Today we started off with conducting a visit to Dolmabahce Saray, probably Turkiye’s, and specifically Istanbul’s most ugly building built using money that could definitely have been used elsewhere. The desire of an Ottoman Sultan to be more European by having a palace look exactly like the Versailles in France was obviously not the best of decisions, but what’s done is done. Hopefully in this case history won’t be repeating itself and all the money (and it was a huge sum, trust me. Loads and loads and loads of gold) will actually be used for the actual good of the country instead of the European look of a city that already combines everything.
I’d already been to the Dolmabahce Saray before as well, once with a lot of friends and another time with four friends two of whom were my mom’s friends and third was the daughter of the friend, and so I was by this point rather unimpressed by the palace. Today’s excursion was made extremely amusing however by the presence of a reporter that wanted to interview us students; he’d apparently met Clayton and someone else last night at Tumata and asked to interview. What made him amusing was the fact that Prof Shields introduced us simply as her students and also said that there was a Turk among them (me, obviously), but that he had to guess who it was. The man could not guess it was me. I was definitely happy about this fact because although I’m ready to offer my translation services at any time, it does get tiring after a while and much as I love everyone in my group, I didn’t want to have to do translations again. So everything worked out and I had my own bit of private amusement because of that man.
We walked around Dolmabahce Palace and also around the harem, and I realized that I probably would have been way more impressed by this Palace if there had been another Leslie Pierce taking us around. However, there was not, and they weren’t letting us take pictures unless we paid about 6 YTL or something, so I laughed at that and used my awesome photographic memory to take all the pictures I needed; which wasn’t all that much so there’s still a lot of space left in there to fill up with actual knowledge.
After Dolmabahce Palace, we had lunch, and then we continued on to the Askeri Museum, where it was Kevin and David’s turn to do their presentation. Asker in Turkish means “soldier” so basically this was a museum that contained a lot of military history. It was truly impressive and I really enjoyed walking through it. We went in to the museum and started walking around a little but right then we heard the mehter music, which I can’t really translate other than to say that it’s the music that strikes fear into the hearts of enemies and greatly energizes the Turkish army. I love this kind of music, and they had a procession going on with the music which imitated the way it was done way back when, and that was really impressive as well. Here’s a picture that gives an idea of all the parts and the people involved in the procession…
I’m not entirely sure about the roles of all of the people, but as a whole they were definitely fearsome and impressive. The man in green in the picture is what’s referred to as a janissary, I don’t remember if I did a spiel about janissaries in an earlier post, but just in case I didn’t they were young Christian men taken mostly from the Balkan areas who were then converted to Islam and circumcised and given very good education. They were absolutely loyal to the sultan up until the point where they forgot their military training and got into business and commerce. The janissaries were a specialized core of soldiers who were the most impressive part of the sultan’s immense army (probably, this is all my imagination combining with the knowledge I’ve gained these past few weeks so…and anyone who knows me knows I have a huge imagination…yeah anyways…) and they were also the best educated and best trained. Here’s a closer picture of one of the men in green…
Check out the way he’s holding the standard. He pushes his sword kind of out of his belt and uses it to support the arm that going to be holding the standard since there isn’t actually a place to stick the end of the flag on him. I thought it was cool and a good method. He wasn’t the only man in green; there was actually one other color, red. I didn’t get a picture of the entire thing but its ingrained in my mind and it was really very impressive. After watching the mehter group for a while (20 minutes-ish. Wish we could’ve watched them some more) we went inside and let David and Kevin get on with their presentation. Here’s a cool little picture of a really small thing from the museum…
This is the chain that went across the Golden Horn in Istanbul that divides its European side in half. It was supposed to be able to keep out ships, but obviously that didn’t work against Mehmed the Conqueror since he just made his way over land with his ships and got them into the sea on the other side of the chain. The Byzantines were then already about ¾ defeated and the only thing left for the Conqueror to do was to breach the walls, which he did with The Urban. The Urban was the hugest gun of its time, sending a very heavy and long in diameter ball to tear down the walls of Constantinople.
The museum was really interesting in that about 50% of the bottom floor dealt with May 29, 1453 (the fall of Constantinople) and the rest is devoted to halls of weapons and whatnot. The second floor is devoted to the Young Turk Revolution. There is also an entire wing of the museum that we didn’t go to visit consisting only of Ataturk memorabilia, but honestly, the halls for the Young Turk Revolution were enough to quench the thirst of any Ataturk maniac. We essentially went from a bit of Ottoman history about only one day to ATATURK AND WHAT HE DID. That was it.
To go back to the mehter group for a minute, something interesting to mention: they were the first military bands ever. The British, the French, all of the Europeans got the idea to have a military marching band from the Turks. Then, when the Turks wanted to become more European, they forgot that they had actually given this marching band thing to Europeans and got rid of their own thing to institute what the Europeans were doing. Which seems ridiculous to me, you already have the original thing, and the Eurpoean marching band part actually has a piece that refers to something Turkish, but you don’t really pay attention to that and believing your own country’s attributes to be worse than that of the Europeans you decide to institute their system. I had a wee bit of a problem with that, and I still do.
After the museum, we went over to the Shields and Merryman house to have wonderful dinner, and after dinner, we went and walked around Istiklal a bit and then went to a concert being held in the Galatasary High School. It would have been more entertaining if I had known the group, and also if the group had had better songs and better voices. The music itself was nice but the voice of the guy wasn’t all that wonderful. Here’s a picture of Zoe and David…
And here’s a picture of Edward looking very pensive…
I spent the night at the girls’ flat and had a lot of fun in general.
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