D Day +4

Right early blog today. It’s 12:45 and we have just checked out of the hotel BUT our flight does not leave until 2:00 am tomorrow morning so we have a 9 hour wait until our ride to the airport arrives. We’ve showered and changed so wandering around in the mid day heat is not an option, in fact even sitting in the shade on the terrace on the hotel roof its HOT.

We started off early this morning and headed out to Hagia Sophia but decided first to visit the Basilica Cistern as the queue was manageable. The cistern was built in the 6th century by the by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian the first but most people would recognise it from the Dan Brown film Inferno or even the James Bond film from Russia with love.

Even having seen it in the movies nothing prepares you for the sheer size of the place, I mean it is enormous. Its capable of holding 80,000 cubic meters of water thats 17.597 MILLION gallons in old money. Apparently it took 7,000 slaves to construct it. Considering that when it was full of water nobody would see the  inside the  336 columns all have capitals mostly  in the Ionic and Corinthian style with a few Doric thrown in for good measure. I’ll let the pictures tell the story.

After going to the cistern we joined the queue to go into the Hagia Sophia. The queue was fairly long when we joined it and we had to wait 20 minutes until it started to move but by that time it stretched out behind us further than you could see. 

Hagia Sophia, like so many places in Istanbul, has a really complicated history. Originally built as the Christian Cathedral of Constantinople and became the spiritual centre  for what we now refer to as the Orthodox Church. In 1054 the western Pope Leo 9th excommunicated the patriarch who in turn excommunicated Pope Leo (so much for religious tolerance). In 1204 it became a Catholic Cathedral when the Fourth Crusade took place and Enrico Dandolo the Doge of Venice looted the place scattering holy relics all around the western world. In 1261 it was back to being an eastern orthodox church until the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453 when it was converted to a mosque and it remained one until it was turned into a museum in 1935 under the secular Republic of Turkey. In 2020 President Erdogan made the very controversial decision to return it to being a mosque again. You can see from this potted history just how complex the past of Istanbul is and why it is such a fascinating city.

Inside the mosque you can quite clearly see both Islamic and Christian iconography but unfortunately the sheer number  of visitors means that the calm and peaceful atmosphere we experienced in the mosque yesterday is missing and thats a shame as it is truly a wonderful space.

Thats it for today only another 8 hours to go before we start on the next leg of our journey