Day+4

=ISTANBUL July 2, 2009=

08:00 AM After breakfast, city tour will start with visit to Ayasofya (Hagia Sophia), which was built by the Emperor Justinian and inaugurated in 537 AD. For over nine centuries it was the center of the Eastern Orthodox Church that was turned into a mosque with the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul and now is a museum. It contains some of the finest mosaics to have survived from the Byzantine period.

Then, we will see the underground cistern, which is the work of Justinian. This is the most impressive of Istanbul’s ancient cisterns with a roof supported by more than 300 columns.

12:00 PM we will drive to Bahcesehir Science Technology High School. Lunch will also be taken there.

16:30 PM In the late afternoon, an informational session with educational NGO’s and reception at the Turkish Cultural Foundation Turkey office. Overnight at the Hotel.

Commentary  Today we get to visit the Hagia Sophia (or Aya Sofya as the Turks call it). Originally built by Byzantine Emperor Justinian in 537 AD, it reigned as the greatest Christian Church until Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453. Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II immediately converted it to a Mosque. In 1923 it was converted to a museum by order of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the first leader of the Republic of Turkey. The architecture inside is amazing and shows the church’s and the city’s importance through vastly different historic eras. Large wall hangings spell “Allah” and “Muhammad” directly below vast paintings of Jesus and Mary. The Muslim Ottomans plastered over the images of Jesus and Mary but left all Christian symbols exposed (human likenesses are not permitted in Mosques). The plaster has been partially removed to show what the inside of the church looked like at various stages in history.   The Hagia Sophia is amazing and we all expected it to be. But our next stop, right across the street, is a huge surprise.

We climb down several flights of steps from street level and find ourselves in the expansive Basilica Cistern. It was built by Emperor Justinian in 532 AD and was one of several cisterns that stored fresh water for the sizeable population of Constantinople. Three things were striking about the cistern: 1) it was architecturally beautiful and no one was ever supposed to see it since it was underground and full of water; 2) it was 20 degrees cooler in the cistern than the surface; 3) all of the columns holding up the roof were recycled by the Byzantines. “Recycled” means that the columns were transported from other sites around the old Roman Empire because it was cheaper than quarrying and constructing new stone columns. In the very back of the cistern are two striking features – Medusa Head columns. The engineers who built the cistern inserted Medusa heads under two columns in order to make the columns higher; one of the heads is upside down and the other is sideways and both came from ancient Greek temples. We were all amused by this architectural improvisation.

 Outside the cistern I have my photo taken with the “Million” column which is the only remnant of a triumphal Byzantine Arch. The arch marked the center of the Byzantine Empire and all distances in the empire were measured from this very spot.

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