History as Deep as the Bosporus

Today as we ate light salads and kabobs in an open and breezy restaurant, the lunchtime call-to-prayer for the Muslim populations of Istanbul rang across the Bosporus from about 30 different mosques. Eerie voices in the atonal Arabic scale blared from the loudspeakers that were precariously perched on every minaret and turret of the intricate mosques across the shore. Even in this mod eatery, the air seemed to grow tight with some unmentionable tension as the intertwining voices found their way into the open doors and windows. I felt the voices speaking in inaudible and unintelligible voices grow infinitesimally more brisk and excited—an air of unsettlement, a feeling of unspoken tradition carried in the 30 simultaneously singing voices that have been performing the same prayers since the dawn of human religious thought.

Even the red flags that dot the shoreline of the Bosporus—the Turkish flag that proudly displays the nationalism of this proud country who takes pride in identifying its success as a distinctly secular place—subtly display the religious undertones that permeate every province within the city. As we visited the world’s oldest and largest mosques, every dome and tower was tipped with a U-shaped gold emblem that is the symbol of the Muslim faith, just as the cross adorns every church in the United States. But, the Turkish flag itself is red, with a white sliver of a moon and a star. When compared with the symbols of the mosques, the U-shaped emblem that adorns the buildings is simply turned on its side within the Turkish flag. In this sense, although the famous Ataturk liberated the country from defining boundaries of hate and oppression under this symbol, the deep tradition of religion here is as stalwart and second-nature as the moon itself—rooted in the earliest of historical annals and within the hearts of every Turk who hears the haunting trills of the call-to-prayer from the mosques five times each day.

It is this religious evolution that is represented in all of the ancient buildings or in the habitual symbolic representations in everyday Turkish life that astonishes me and gives me a sense of the thousands of years of history that stretch before me while looking at a simple wall of a mosque. Hagia Sophia, the world’s oldest mosque has a single wall that visibly shows architecture dating back to the 500’s—when Christianity was born. As we walked through a steep and dank hallway to reach a gallery on the second floor of the building, the damp cobblestones in the floor smelled dank and cold—as if they had been wrought from their native creeks, rock beds, and cliffs only yesterday. As I headed toward the fresh air and light from this corridor, I almost felt like a caveman who was leaving this figuratively religious cave to explore the history that sprawled out before me in the form of imprints of crosses ripped from the walls, painted flourishing tulips from the Ottoman Empire, Byzantium architecture, Greek mosaics of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, and huge disks gilded with Arabic symbols that paid respects to Muhammad and every prophet before him.

It is this richness that cannot be found inscribed in even the most beautiful houses of worship in Amercia,like the Duke Chapel, but it is something that is ever-present in these countries where civilization, modern government, and religious beliefs were born. As intangible as this almost infinite lapse of time is, it adds a certain richness to my travel experience as I learn to reconcile the present and the future with a past of which I am constantly reminded with every ancient edifice and the undying sounds that scatter the streets.