Visions of Byzantium
December 28, 2010 by Max Crandale
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The exhibition, Vaults of Heaven
Visions of Byzantium, presents a series of extraordinary ultra-large-scale photographs, many over six-feet tall, by the renowned Turkish photographer Ahmet Ertug. The exhibit is at the Kelsey Museum of Archeology at the University of Michigan through Jan. 23.
Focusing on paintings, mosaics, and architecture of the Byzantine world (6th–14th centuries AD), the photos provide a journey through such venerated sites as Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia and Church of Christ in Chora, as well as churches in the Cappadocia region of central Turkey, an area known for hidden Christian retreats hewn out of the region’s unusual volcanic rock formations.
Trained as an architect, Ahmet Ertug combines a deep understanding of Byzantine history and culture with an artist’s eye. His remarkable photographs capture the mystery and power of these ancient sites, offering viewers intimate views of the great domes, expansive structural details, and exquisite mosaics and paintings of these sacred spaces.
Accompanying the photographs are objects from the Kelsey Museum’s collections of Byzantine and Islamic material, including gold coins, manuscripts pages, small carvings, pottery, and wooden architectural fragments.
Vaults of Heaven
Visions of Byzantium will be displayed in two parts. Part I, on display from Oct. 1– Jan. 23, 2011, includes visions from two famous metropolitan churches in Istanbul: Hagia Sophia and the early 14th-century Church of Christ in Chora.
Part II, on display from Feb.4 – May 29, 2011, focuses on Karanlik, a monastic compound built in the 11th century; Tokali, the largest church in Cappadocia, with paintings from the 10-11th centuries and the church of Meryemana (“Mother Mary”), which is currently closed to the public.
Ahmet Ertug has been hailed as one of the world’s few living photographers who is “predestined to become a part of history.” His extraordinary images have been featured in major exhibitions from Japan and Turkey to Paris and London. A selection of his work is permanently displayed in the upper gallery of Istanbul’s famous Hagia Sophia.
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A 1974 graduate of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, Ertug began his photographic career in 1972, taking pictures of Caribbean festivals and street life in London. Although he continued to work as an architect, his interest in photography grew throughout the 1970s.
While working in Iran, he began photographing indigenous settlements and ancient Persian monuments, and in 1979, with the help of a research grant, he traveled throughout Japan, capturing images of ancient Japanese temples, Zen gardens, and festivals. After his year in the Far East, Ertug returned to Istanbul, having been hired as an architect for the conservation planning of the city. His increasingly intimate knowledge of the city’s historic quarters inspired him to begin photographing Istanbul’s impressive Byzantine, Ottoman, and Roman remains, using a large-format camera that enabled him to capture their full splendor.
In the 1980s, Ertug established his own publishing house, producing specially designed books of his photographs that are now recognized for their innovation in the printing industry. Both his books and photographs have been internationally praised for their beauty and “deep meditative energy,” which draw the viewer into his subject.
The Kelsey Museum of Archeology is located at 434 S. State Street, Ann Arbor. (734)-764-9304; www.lsa.umich.edu/kelsey
Todd Gerring is community outreach coordinator at the Kelsey Museum of Archeology
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Kariye Istanbul one of the world’s greatest museums
July 25, 2010 by Max Crandale
Filed under News
The Kariye Museum in Istanbul, Turkey is listed among the top 30 must-see museums in the world.
A recent article includes the Kariye Museum in Istanbul among the top 30 must-see museums in the world.
Patricia Schultz, author of the book, “1,000 Places to See Before You Die.” ranks The Kariye Museum in Istanbul alongside such internationally celebrated art museums as The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain; The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia; Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam; and The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
The Kariye Museum also known as the Church of the Holy Savior in Chora, this often-overlooked museum began as a chapel or church built as early as the fifth century, after which it flourished as a mosque during the time of the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul.
Kariye Museum in Istanbul is, after Hagia Sophia, the most important Byzantine monument in Istanbul, Turkey. The interior of the building is covered with fine mosaics and frescoes.
After the Turkish conquest in 1453, the church remained as it is for a time, and was turned into a mosque in 1511 by addition of a minaret. Then it became a museum in 1948 and its frescoes and mosaics were cleaned.
The majority of the current building was built in the late 11th century with lots of repairs and restructuring in the following centuries. It was dedicated to Christ the Savior. The interior of the building is covered with wonderful mosaics and frescoes, illustrating scenes from the life of Christ and the Virgin Mary. Surprisingly few of the tourists that fill Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque visit Kariye.
Nearby you can find atmospheric cafes and historic Ottoman houses in the shadow of the city’s fifth century walls.
The Kariye Museum, however, isn’t the only unique museum on the list. Among the 30 selected by Schultz are such unusual institutions as the National Archeological Museum in Naples, Italy, and The International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.
Thomas Whittemore has been chipping away plaster walls off for 14 years.
September 26, 2009 by Max Crandale
Filed under Articles
From Time – Jan. 27, 1947,
Glory be to God, who hath thought me worthy to accomplish so great a work; 1 have vanquished thee, O Solomon!
This was the proud thanksgiving uttered by Justinian the Great at the dedication of the church of St. Sophia (“Divine Wisdom”) in Constantinople 14 centuries ago. Justinian had something to crow about; “compared with the formation of the vilest insect,” as Historian Edward Gibbon pointed out, the church might be dull and insignificant, but the peak of its interior is one of the Highest in the world (180 feet) and as art, St. Sophia doubtless surpassed Solomon’s temple. Among the church’s beauties, noted Gibbon, were “a variety of ornaments and figures . . . curiously expressed in mosaic; and the images of Christ, of the Virgin, of saints, and of angels, which have been defaced by Turkish fanaticism. . . .”
Last week Boston Archeologist Thomas Whittemore returned home from Istanbul, with proof that the conquering Moslems had not been guilty of defacing, only of concealing, St. Sophia’s Christian mosaics. Whittemore, a spry, enthusiastic bachelor of 76, and director of Boston’s well-heeled Byzantine Institute, has been chipping away at the church’s plaster walls off & on for the past 14 years.
He had won the approval of Turkey’s late President Kamal Atatürk for the project. At first, because the church was in use as a mosque, Whittemore and his assistants had to take Fridays and Moslem prayer hours off. But in 1935 the Turkish Government made St. Sophia a public monument, and since then work has proceeded on a businesslike 9-to-5 schedule (except for winter months, when the place gets too chilly to work in). Whittemore went right on chipping through the war.
Under the plaster he has discovered close to a thousand years of history—in silver, gold, marble, and sparkling glass cubes put together into a parade of saints and influential sinners which stretches from 537 to 1453 A.D., when the Turks came marching in.
Among the mosaics already laid bare are portraits of Emperor Leo VI (made about 900 A.D.), Constantine the Great and Justinian II (995), Empress Zoë and Constantine IX (1042), John II Comnenus, Empress Irene, and their son, Alexius (early 12th Century).
Whittemore still has years of chipping ahead, and not much of an idea what he will find next. His men work mostly on scaffoldings high up on the walls. They use no chemicals to dissolve the plaster and paint which the Moslems spread over the murals (the Moslem religion forbids pictures of people or animals, as the Jewish forbids graven images). Whittemore has found it safer to flake off inch by inch with “a small steel chisel, [the kind] used in delicately cleaning fossils.”
Where they have been freed of plaster, St. Sophia’s walls and vaulting seem to dissolve in color. The mosaics, says Whittemore enthusiastically, meet “the vision as if charioted on a billow of light, each with an appeal as thrilling and compelling and personal as it seems possible to experience. The effect as you move past them has the cumulative power of a rising flood, and they engulf you in the religious enthusiasm of Byzantine conviction. . . . We may say of all [the mosaics] that we are in the presence of [works of] metropolitan masters, compared with which the contemporary mosaics in Italy, for instance, are provincial and derived. We have only to look at extant gth Century mosaics in Roman churches and their feeble treatment to assure ourselves that the fountainhead of the art was at Constantinople.”
Throughout the 1,000 years in which they were made, St. Sophia’s mosaics hardly varied in style or excellence. They were made by the best artist of each generation, working in “orchestral” anonymity of the sort that, Scholar Whittemore believes, “life is trying to induce us to return to.”
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