Fun with Mavis and Herm: Part One

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Over twenty-odd years ago, Nancy, Matthew and I moved from Los Angeles to northwestern Wisconsin, to a city named Eau Claire. Eau Claire is, duh, French, and means “clear water,” a misnomer since the river is the color of strong tea. This is due to the tons of bark that were shed from the millions of acres of pine trees that were harvested and rafted down the river past the town during the 19th century. The disintegrating bark continues to release tannin, hence the color of the water. Julia was born in Eau Claire.
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The reason we were in Eau Claire is because I landed my first university teaching position there. Soon, I also took on the job as choir director/organist at Trinity Lutheran Church. That’s where I met the Hermodsons, Mavis, alto, and Warren (Herm), tenor. Warren was a teacher of reading at one of the local junior high schools, and Mavis was establishing a driving school. Most of Mavis’ students were Hmong immigrants. If you have seen the Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino, you have been introduced to these Laotian immigrants, mountain people who backed the US effort in Vietnam, and left en masse to save their ass to the northern Midwest when the communists took over.
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Warren and Mavis are tourists now in Turkey, and we spent most of an early April day together. I met them at their hotel on a brisk Saturday morning and we set off to see some interesting sites that were not on their Istanbul itinerary. We began with a short walk down Barbaros Bulvari (Barbarous Boulevard) then caught a bus to Kabatas (pronounced “Cobatosh,” meaning “rough rocks”) where we took the Metro (urban rail) to Sultanahmet (named after Sultan Ahmet I, who built the Blue Mosque) and their first visitation site, the Basilica Cistern. This underground marvel dates from 532 AD, and is an amazing example of Byzantine engineering. Its existence was unknown for centuries. It wasn’t until over 100 years after the Ottoman conquest (when Constantinople became Istanbul in 1453) that the cistern was rediscovered -- people were found to be collecting water and fish by lowering buckets through holes in their basements. The cistern’s vaulted brick roof is supported by 336 columns, each over 26 feet tall, each capped with an ornately carved capital, each looted from Roman ruins. The two most unique columns rest on huge Medusa head bases. One of the heads is upside down. Tourists gape and ponder why. Why not? The columns were going to be underwater and underground for centuries. Which of the Byzantine engineers could have ever imagined they would be seen by anyone, much less millions of tourists?
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Next, we walked through the huge courtyard of Yeni Camii (pronounced “Yenny Jommy,” meaning “New Mosque”), which dates from the 17th century, making it, by Istanbul standards, new. Then we passed through the Spice Bazaar, an L-shaped collection of crowded, aromatic stalls under a high ceiling, built as an extension of the New Mosque complex. It was originally called the Egyptian Bazaar because it was built using money from spices imported from Egypt.
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Then, we used a Metro/taxi combination to visit the Chora Museum. This remarkable building takes its name from the Greek word “chora,” meaning an area outside of a city or in the countryside. A former monastery, later called the Church of St. Savior, later again called Kariye Camii, Chora originally lay outside the city walls built by Constantine, but was later contained within the massive Theodosian walls built in 423 AD, walls which protected Constantinople from invasion for over 1000 years. The church was destroyed by earthquakes and fires several times, but was always rebuilt. The present church-turned-mosque-turned-

museum dates from the 11th century. Its world-famous mosaics date from 1315-21, and depict the genealogy, infancy, and ministry of Jesus. My favorites are those depicting the life of the Virgin, stories taken from the Gospel of St. James written in the 2nd century, subject matter that was extremely popular in the Middle Ages, but later judged as inauthentic (apocryphal).
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We returned to Sultanahmet for an outdoor lunch, where we were protected from the predicted rain (which arrived almost exactly on time) by a sturdy plastic canopy. Full, footsore, but not fatigued, we walked downhill to the Archeological Museum. This enormous musem includes artifacts spanning over 5,000 years. The most amazing thing to me is that this collection of antiquities was only begun in the mid-19th century! It now contains one of the world’s richest gatherings of classical and pre-classical artifacts. I have visited it three times, and have still not seen all the exhibits. In fact, when I visited it this latest time with Mavis and Warren, a whole new wing was open in an area that had been closed before.
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We taxied back to Besiktas (pronounced “Beshiktosh,” meaning “five rocks”), where I got out, sent the Hermodsons on the way back to their hotel, and caught a bus home, in the happy knowledge that we would be back together in two weeks for more Adventures.
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