It was the irresistible tug of the city, the lasso of his own identity moored among these ancient stones.
When Friar William was invited to preach in Haghia Sophia on Palm Sunday of 1253, the great church was already very old. Built in the 530s by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great, it belongs to the architectural tradition of the Roman basilica, and thus indirectly to the pagan world of the Greek temple.
The brilliance of Haghia Sophia is the transition from the earthbound exterior to the soaring lightness of its interior. From the outside the great church is monumental and brooding, the original form much confused with buttresses and minarets added after the Turkish conquest when it began a new career as a mosque. Inside it takes flight. It is transfiguration in architecture. You may run your hands over the massive outer walls, a millennium and a half, stained and crumbling beneath your fingers, but the ethereal magic of the nave is less palpable. The air is gold- and rust-coloured, like some exhalation of the old mosaics and the red marble. Moted columns of light fall from the high windows onto the wide expanses of the floor. The walls, the columns, the distant vaults, might have been weightless; the great dome, Procopius wrote over fourteen centuries ago, seems to be suspended from heaven by a golden chain. Robert Byron compared the old basilica to St Peter’s in Rome. Haghia Sophia is a church to God, he wrote, St Peter’s merely ‘a salon for his agents’.
It is a daunting place to begin a journey to the nomadic steppes. I spent hours in Haghia Sophia wandering the upper galleries beneath the conch vaults gazing down into the great canyon of the nave. I had come to see it as my world and I lingered here as a kind of farewell. As the slanting afternoon light crept through the galleries, amid lengthening shadows, I listened to the crescendo of the great city outside as its inhabitants began their journeys home. In the golden embrace of Haghia Sophia, I suddenly saw the journey to Mongolia as a Byzantine might have done, a journey into emptiness, into some fearful void. I understood the ambitions and the richness of cities. The desire to carve the aspirations of the human heart into some permanent form was central to my own world. In Haghia Sophia that impulse had produced sublime transcendance.
On this day at the beginning of June, on the other side of Asia, the Mongolians would be packing up and moving to summer pastures, leaving nothing to mark their passage but the shadows on the spring grass where their tents had stood.
At the docks my fellow passengers, a queue of burly figures beneath amorphous sacks, were making their up the gangway of the Mikhail Lomonosov like newsreel refugees.
Below in the cabin the resident onions had been cleared away leaving a faint astringent odour and a litter of red skins. The accommodation master appeared with my cabin-mate, a fifteen-year-old boy from Sevastopol. Kolya had been visiting his mother who was working in Istanbul. He was a thin boy with a mutinous complexion and an agitated manner. His gangly limbs jerked and rattled with adolescent impatience.
Kolya and I conversed in a bizarre amalgam of English, Turkish and Russian, prompted by various phrase books and a vocabulary of gestures and mime. It made for surprisingly lucid conversation. At first I tried to chat to him about kid’s stuff – his age, his school, his mother, ice-hockey – but he brushed these dull enquiries aside. He was keen to know the legal age limit for smoking and drinking in England, what kind of guns the police carried in London, and if the Queen was still in the business of beheading. His Istanbul had been somewhat different from mine. He had never heard of Haghia Sophia but he knew where to buy imitation Rolex watches and could quote the prices in three currencies. Like everyone else on this ship, he was a small trader, bringing home goods to sell in Sevastopol. He showed me his wares, – T-shirts, switchblades, pornographic magazines.
He sat on the edge of his bunk, drumming his legs in a nervous rhythm, blowing smoke rings towards the porthole. Kolya was in a hurry to grow up, to find the fast-track to the adult world of hard currency, illegal trading, and women. I was more than he could have hoped for as a cabin-mate, a representative of the glamorous and decadent West, that happy land of rap stars and Playstations. Hoping to cement our relationship, he looked for a way to make himself useful to me. I was a lone foreigner on a ship of Ukrainians and Russians, and he began to cast himself as my protector.
His mother appeared at the door of the cabin to say goodbye. A tall blonde Venus in a fur-collared coat, she was an exotic dancer making a Ukrainian fortune in one of Istanbul’s nightclubs. In the narrow passage Kolya was momentarily tearful – a boy like any other saying goodbye to his mother – but once she was gone he was quick to shake off this unwelcome vulnerability. He began to count the fistful of dollars that she had tucked into his pocket. Then he bolted out the door as if he had another ship to catch. Fifteen minutes later he was back, carrying a shopping bag from the free-port facilities on the quayside. Inside was a hard plastic case. Opening it, he lifted out an automatic pistol.
‘A hundred dollars,’ he said, breaking the seal on the box of ammunition.
‘What is it for?’ I asked, ducking as he swung the gun round the cabin.
‘Protection,’ the boy said. His eyes shone.
He had bought a shoulder-holster as well, and sought my help in buckling it round his thin shoulders. Then he slipped the gun into the new leather, and put on his jacket to hide the weapon. Smiling, the child stood before me, armed and dangerous, ready for the voyage home.
We sailed at nine. Below in the cabin, I felt a series of shudders run through the ship, and went out on deck to find us slipping away from our berth. Swinging about in the entrance to the Golden Horn, where a stream of cars was crossing the Galata Bridge, we turned up the Bosphorus away from the old city. The world’s most splendid skyline, that exquisite silhouette of minarets and domes, was darkening on a lemon-coloured sky. Haghia Sophia, round-shouldered above the trees of Gülhane, was the colour of a shell, a delicate shading of pinks and greys. Swaying in the wash of currents, ferries pushed out from the docks at Eminönü, bound for Üsküdar where the lights were coming on along the Asian shore. On the foredeck, I made my way through the cables and the piled crates to stand in the prow of the ship as we slipped northward through the heart of the city.
The austere face of the Dolmabahçe Palace, the nineteenth-century successor to the Topkapi, rose on our left. Its restrained façade belies a kitsch interior, a confection of operatic furnishings too ghastly to detail. It was here that the last Sultans watched their enfeebled empire slither to an ignominious end in the early years of the twentieth century. Much of the palace was given over to the harem, whose membership seemed to grow as the number of imperial provinces declined. Sex, presumably, was some consolation for political impotency.
The Bosphorus is a pilot’s nightmare. In the twisting straits ships veer back and forth between the two continents, dodging the powerful currents and each other. We passed so close to the mosque at Ortaköy on the European side that I was able to look down through grilled windows to see a row of neatly synchronized bottoms, upturned in prayer. Half a mile on I could see what was on television in the stylish rooms of the old renovated Ottoman houses on the Asian shore. Accidents are not uncommon, and people tell amusing anecdotes about residents of the waterside villas being awoken in the middle of a foggy winter night to find a Russian freighter parked in the living room. Since the late seventies no less than twelve listed yalis or Ottoman houses have been run down by ships, invariably captained by tipsy Russians.
A spring wind had blown up, the Kozkavuran Firtinasi, the Wind of the Roasting Walnuts, which comes down to the Bosphorus from the hills of Anatolia. On the Asian shore we passed the twin-spired façade of the Ottoman cavalry school where cadets were taught some shadow of the horsemanship
