Thomas Whittemore has been chipping away plaster walls off for 14 years.

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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Cerrahpasa a forgotten corner of old Istanbul

In a city the size of İstanbul it’s hardly surprising that people can live here for decades and still not have visited every part of it.

What is a little more surprising, however, is to stumble on a part of the old city inside the ancient walls that goes virtually unvisited by foreigners. The area around Edirnekapı used to be a bit like that, but these days a growing number of coach parties pass through on their way to visit the Chora Church (Kariye Museum). The part of town around Cerrahpaşa and Haseki, though, is still completely off-the-beaten-track despite being within easy walking distance of Aksaray.

Historically, this was a very important part of the city, the place where the old slave market used to stand and thus the place where some of the women who rose to power in the Topkapı Palace harem changed hands on their path to the sultan’s bed. But it was also a part of town picked by several dignitaries of the Ottoman court who chose to adorn it with magnificent mosque complexes, some of them by the great architect Mimar Sinan.

To find Cerrahpaşa you need to alight from the tram at Aksaray, cross the busy interchange and look for the 18th-century Ebu Bekir Paşa schoolroom, which now houses a humble teahouse. From there you should head along Namık Kemal Caddesi to find the Cerrahpaşa Cami, which was built in 1593 by Davud Ağa, a pupil of Sinan who succeeded him as chief architect. In the grounds stands the tomb of Cerrah (Surgeon) Paşa, the barber who had the honor of circumcising the future Mehmed III and who was awarded the title of surgeon for his pains.

If you continue along Cerrahpaşa Caddesi and then turn left along Haseki Kadın Sokağı you will come to the enormous Bulgur Palas, built in 1912 in the style known as First National Architecture for Mehmed Habib Bey, who made a fortune in cracked wheat (hence the name) and then went on to become a deputy for Bolu. One of the architects who worked on it was Giulio Mongeri, who was also responsible for St. Anthony’s Church on İstiklal Caddesi as well as for the Maçka Palas building that now houses the Park Hyatt Hotel.

If, instead, you turn right along Haseki Kadın Sokağı you will come to one of the city’s more curious and easily overlooked monuments, namely the Column of Arcadius, erected in his own honor by the Emperor Arcadius in 402. The column was torn down for safety reasons in 1715, which means that only the base survives, squeezed in between a house and a car park. In winter it’s clearly visible, although at this time of year it’s largely obscured by foliage.

Believe it or not, the area around this column where there is now a children’s playground was once the Roman Forum of Arcadius, and then the site of the Avrat Pazarı, or Women’s Slave Market, which survived until 1847. There’s nothing left to show for it today, not even a commemorative plaque, but it’s thought that among the many women to have passed through it were Roxelana, who became the wife of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent and whose beautiful bath complex in Sultanahmet Square is currently under restoration; Kösem Sultan, the wife of Sultan Ahmed I and, as co-regent for her sons and grandson, one of the most powerful of all Ottoman women; and Mihrişah Sultan, the mother of Sultan Selim III.

At the end of Haseki Sultan Sokağı you will come to the Bayrampaşa mosque complex, which is split in two by the road with the mosque on the left-hand side of the road and the medrese (theological seminary) on the right. Bayram Paşa was a grand vizier to Sultan Murad IV, who died during the campaign to recapture Baghdad in 1638 and who gave his name to the area of İstanbul around the Esenler bus station. His tomb is in a very poor state of repair, but a mescid and dervish tekke (lodge) that formed part of the complex now house a women’s clinic.

If you turn left onto Haseki Caddesi you will come to the Haseki Hürrem mosque complex, which was built by Sinan for Roxelana in 1539. It’s the third largest such complex in the city after the Fatih and Süleymaniye models, which makes it all the more remarkable that it is so little known or visited. The mosque itself stands on the left-hand side of the road in a cramped courtyard, but the medrese over the road must once have been magnificent, to judge from the delicate tiled panels removed from above its windows and placed in the İstanbul Archeological Museum for safekeeping. Behind it the imaret (soup kitchen) bristles with chimneys alongside a splendid hospital building. Sadly, none of the complex is actually open to the public, and even the mosque seems reluctant to admit visitors.

A little bit of zigzagging around the back streets will bring you to the older Davutpaşa Cami, which was built for Davud Paşa, a grand vizier to Sultan Beyazıd II, in 1485 and whose tomb stands right beside it. Across the road, the medrese is one of the oldest in the city but stands in ruins, unlike the Fatih İbrahim Paşa Medresesi, a little way west of Cerrahpaşa Hospital, which was erected in 1560 but badly damaged by an earthquake in 1894. It has just been completely restored (rebuilt might be a better word).

Even if you’re starting to feel all mosqued out, it’s still worth heading up Ese Kapısı Sokağı to find the Hekimoğlu Ali Paşa Cami, which was built in 1734-5 in a style that segues neatly from classical Sinanesque into early baroque as exemplified by its main entrance, which blends traditional stalactite decoration with more rococo elements. The mosque itself is particularly beautiful, but you should make sure not to miss either the lovely sebil (water dispensary) built into the walls on the corner, or the wonderful library housed above the main gate. Books here are encased in a cage above the ground and still have to be accessed via a ladder.

Another curious reminder of the Byzantine period can be found nearby, and that is the Cistern of St. Mocius, a vast open-air reservoir that may have been used to store water for irrigation in Byzantine times. At 25,000 square meters, it’s big enough to enclose a park and children’s play area. Just look for a monumental hole in the ground, and you’ve found it.

Finally, if you continue west along Kocamustafapaşa Caddesi you will come to a busy square where many buses terminate. Here, too, is the inconspicuous Ramazan Efendi Cami, the last work of Sinan, designed in 1586 when he was 96. It contains a fine collection of İznik tiles, although you may only be able to get inside to inspect them around prayer time on Friday.

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Drama in the Round

by Robert Ousterhout,
author of The Art of the Kariye Camii
Article with historic photgraphs published in Cornucopia 27

The dramatic mosaics and frescoes of Istanbul’s Kariye Camii, or Church of the Chora, blew away the stiff conventions of Byzantine art. Their energy leaves Giotto looking staid. But theyare now in danger of turning to dust. The powerful pictures on these pages are from a new book by Robert Ousterhout, who fell in love with the church twenty-five years ago. Here he makes a passionate case for preserving this fourteenth-century masterpiece

When I first set foot in the Kariye Camii years ago, I fell in love. It was the academic equivalent of a blind date – I’d committed myself, sight unseen, to write a PhD dissertation about a building I’d never seen in a city I’d never visited. Happily, the Kariye caught and held my interest.

In fact, the Kariye proved to be the perfect blind date, possessing both beauty and brains. As I quickly discovered, the dazzling spectacle of its mosaics and frescoes was balanced by a coherent architectural framework and by firm intellectual underpinnings. It is one of Istanbul’s greatest treasures, once the main church of the Byzantine monastery of the Chora, and now a well-visited museum. Built and decorated between 1316 and 1321, the Kariye represents the patronage of Theodore Metochites, one of Byzantium’s greatest intellectuals, who was both an accomplished poet and prime minister. As sophisticated and erudite as a contemporary work of Byzantine literature, the Kariye is structured like a vast epic poem.

Theodore Metochites, famously depicted above the entrance in his big hat, was not only a powerful politician and the greatest scholar of his age, but he was also fabulously wealthy – the ideal patron for a project like the Kariye. More importantly, he was fortunate to find artists capable of translating his vision into built form. The hothouse conditions Metochites provided led to one of the most experimental periods of Byzantine art. If the word originality can be applied to the Byzantine, the Kariye is as original as it gets.

As the art historian Otto Demus once commented, at first glance the art of the Kariye seems to have no acknowledged canons, as if the artists preferred the abnormal to the normal, the distorted to the regular, the chaotic to the harmonious. It is the Byzantine equivalent of Postmodernism, breaking all the rules, but doing so in such a delightful way that we barely notice. As the key monument of late Byzantine art and architecture, there is absolutely nothing that can compare with it in Istanbul, or anywhere else for that matter.

Ten years after my first encounter, I was still in love with the Kariye. Our relationship had survived the dissertation, the revisions and, finally, the publication of the monograph. Then, after twenty-five years, I celebrated our silver anniversary with the publication of a second book. Although I began with a study of bricks and mortar, I found I couldn’t ignore the mosaics and frescoes. To be sure, I have been involved in a variety of other projects, but I keep coming back to the Kariye.

With its intricate architectural settings and its wealth of decoration, with each visit I seem to discover something new. On my last, for example, I started noticing the trees, how and where they are represented: in addition to a variety of expressive stumps and shrubbery in the mosaics, I realised that David of Thessaloniki, a dendrite (that is, a hermit who sat in a tree) shown at the entrance to the funeral chapel, is positioned equidistant from Christ Calling Zaccheus (who had climbed a tree in order to see Christ as he passed through Jericho) and Moses Before the Burning Bush. In each, we witness an encounter with the divine – Old Testament, New Testament, Byzantine.

Byzantine poets loved this kind of comparison. On an earlier visit, a friend pointed out how the drama and violence in the mosaic of the soldier pursuing Elizabeth with the infant John the Baptist (the last scene in the cycle of the Massacre of the Innocents) is emphasised by the soldier’s sword severing Elizabeth’s name in the inscription: eli-sabeth. Words and images work together.

Guidebooks are quick to point out the contemporaneity of the Kariye with the work of Giotto – as if we needed the Italian Renaissance to appreciate Byzantine art. There is certainly a similar power and sense of life in both, but the Byzantine artist worked differently from his Italian counterpart. Giotto developed an early system of perspective, so that his scenes appear as if viewed through a window, in a space beyond the picture plane. In contrast, for the Byzantine artist, pictorial space and the space occupied by the viewer were one and the same. As a consequence, the scenes at the Kariye have a greater sense of immediacy and are thus more emotionally compelling.

What is more, the setting for the art is not the flat walls of a big anonymous box (the typical Italian church), but rather a series of small, tightly interlocking spaces, in which architectural form and decoration are perfectly fitted together. We are led – personally, experientially – from one space to the next by the narrative, by the gestures of the figures and by the visual and thematic connections between the scenes.

The Byzantine artist did not attempt to create an artificial space through the science of perspective; instead, he created three-dimensional representations that come to life as we interact with them. Where else can we walk through the midst of the Last Judgment, with the scroll of heaven rolled up above our heads, flanked by the blessed and the damned?

The Kariye owes its preservation to the vagaries of history. It is set in what was originally a rural area by the land walls – the name Chora may be translated as “in the fields” – in the northern corner of the city, which became a hub of activity in the late Byzantine period, with the nearby Blachernae Palace as the main imperial residence. After the Ottoman conquest in 1453, however, the centre shifted back to the end of the peninsula, to Topkapi Palace, and the Chora church became an all-but-forgotten neighbourhood mosque.

Through the early Ottoman centuries, its decoration remained uncovered and, in fact, was never completely covered. The frescoes were whitewashed, some of the lower mosaics were removed, but the dome mosaics remained visible, and some of the wall panels were covered with wooden doors – to be opened to visitors for a small tip. When the Byzantine Institute of America undertook its extensive programme of cleaning and consolidation between 1948 and 1960, the surviving mosaics and frescoes were discovered to be in pristine condition.

Not so today. Both the Kariye and I are older than when we first met. The rapid growth of Istanbul’s population has increased the levels of humidity and pollution throughout the city. Crowds of visitors have also raised the level of humidity inside the building, which may be compounded by the lush garden planted close to its foundations, as well as by leaks in the roof and windows. The results are all too visible: in the parekklesion (the funeral chapel) the painted plaster has crumbled away at floor level, and efflorescence, or “bloom” (dampness causing salts to leach through the plaster and collect as a cloudy white substance on the surface), now obscures many painted scenes. For example, Theophanes the Hymnographer is represented below the dome in the parekklesion. He pauses while writing a funeral ode on the theme of Jacob’s Ladder as a guarantee of our access to heaven, holding his pen to point towards the adjacent scene of Jacob’s Ladder and, beneath it, the tomb of Theodore Metochites.

His meaningful gesture, which served visually to connect these several elements of the composition, is now all but invisible. A similar cloud of bloom obscures the Daughter of Jairus, raised from the dead by the hand of Christ, as well as the figure of Satan bound and gagged in the great fresco of the Anastasis (the Resurrection) which forms the visual termination of the parekklesion. Within the mosaics, protective covers of Perspex have created micro-environments in which the humidity is concentrated, causing the setting plaster to crumble.

What is to be done? First, a careful evaluation of the building, its mosaics and frescoes, is required, followed by a comprehensive programme of conservation, regular monitoring, and possibly the installation of climate controls. In France, the Lascaux caves, with their famous prehistoric paintings, have been closed to tourism and the interior environment sealed, controlled and carefully monitored. Even the scientists are allowed only limited access. It may be that nothing quite so drastic is required at the Kariye, but as a new government is elected, it might be worth reminding it that the long-term preservation of Turkey’s unique cultural heritage deserves greater priority than the quick-fix economics of tourism.

As I escorted a friend’s aged grandmother through the Kariye recently, it occurred to me that old buildings are like grandparents.

We love them just as much in their old age. But they require periodic check-ups and regular care – and occasionally treatment by specialists and prescription medicines. I am still in love with the Kariye Camii, but right now it needs urgent medical attention.

© Robert Ousterhout
Robert Ousterhout’s earlier book, ‘The Architecture of the Kariye Camii in Istanbul’ (Dumbarton Oaks Studies 25, 1987), is available from www.doaks.org

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