ISTANBUL

In March 2012, we went on a field trip to Istanbul. We started to count the mosques and minarets already from the plane. Many of them are rebuilt Byzantine temples, and these were precisely the purpose of our journey. It was both a necessity and a joy for us to spend almost the whole day in the largest of the Byzantine temples – Hagia Sophia. After a moment of quiet amazement at its magnificence, we moved on to the papers, which are mandatory to take part in any excursion. We learned plenty about the building’s history, about the possible form of the local liturgy and about the rarely-preserved Christian mosaics. A similarly unique place was the Chora monastery with its mosaics, where frescoes from the beginning of the 14th century with sophisticated iconography have been preserved in the adjacent funeral chapel (Parekklesion). We spent a lot of time in the Archaeological Museum, with collections of art from ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, antiquity, Byzantium and Islam. We visited the Basilica Cistern (Yerebatan), an extensive underground cistern from late antiquity and a reminder of the beginnings of the millennial empire and an uninitiated hidden, late antique mausoleum in the area between the walls of Theodosius. In mosques, deserted neighborhoods and several isolated Christian churches, we tirelessly searched for the slightest reference to the glorious Byzantine past.