphrodisias or Ephesus, resurrected from the sands of time. Human beings live and work here.

It’s a functioning town, which ebbs and flows around visitors in a jocular manner. Children cavort at the waters’ edge, near the two great piers of the ancient bridge. There’s archeology going on at that 9,500-year-old site. Young pine trees shoot up to the sky. Below a rock face like a giant griffin, topped with a ruined Byzantine castle, shops are full of business, and excavations prove they always have been.

The Tigris, snaking along the edge of the valley as it has from time immemorial, has carved the rocks into fantastic sculpture. Streams run down through it from the mountains to the river. So Hasankeyf is naturally protected and watered.

A place of topographical geological magic, inherently attractive and inviting to human beings, to quote my friend John Crofoot. A longtime fellow-advocate of saving Hasankeyf via Cultural Tourism, he came over today to update me on Hasankeyf. He was there all last week. We are hoping, all of us, that the Powers That Be can find a way to have their dam and preserve Hasankeyf. I believe they can do this. I have faith in their ability.

THE HASANKEYF TRAIN

Last week there was a court order to save Hasankeyf. There have been many stays of execution, followed by more development, so people are wary. Atlas Magazine and Doga Dernegi organized a protest train in 2007, the one pictured here. Hasankeyf continues to quiver on the edge of destruction, absolutely unique, a monument to the past, a hope of the future. But Turkey is about right now, and dams are the order of the day. Dams are sexy. Lots of water, lots of electricity, lots of jobs, and fast. Detractors say solar power is sexier, that dams dry out the country. There’s a lot of pro-dam noise right now. Articles sing the praises of the many dams and say they’re creating all kinds of great sites. I dunno. I sure saw a lot of dead rivers.

Dam detractors argue that river valleys would, if cultivated, provide more money than the dams, prevent more overcrowding in the cities, and the most fertile and beautiful country in the Middle East would continue to provide plentifully for its people. In Mesopotamia, the origins of civilization would endure as they always have. This dam will cost over a billion dollars. It was the approval of the loan of this sum by European banks that inspired the 2007 train trip, one of several. Three hundred and seventy-four Turks and one American traveled with little sleep and no showers to celebrate this diehard ancient town.

The people on the train were educated hip Turks who love antiquities and nature enough to give up a four-day beach weekend for a rackety train with smelly bathrooms, intermittent air-conditioning and only a brief overnight in antiquity before the return. But did we care?

On the Hasankeyf Train ©2007 Trici Venola.

Not a harsh word, and on the next-to-last night, a raucous party stretching through both dining cars with loud singing and people dancing in the aisle and everyone screaming with laughter.

I never met nicer people.

You might think that being the only person who couldn’t speak Turkish, I’d feel left out, but no. Drawing On Istanbul had just come out, and people made me feel swell. Several had seen articles in the papers, They stood around and watched me draw, and I only wish I had taken fifty copies with me because I sold every one that I had.

Dark and Light: Ahmet and Cihan with Tower ©2007 Trici Venola.

I was there thanks to Celal Ogmen at Kalamar Restaurant in Kumkapi. My first year in Turkey, I designed Kalamar’s logo and drew pictures of the place while eating fish dinners. Never did I pay for one. The art has variously decorated the tablecloths, napkins, walls, brochures, ads, menus, business cards, waiters’ T-Shirts and the packet holding the refreshing towelette.

Celal and his horde of relative-employees are from Van, to the north of Hasankeyf. He originally wanted me to go and draw his birthplace, but found the trip to Hasankeyf instead and coughed up my fare. It can be easier to get a pubic hair off of a gorilla in a wetsuit than to get cash out of a Sultanahmet entrepreneur. I told the organizers of the trip that if this guy was on the bandwagon to save Hasankeyf from the dam there was a lot of hope. Right, they said, Hasankeyf is one of the most beloved places in Turkey. Covering it with water is considered sacrilege.

So I drew and I drew. First out the window, dozens of tiny thumbnails.

A woman tugging at a sheep, a door in a hillock, a long mud-brick barn, olive trees and grassy knolls and forlorn dusty riverbeds, sad bridges unused, in the distance the bright hard blue of the huge dams. Toward Malatya, known as Turkey’s breadbasket, the land began to look like the Garden of Eden.
I drew sheaves of poplar trees, tiny houses, orchards everywhere. The very air was full of essence of apricots. Here, the rivers have water.

There was a conference on the train with the two prime movers of this demonstration: Guven Eken of Doga Dernegi and Ozcan Yüksek, the editor of Atlas Magazine. I couldn’t follow the conference but I drew the passion on the faces as the train roared into the gathering dark. In the middle of the night, indigestion kept me up to see a full moon on the loneliest train station in the world. Was it called Sapak?

Next day: a row of people standing next to sacks full of potatoes in a field, a flock of turkeys, a flat-topped mound with a rectangular cut in it and trucks drawn up: an archeological site. A long line of goats walking along the bottom of a cliff, and in the dawn, the full moon showing a different face.

Near Mt. Aegeis, the highest point in Turkey, we racketed past mesas and ramparts of stone jutting out of the dry grassy hills. A giant, many-pointed black rock loomed near a green hilltop community. Its citizens in antiquity must have believed that the gods lived there.

Red Rock Ramparts

The mountains grew higher and sharper as we started into tunnels. Spectacular vistas shot past: jagged peaks soaring into the clouds and dizzying glimpses down bottomless canyons covered with cedar trees.

Stunned, I stopped drawing and just gaped along with everyone else on the train. None of this can be seen from the road, only the rails. A sudden thatched roof on a terraced hodgepodge of brick and wood near some olive trees, and the whole family out taking the sunset air, a little boy and girl up on a cistern, waving.

Near Diyarbakir, the copper in the hills shadows blue into the rust of the mountain towns. We had been warned that malcontents might attack our train in this area, and they did: several windows were hit with rocks, the shatterproof glass spiderwebbed behind the posters that said THE HASANKEYF TRAIN.

My new friend Buket (pronounced Boo-Cat) saw the malcontents: three little kids. In the dining cars everyone drank coffee and tea and ate kebap and grinned at the waiters and charged their telephones at the outlets. By now many of us women had bright scarves over our flat sweaty hair. By the end of the trip these had bloomed into fantastical headdresses.

LITTLE GIRL DRUM

Although the very Minister of Transportation had been involved with this journey, the train was all-day late. The railroad town of Batman, adjacent to Hasankeyf, waited seven hours in the thick heat to welcome us with brass bands, banners, crowds of shouting children, and the mayor himself passing out red carnations to every woman on the train.

In the fierce heat I wore a small black shirt, a huge black hat and shades. Where are you from? The little boys screamed in Turkish. I was never so glad to be from Los Angeles, because it is so far away. And because of the movies everyone knows what it is. So I screamed back, Merhaba from Los Angeles, Hollywood, California, USA!! The head of the brass band put down his trumpet, stuck out his hand and said ON BEHALF OF THE CITY OF BATMAN WELCOME, and gave me two red carnations.

The kids made us cry, singing and wringing our hands. Little boys pressed sweaty wads of salted watermelon seeds into our hands and kissed them. Little girls in tribal dress banged huge tambourines. I thought of them out there in the searing sun all day, dressed up and waiting. We were hustled into buses and half an hour later we were winding through Mesopotamia when the bus slammed to a stop and there it was, Hasankeyf, the fantasy in the late afternoon sun.

Buket Sahin, sleeping in the next seat on the train, translated everything and has been a friend ever since.

Buket and I wandered as much as possible in the time before sunset.

IN THE TOWN

Three young men, students from Izmir, held still on the edge of the castle for portraits, staring down into the vista of caves and lantern light. “We read Atlas,” they said, “and so we travel Turkey this summer and learn our history.” Buket and I climbed down the slippery stones from the top of the Byzantine clifftop castle to dinner on the beach below.

Dinner was river trout barbecued and served at tables set up in the shallows. A jolly crowd sat at a tilting table with our feet in the Tigris, eating the fish caught in the river and throwing the bones back in to repay the river. Girls in trailing headresses waded out into the rushing water, legs glowing in the gloom.

We were going to sleep on railed platforms set up in the river. I hiked across the rocky beach toward the vast sheer cliff with the zigzag staircase and the castle on top, to use the pay restroom set up in a cave and manned all night by two hardy kids.

The cliff shone pale in the moonlight, impossibly high and huge, like something from another planet, like something glimpsed near sleep. Near the bottom of the zigzag staircase was a huge natural arched entrance all lit up and hung with tapestries. I peeked in: a vast multistoried cavern fitted out for lounging. Reaching all up inside the cliff, natural stone passageways and staircases and wooden platforms covered with cushions and little tables, halogen lamps hanging here and there showing the top of the cave high above and the water sluicing down the far wall from the natural cistern. They called it Transpassers’ Cave. Hmph. It’s Ali Baba’s cave from Arabian Nights– Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.

I don’t know if the cave is still accessible, so I’m very glad that I ran and got Buket and that we slept there, along with a litter of flea-free month-old kittens, up on the second platform high above a slumbering company from the train. I expected to dream of Ali Baba or to channel the ancients, but all I heard was Celine Dion on the sound system until they shut it off around dawn. No matter! Stiff from sleeping doubled up on the train, I sprawled in bliss on the cushions. A night to cherish, and in the morning they only let us pay for our breakfast.

These kids interviewed Buket and me for a show on Hasankeyf to run on Iz TV. In the background, three young guys and their grandmother held a sit-in.

Most of the people of Hasankeyf aren’t happy about losing the cave homes they’ve occupied for generations.

There’s a fatalism about most of the town. Still, there were townsfolk protesting with us. Ozcan Yuksek, editor of Atlas, climbed up a radio tower and got a photo of all 374 of us cohorts standing around a huge sign: HANDS OFF HASANKEYF.

Two guys sitting under a protest sign said in Turkish We will live under water if we have to. There are now scuba tours of the fabulous mosaics at Zeugma, the ancient trading port now covered by Turkey’s damming of the Euphrates years ago.

IMAGINE

Turkey wants to be one of the most visited places on earth. Right now it’s Number 7. The most visited place is France. Hm, I wonder why. Perhaps it’s the presence of exquisitely preserved cultural treasures– Notre Dame!– and the absence of billboards, trash and Walmarts. People don’t cross oceans and continents to see what they can see at home. Sure, people shop. But cultural tourism combined with shopping is huge money, and it doesn’t destroy your cultural heritage, it preserves it. Turkey has absolutely unique places, important to the whole world, for Turkey is geographically and historically in the center.

Imagine six years later. Buket and I are still great friends. Iz TV interviewed us both back in Hasankeyf, and the show has been aired about a hundred times on public TV in Turkey. I know because delighted strangers stop me in the street and tell me. Hasankeyf seems to bring out the best in people.

Lon Chaney as Quasimodo, 1923.

Trying not to think about Hasankeyf being flooded or ruined with bad promotion, I imagine Victor Hugo’s vexation about Notre Dame. It created Quasidmodo, gibbering in hideous rage on the tower as he pours molten lead on the mob hammering at Notre Dame’s doors, trying to get in and destroy the unique and exquisite Esmeralda. Snatching her from the moronic maw of the ravening mob, bearing her into the church, screaming Sanctuary! Sanctuary! That’s just how I feel: Lon Chaney as the fearsome Hunchback, and how I wish I was strong enough to ring his bell. Rage can make Quasimodos of us all, but he did save the church.

Now imagine Hasankeyf as the center of a cultural tourism Renaissance in the troubled Southeast of Turkey. Chronic upheaval makes for fascinating history, which can mean great tourism. Imagine a fine life for the poverty-flattened people of Hasankeyf, with government sanctioning of their town as a regular tourist destination, with UNESCO backing and with the kind of money that educated tourists are willing to spend to see something unique and irreplaceable.

There’s that great big highway they’re building, there’s that great big bridge. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it led to a better life for all. In situ. Just imagine! As they say in Hasankeyf, the rose is most beautiful on the branch.

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All road drawings, spot illustrations and portraits Plein Air. All other drawings Plein Air with some augmentation from photos in places due to time constraints. All art, including most photos © Trici Venola. These drawings are part of the Drawing On Istanbul™ Series by Trici Venola, produced with drafting pens on rag paper in sketchbook format. Large drawings are 18 cm X 52 cm. Special thanks to John Crofoot, Buket Sahin. and to Celal Ogmen and the staff at Kalamar Restaurant in Kumkapi. We love their fish, and we love your comments. Thanks for reading.

THE GORDION KNOT OF HISTORY: Drawing in Museums

Posted on January 16, 2013 by tricivenola

ALEXANDER RIDES TO MIDAS

Alexander the Great died in 323 BC. He was 33. Alexander died of a bone infection from an old arrow wound. It’s possible that his immune system was compromised by his grief, bordering on dementia, over the death of Hephaestion, his closest friend, greatest general, second in command and, some say, the love of his life.

Hephaestion

Like the god he believed himself to be, the Golden Conqueror would never age. He won the respect and admiration of his own time and successive generations. In awe and affection they continue to laud him, creating imagery in all media from marble to film.

His actual body was mummified in Alexandria, Egypt, by Egyptian necromancers, and was still in a good state of preservation three centuries after his death, when Caesar Augustus leaned into its glass sarcophagus to kiss the Conqueror and, slipping, broke off the mummy’s nose. But Alexander’s tomb and body disappeared. The Alexander Sarcophagus in Istanbul’s Archeological Museum is the nearest thing we have.

Alexander is still fighting and hunting lions on this museum centerpiece from the great Necropolis at Sidon. The stunning bas-relief was created by unknown talent during Alexander’s lifetime. It’s possible that the artist actually set eyes on him.

The art commemorates victory over the Persians at the Battle of Issus in what is now Turkey, and Hephaestion is there fighting as well. Scholars argue over who was buried in the tomb, but he may have commissioned the work before his death with an eye toward Alexandrian help in future battles. The Alexander Sarcophagus was discovered, in what is now Lebanon, in 1887 and brought to Istanbul by Osman Hamdi Bey, the great Ottoman statesman, archeologist and artist who built Istanbul’s Archeological Museum.

This very famous bust of Alexander is here too. It still has traces of yellow paint in the marble hair, rose on the lips. It’s one of several done in the second century BC, when the artist might have had Alexander’s mummy to work from. I find this plausible because the forehead wrinkles are realistic for Alexander but idealized out of many statues.

THE GORDION KNOT

In the drawing up top, Alexander rubs shoulders with an ancient Cypriot statue of Bes, the God of Plenty, a Hittite lion 5500 years old, and King Midas, whose skeleton– or that of his father, nobody’s sure– rests upstairs among swanky grave goods built of boxwood from 740 BC. Midas was King of the Phrygians, whose capitol of Gordion is near Turkey’s capitol, Ankara. The Phrygians invented a smelting technique that made bronze shine like gold, so yes, everything Midas touched turned to gold. And I thought it was just a fairy tale. Here’s some Midas Gold in the Archeological Museum in Antalya. It actually looks like titanium. There’s also a Madonna whose breasts weep blood, three jolly bronze creatures and a festive phallic bronze pin. I love drawing in museums. The stuff in those cases is laughing at you.

Gordion is the Home of the Gordion Knot. More fairy tales: Nobody could untie the Gordion Knot. Alexander famously solved this dilemma. He pulled out his sword and cut it.

Alexander Cuts the Gordion Knot by Jean-Simon Barthelemy (1743-1811)

A rendition of the Gordion Knot.

Turkey is a veritable Gordion Knot of history. The threads keep weaving in and out, disappearing and reappearing, and I will never ever live long enough to unravel it. In a beloved tale, King MIdas judged Pan the winner in a music contest with Apollo, and a furiously un-godlike Apollo gave him donkey’s ears. The little figures below are Midas Gold and smaller than my hand. I haven’t yet been to the museum in Ankara, now in restoration, but look forward to its re-opening, when I can see Midas’s magnificent wooden furniture preserved and reassembled over years by dedicated archeologists.

LIONS CAN LIVE THOUSANDS OF YEARS That Hittite lion back in Istanbul has fellows all over what is now Turkey. Aslantepe (Lion Hill) Huge dig near Malatya features a jocular fountain lion and many real pussycats.

The museum at the University in Elazig was full of artifacts from Paleolithic to Ottoman. It’s the only place I’ve ever been offered a chair, not to mention tea and conversation.

Reyhan in Elazig Muse ©2004 by Trici Venola.

I love the combination of tribal art and ancient artifacts found all over rural Turkey. Here’s a collection from Aslantepe Huge:

My sketchbook got me into this dig in 2004. It’s a Hittite courtroom. The culprit sat in the hot seat, surrounded by devils– those paintings on the walls– and was judged by a group. Not much has changed in 5500 years, if you consider the paparazzi.

NIMRUD IN HOLLYWOOD The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is one of the more civilized museums in the world, allowing artists to carry in sketchbooks and work at any time. But they go farther still. I drew this Assyrian Guardian and mapped his beard curls to render when I wasn’t standing up on feet that felt like two hot anvils pounding upward. But I neglected to render one curl to go by. I went back next day, but the exhibit was closed. At the guard station I explained the problem while flipping pages in the sketchbook. “All I need is five minutes,” I said. It seemed a guard was sick. I kept flipping pages, and those enlightened people called the actual curator who personally came downstairs, escorted me up to the exhibit, unlocked it and stood there while I drew the beard curl. Now THAT’s a museum!!

Nimrud, Bird Djinn

To the right of the bearded Guardian is a piece from a personal puzzle: that male figure with a bird head, wings and a sideways Egyptian stance, symbol of exotica and ancient mystery. This image strides through my earliest memories, associated with Echo Park, with klieg lights across the sky and the smell of eucalyptus, an enduring symbol of Old Hollywood, of Los Angeles, of home. What a shock to discover this dear and familiar figure to be a djinn– a genie, relic of Nimrud, in Mesopotamia, oceans and continents and millennia away from my childhood in California. I was totally immersed in the Middle East, obsessed with moving to Turkey, drawing to learn more. Echo Park had been the furthest thing from my mind. I stood there in the Met with my mouth open while images strobed through my memory. DW Griffith’s silent epic Intolerance, shot in Hollywood in 1916, stunned viewers with its exotic representation of Babylon. See the figures on the gate?

Set of Babylon, DW Griffith’s Intolerance, Hollywood 1916.

Antiquities in the Middle East were being discovered at the same time as the medium of film. DW Griffith’s Babylon featured this same djinn, still parading in Hollywood shopping malls to this day.

Hollywood Highland Center, 2004.

Last Ramadan, drawing from memory Eastern Turkish women I’d seen on the tram, I was compelled by a certain strength in their features to intersperse them with Mesopotamian deities. After all, these faces are all from the same region.

Nimrud is on the Tigris, just southeast of the eastern Turkish border. It was originally excavated in the 1850s. One example of our bird-djinn was surely found between then and Intolerance. DW Griffith employed artists from all over the world. One of them knew the image, which was used precisely because of that sense of ancient mystery it conveys. Many more were found at Nimrud in 1931 by archeologist Max Mallowan. The one above, which I used as reference for my djinn drawing, was photographed by his wife, Agatha Christie.

Agatha Christie at Nimrud, c1937.

Agatha Christie? That Gordion Knot again! The most prolific and well-known mystery writer of all time was no stranger to Hollywood, since so many movies have been made of her novels, including Murder on the Orient Express which begins in Istanbul, where she often stayed on her way to and from her husband’s digs in Mesopotamia. I had always associated Agatha Christie with floral dresses, trains, lorgnettes, a detective with patent-leather hair. But here she is in the dusty winds of the Middle East. She funded many digs, used up her face-cream cleaning ancient sculpture, and was an inveterate shutter-bug. She photographed many of the considerable Mallowan finds and wound up on many a museum plaque, along with all those best-seller lists.

Turkey is a mystery I will never solve, but it sure is fun trying. One way is to travel, and another way is to go into the museums and draw. When I get fascinated by a piece of art and draw it, I learn more and more about this place. Everyone was here, many at the same time. Check out these strange bedfellows from the 2nd century AD, at the Archeological Museum in Antalya.

Priapus, God of Sexual Enthusiasm, was as popular with the ancients as he is with us. The one on all those postcards is in Selchuk, along with many other aspects of love.

There’s Priapus actual size– fist-sized– at right center. He’s in a glass case with a light you press for two minutes of illumination. I kept pushing the button so I could see to draw, and when I looked up a large crowd was standing behind me, staring into the case and giggling.

THE BYZANTINE FANTASY ZOO

It turns out that a dragon was a symbol of Christianity. So was a foot, which represented pilgrimage. Drawing in the Met, I realized that Christianity had spread all over the Middle East long before Islam. It incorporated all the fantastic animals of the Shamanistic religions that preceded it.

Thanks to the movies, the co-mingled Egyptian animal-human gods are old friends. But who ever heard of a Senmurv, a rocking-horse-like winged creature with a peacock tail?

Hieronymus Bosch, Hell.detail, 16th century.

All the early Christian exhibits are full of these strange co-mingled creatures: bird-headed lions, griffins, dragons, hippogriffs, pigs with wings. By the Middle Ages, artists were using them to populate Hell, most famously Hieronymus Bosch. The ancients combined lions and eagles and bulls. Bosch used animals he saw in Holland: frogs, birds, cats, mice, rabbits. Gradually these disappeared from Christian art, and all that is left of them now are those gargoyles on Notre Dame.

Gargoyles, Notre Dame, Paris 2000.

Heaven got the winged deities. The visual depictions of angels evolved from those Shamanistic figures, from fiery six-winged Seraphim to Cupid-inspired cherubs. And this powerful winged male figure: our dear and familiar djinn with a human head: the Archangel.

The Archangel Michael, by Guido Reni, 16th Century.

A PRIDE OF LIONS

Not every fabulous museum denizen is in a glass case. Derek here posed on the steps of the Met with all the insouciance of one of the stone lions within, while I was able to delight nine-year-old Faisal by drawing his incipient mustache.

Lord Elgin was the British ambassador to Ottoman Istanbul. Distressed at the rural peoples’ indifference to antiquities, he bought as many as he could afford, bullying an old friend into building an entire wing at The British Museum to house them, and bankrupting himself in the process. This is now a cause of discord between Turkey and England, but in the end the things are preserved.

In The British Museum, while drawing these lions from Xanthos, I was surrounded by schoolchildren. In uniforms, with sketchbooks, little Harry Potters all, saying in those lovely accents, “Are you actually drawing those lions? Truly?” Yes, I said, these lions are from Xanthos, a city in Turkey. They were astonished, they were entranced. They had not known that Turkey is the Asia Minor referred to in the museum. My sketchbook at that time had pictures of the British Ambassador to Turkey, our Anglican Canon, the chandeliers in the British Consulate, and Cappadocia.

What these kids loved was the open air museum in Cappadocia. They would not let me turn the pages. They wanted to know the story of every single pigeon cave in the cliffs, every window, every cave church. “These are pigeonholes? Real ones?”

“Look at this, it’s old Father Theodosias’s church, look here, where he prayed, the stone is worn there, that’s Arab painting up top, you can see-” When I looked up, there were a hundred kids there, parents, teachers, docents. I can’t begin to say how much fun it was.

There are plenty of Hittite lions in Cappadocia, too. All of Turkey is one breathing, palpating, interwoven fist of historical threads, pulling in the whole world. We live at the center, then and now. And what’s all this history for? Well, for starters history gives me hope. In these perilous times it’s reassuring to realize that the ancients, too, often thought– with good reason!–that the world was ending. It’s relaxing, when distressed by the antics of some fruitcake potentate, to read of one a thousand years ago and know that this lethal fool too shall pass. History is humbling: no matter how unique I feel, I learn of legions of others. Wandering through the museums, looking at familiar expressions in ancient bronze and marble and clay, I feel at one with the great tide of humanity: following that Gordion thread, seeing it disappear into the knot, wondering if I will ever see it re-emerge, or if I must wait for another incarnation. One day I may have all the answers, but by then the questions probably won’t matter anymore.

All drawings Plein Air. All drawings © Trici Venola, created with drafting pens on rag paper in sketchbook format, standard size 18 X 52 cm / 7 X 20 inches. All drawings part of The Drawing On Istanbul Project. We love your comments.

2012 IN REVIEW: Thanks for the Dance

Posted on December 31, 2012 by tricivenola

Sixteen months ago I was drawing a ruined Byzantine palace on the Marmara Sea. There had been many such projects and I often sent long detailed emails about them to friends. This time, one such friend showed me how to put it up as a post. That was fifty posts ago. At first I felt like I was taking a shower with the curtains open. Now I feel like I am dancing with the whole world. Thank you for this dance.

As it shows in the report below, this blog is read by people in Uganda and Bolivia and Afghanistan, in Texas and California, Van and Istanbul. Years ago, an untraveled art student in Los Angeles, I fell asleep at night imagining Greece and Rome and Egypt, and now I have pen pals there. Pretty heady stuff!

I’m glad I’m able to stay in Istanbul, living on art. It takes everything I’ve got. I’m not able to travel much, but my blog does! This is a bloody miracle. I was born before the computer revolution. Actually I was part of it. One of the first digital artists on the Mac, I got to be in the center of that fabulous technological and cultural maelstrom. I remember Life Before Internet. So I don’t take any of this for granted. I hope I never do.

I recently watched a program about the Cygnus Mystery. Cygnus is a constellation in the Milky Way in the shape of a flying swan. The West calls it the Northern Cross. The stars of Cygnus form the guide to the layout of ancient temples around the world, including Turkey’s Gobekli Tepe. The ancients were far more savvy than most of us suspect. It’s probable that many civilizations, as advanced as ours or more, have risen, peaked and fallen away long before recorded history. A dark star near Cygnus causes cosmic rays from stars in Cygnus to beam Earthward, bombarding our DNA with cosmic particles. This may account for dramatic accelerations in human development. Musing on such things took me right out of worrying about survival and put my perspective up there with the wheeling constellations of the galaxies. It’s comforting to realize that the world doesn’t rest on my shoulders. It’s equally comforting to realize that it’s resting on everyone’s. Thank you for your company on this journey.

——-

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 36,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 8 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

A DATE WITH AN ANGEL: Worlds Collide in Hagia Sophia

Posted on December 20, 2012 by tricivenola

The date of this angel is probably slightly after 1261. That’s when the re-enfranchised Eastern Christians of Constantinople dug up Dandolo and threw him out the window of Hagia Sophia, officially ending the sixty-year Roman Catholic aftermath of the Fourth Crusade. You remember Dandolo, don’t you, from two posts back? The old blind Doge of Venice who told the Fourth Crusade to sack Constantinople? Buried in Hagia Sophia, center of Eastern Christianity and its foremost temple, which he turned into a cathedral? That guy. Out the window, his bones gnawed by the dogs. How I love the history here.

This Angel is actually a Seraph, a sexless bodiless representation of Divine Thought. Its re-emergence in 2009, thanks to the Turkish government, colors the whole eastern side of the basilica. It’s the only whole survivor of four mosaiced into the four pendentives below the dome. A pendentive is that triangular space that allows a dome to join with the square space beneath it. Why not fill the space with angels? Made sense to the Byzantines. Makes sense to me, but then I’ve been living here awhile.

So: fifteen hours drawing this angel from this exact spot: a complete sweep of history. We have the 6th-Century windows around the dome, the post-Latin mosaic Angel, some of Sultan Abdulmecid’s 1841 paint, the Byzantine balustrade, an Ottoman chandelier, and a medallion with Abdulmecid’s tribute in Arabic to family and Allah. All of this in one shot required siting on a campstool precisely lined up against certain scars on the marble floor, because I have to get up now and then, and the perspective hangs on a hair. Lots of concentration here! As always I muse while drawing on the passionate concentration of the original mosaic artists, keeping the grand gesture in such a slow tedious medium. That face up there is over three feet wide.

To break things up a little, I wandered around drawing those graffiti crosses from a couple blogs ago. I was down on the floor in front of the nave drawing this one hacked into the floor when another sort of angel came over to watch, followed by his parents.

If there is an icon of boyhood in Turkey, this is it. Emirhan here is attired for his Sunnet, his circumcision, followed by a party to celebrate his manhood. Every Turkish boy goes through this ceremony, and it bonds them for life. Before the great event the little boy parades around town in as grand a fashion as his parents can afford, often in this costume of a miniature Sultan. Normally I don’t take requests, but when his father asked I just couldn’t resist.

Here is one of Hagia Sophia’s stellar guards with Obama Gule Kitty, who our President petted on National TV while visiting Hagia Sophia back in 2008. Hagia Sophia is popular with American Presidents: here it is in 1999 with the Clintons inside.

Obama Gule lives in Hagia Sophia and like all cats has always behaved as a queen, but since her media appearance with the President she is even more fat and smug.

And check out that inlay work above the pillars around the upper alcoves! I always loved whirligigs and so did Justinian. St Catherine was one of his patron saints, and we find Catherine Wheels everywhere in Hagia Sophia. Is it mother-of-pearl? With some dark wood or tortoise-shell or black stone, porphyry in the circles…

Whatever it’s made of, it was made in the 6th Century. It’s recently been cleaned, and what a revelation. It used to look like shallow gray bas-relief. Here’s a drawing from 2004, see? I couldn’t make out the design and had to make do with curlicues.

(This drawing segues into an entire rendering of a section of balustrade with all the graffiti. It’s not a texture; it’s fifteen centuries of people carving their names. Over time the names fade down into the marble, leaving a scratched, pitted texture I love.)

The far right arch in these photos is trompe l’oeil from the Fossati Brothers, Swiss architects hired in 1841 by Abdulmecid to do a restoration. That’s their yellow paint job peeling off the upper walls, trying to match the original gold mosaic below. The Fossati Brothers found the Angel face plastered over. They carefully documented it, drew it, and according to Islam’s proscription on faces, covered it up with a medallion like the ones still on the other three. Our angel is on the northeastern pendentive. The ones to the west are trompe l’oeil to match the mosaic ones to the east. The southeastern medallion may have a face under it. If you know, please write in.

Here are more faces from Hagia Sophia’s wonderful security staff. I drew each one at different times and separated them for gift prints. If you are going to spend any time drawing monuments, be nice to the guards.

RELENTLESS BEAUTY

St Irene in Pala d’Oro Altarpiece, St Mark’s, Venice

That there are faces at all on the walls of Hagia Sophia is due largely to Empress Irene of Athens, who ruled Byzantium at the turn of the eighth century to the ninth. Notice her shield and cross: she was a kind of warrior. Irene’s Emperor Leo from Armenia, the first Iconoclast, is said to have been influenced by Islam in his abhorrence of icons. We all know icons as those little gizmos that pop up on your desktop, letting you know where to click to access all manner of things.

Their origin, like so much else, is pretty much Byzantine. What the Byzantines were accessing was faith. Here are some religious icons.

A modern program icon designer works with much the same limitations as the original religious painters. In a small space with limited colors you must create an instantly recognizable image that conveys a sense of where you want the viewer to go. We icon designers want you to know you’ll be transported to Desktop or Skype or Adobe Photoshop. The Byzantines wanted you to be transported into Faith. Faith that the saint represented by the icon would intervene with the Power of the Universe to help you. Come to think of it, they’re not so different.

Battle Over Icons, Medieval painting

Icons are a touchy subject. In Communist Russia you could get into a lot of trouble for possessing them. Many were said to perform miracles, survive all manner of cataclysm. In our time icon has come to mean a powerful representational figure, or face, like Hitler meaning Fascism, or Steve Jobs representing idealistic progress. The Byzantines prayed to pictures of the saints, lit candles to them, went on their knees before them, fought wars under and for them. The power was in the faith, but Emperor Leo believed that people worshipped the pictures themselves, so he destroyed them. All of them. Every icon, and then every pictorial mosaic, fresco and bas-relief went. Hagia Sophia is full of empty frames, carved marble around a vacant space, and lone, austere crosses. The original gold mosaic ceiling, with its geometric designs, was allowed to remain. After the Iconoclasts– the breakers of images– had done with the pictures, they started in on the artists. Leo is not my favorite emperor, but at least there aren’t a lot of pictures of him.

Ceiling Gold in Hagia Sophia

Irene his wife was an Iconodule or Iconophile: she loved icons. She is remembered as a beauty: a tall noble brunette. One fable has Leo discovering some she’d hidden, and refusing to sleep with her afterwards.

Harun Al-Rashid

Was she a woman scorned? Leo died in 775, and Irene set about gaining the throne. Beset by her own ministers, Bulgars, and Harun Al-Rashid, she never gave up…wait a minute. Worlds collide….Harun Al-Rashid? Isn’t he supposed to belong in Arabian Nights? Yes, and he did his best to invade Byzantium. Irene kept him out by paying him a whopping annual tribute. When the Pope refused to recognize her rule and crowned Charlemagne Roman Emperor, rather than sulking over the insult, she simply arranged to marry Charlemagne. But she was deposed first.

Medieval drawing of Pope Crowning Charlemagne

Her son by Leo, Constantine VI, grew up in the shadow of his vivid autocratic mother. He too was an Iconoclast. When the inevitable clash came, Irene gave him short shrift: she seized the throne, and very likely in the same purple chamber in which she had borne him, she had him blinded. This killed him and sickened the people, who proclaimed it “a horror of Heaven” and blamed on it a 17-day solar eclipse.

Byzantine Empress regnant Irene of Athens

Irene and Constantine VI by Hubert Goltzius 16th-Century

Nevertheless Irene ruled for five years before being replaced by her minister Nicophorus. You remember Nicophorus? He wound up beheaded by Krum the Horrible, Khan of the Bulgars. That’s Nicophorus on the right, being carried in filled with beer.

Medieval drawing of Krum the Horrible with his famous Byzantine beerstein

The Iconoclasts stuck around until the mid-9th Century and finally petered out. Irene ended life on an island, spinning to support herself, and in Hagia Sophia, the heart of the kingdom she ravaged her soul to protect, there is no image of her. I doubt there’s one in Istanbul. Fourth Crusaders carried them all off to Venice, the city of that Doge thrown out the window. Yet she endures, for she restored image worship in Christianity. Under her rule in 787, the Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicea refuted the Iconoclasts, declaring that artistic materials merely represent the saints, a belief upheld to this day. The glorious pictorial mosaics of St Savior in Chora, as well as many surviving in Hagia Sophia, are all from after Irene. Throughout Christianity, religious art endures, and it always has a face.

Greek Orthodox Icon of St Irene of Athens

THE EVOLUTION OF AN ICON Santa Claus, called Noel Baba (Father Christmas) is big here in Turkey. St Nicholas himself was Bishop of Myra, down on Turkey’s Mediterranean Coast. A benevolent leader, he gave all his money to the poor, hiding dowries in the shoes of impoverished virgins to save their pride, which comes to us as the tradition of Christmas stockings. St Nicholas is huge all over Europe. Think of all those Greeks named Nick. Here’s one of many Russian icons of him.

Russian Icon-St Nicholas of Myra

At some point, he became mixed with Lapland myths of tall, fur-suited Father Christmas who lived with reindeer in the snow. Vikings were in Istanbul, the Varangian traders invited in the 9th Century. Here’s their graffiti in Hagia Sophia, and even I feel I’m stretching to imagine that’s when the mix began. But worlds DO collide here…could it be?

Viking Graffiti ©2004 Trici Venola. Means "Halvdan was here."

Victorian Clement Clark Moore turned Father Christmas / St Nicholas into a “a right jolly old elf” in his iconographic (!) poem The Night Before Christmas. And in 1930, Coca-Cola hired Norwegian-American illustrator Haddon Sundblom to depict St Nick for their ads in the Saturday Evening Post. This became the prototype for Santa Claus as we know him today.

Haddon Sundblom for Coca-Cola, 1931

Justinian undoubtedly included icons of St Nicholas in Hagia Sophia. After all, he built the church at Myra in memory of the 3rd-Century saint. And as the snow whirls in the darkness outside and the wind howls up over the mouth of the Bosporus on this 20th of December 2012, the day before believers in the Mayan Calendar tell us the world is going to end, it’s fitting that we end this post with a commemoration. Since the beginning of recorded history, people have been crying that the world is surely ending, but we will more surely see another Christmas, another New Year. So to all of you, a good night.

—-

All drawings Plein Air, 20″ X 7″ / 18cm X 52cm, drafting pens on rag paper, sketchbook format. All art ©Trici Venola. All drawings from The Drawing On Istanbul Project by Trici Venola, see description on this blog. Thanks for reading. We love your comments!

Drawing On Istanbul

Plein Air drawing in Turkey: blogging about the site and the process.

JUST UNDER YOUR FEET: Drawing in the Corridors of Lord

KAPADOKYA / CAPPADOCIA 2: Drawing in the Echoes of Faith

KAPADOKYA / CAPPADOCIA: Drawing Over the Rainbow

ROCKING THE CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION: Drawing On The Hasankeyf Train

THE GORDION KNOT OF HISTORY: Drawing in Museums

2012 IN REVIEW: Thanks for the Dance

A DATE WITH AN ANGEL: Worlds Collide in Hagia Sophia

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