Songs of My Father: A Travelogue

Songs of My Father

A Travelogue

 A church for 1,000 years, a mosque for 600 years, a museum now for nearly 100 years, the Hagia Sophia seemed to embody the impersonal nature of Truth; an individual standing in this vast space in the flickering glow of oil lamps was both paramount and inconsequential. As I stood spellbound in the dimly lit interior, I found myself increasingly aware of the cold draft of the vastness of time, the vulnerability of being a tiny speck in the universe.

As I looked up at the face of Christ Pantocrator I realized that the Byzantine image in the shimmering gold mosaics was the same image that had admonished me for so many years from the golden dome of Holy Name Church in Boston. Istanbul is of course famous for such collisions of worlds; east and west, religious and secular, old and new, but I was surprised that it now seemed so personal.

But the most surprising thing about being here was that I found myself almost constantly being reminded of my father, and the realization that in just two years he would have been one hundred years old.

           

Why this should come as such a startling revelation, I’m not sure, but somehow this thought seemed to make the years between Justinian’s conception of this remarkable structure and my standing in the middle of it seem not so distant, perhaps because fewer lifetimes spanned the centuries than I’d previously imagined or maybe now my thoughts, my appreciation of history, or my sense of place seemed closer to what I thought my father’s to be. A classics scholar and student of history, my father would often spontaneously quote from Homer, Dante, or Cicero, and launch into elaborately embroidered stories of Greek and Roman mythology. Whatever the reason, the entire trip I could not shake this sense of Dad looking over my shoulder.

Awakened each morning by the call to prayers, the voices reverberating from the minarets first from one mosque then another until the entire city echoed with the chanting of the Qur’an, I was surprised to realize what an extraordinary sense of comfort this daily rhythm provides; a serene sense of permanence, stability, and community. There is a common purpose and meaning to life here, it is different from our own, it is affirmed five times each day, and it impacts every aspect of life every day. These centuries’ old bonds to the community and a shared sense of values and beliefs seem somehow at odds with our focus on the individual, but there is a great strength in this unity.

Istanbul is today, as it has been for millennia, at the intersection of many worlds, and the economic and political tensions with Europe and the West, the cultural divides with Asia and the East, and the secular and  fundamentalist tensions with Islam and the Arab world are palpable. This is still a city of legends that conjures images and echos memories that are both distant and exotic.

We sailed one morning up the Bosporus; crossing the Golden Horn, then sailing past the caravan crossings of the old Silk Roads, past the old yahlis and palaces, past the fortress where Mehmed II and the Ottoman Empire lay siege to Constantinople and conquered an empire that had flourished for a thousand years, past the place where Prometheus guided Io across the waters as she fled Hera’s jealous wrath, to a tiny fishing village where the Black Sea emerges from the fog and the memories of Jason and the Argonauts trail to the horizon. It is a long day’s journey through five thousand years of western history, philosophy and mythology.

Exiting the Sea of Marmara in the opposite direction, the Dardanelle Straits lead south, narrowing to where Xerxes led the Persians to victory over the Greeks crossing from East to West on their fated journey toward Thermopylie, and where Alexander the Great extracted his revenge a century later, crossing in the same place but from West to East, and of course lead still farther south to the plains of Troy and the never too distant voice of Homer. This place seemed the embodiment of the stories and narratives, the history and mythology that so greatly influenced my father’s perception of life and the world, and of course my perception of him.

But there is another church in Istanbul that was built in what was at the time a sheep pasture just outside the Theodosian walls of the city, that has somehow survived the onslaught of the tremendous upheavals of the next sixteen hundred years; the great plagues, the crusades, the Ottoman invasion, the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire and the Byzantine world, the Crimean War, and two World Wars.

The Church of the Chora, its astonishing mosaics and frescoes still largely intact, is everything that the Hagia Sophia is not. If the monumental scale and astonishing space and light of the Hagia Sophia draws men to heaven, the intimate Church of the Chora brings heaven to earth.  This is a place conceived and built in the extraordinary struggles and tumult of the years following Emperor Constantine’s great council at Nicea; that first ecumenical council that cast out the false prophets and the gnostic gospels of Thomas, Mary Magdalene and others, defined the one and true faith of Christianity, and proclaimed what would become known as the Nicene Creed; “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth...”.  It is again from this place, a thousand years later, in a final moment of panic and despair as the city of Constantinople fell to the invading Ottoman Empire, that a sacred icon was rushed to the place where the city walls had been breeched in a failed attempt to turn back the invading armies. This is still a place of extraordinary faith.

Every inch of the vaulted vestibules, walls and domes are embellished with frescoes and bejeweled with shimmering mosaics. The painted figures are life size. They stand next to me, staring stern faced, passing judgment as I pass down the narrow halls. Hosts of golden Seraphim swarm like starlings high along the ribs of the narthex, keeping constant vigil on all who enter. There are no barriers here. I could pick the thousand year old golden tiles from the mosaics of Mary’s cloak if I chose, as many have done for centuries before me. I could reach up and grasp the keys to the Kingdom from the hand of St. Peter.  I could stand face to face, eye to eye, with the austere ascetic, John the Baptist, and I do. This place is a personal communion with God, an intimate camaraderie with angels and saints, a house of prayer in its most profound sense; it brings the awful vulnerability of mortality into stark and immediate focus. My father told me once that when he went to church he didn’t go to participate in the mass, he went to have a conversation with God. This is such a place.

My father died when I was in my twenties, a year before my own son was born and I struggle at times to understand who he truly was, apart from being a father, to somehow fathom his hopes and dreams, to understand who he was as a scholar, educator, mathematician, historian, a Major in the US Army Corp of Engineers. I find my father in my thoughts more and more with each passing year.  I never had those occasional long philosophical discussions that I sometimes find myself having with my own son, the ones I imagine Dad had with his father on those long, lazy Sunday afternoons in my grandfather’s kitchen in Dorchester. This trip makes me feel a connection somehow, a sense that I have come to appreciate some of what he valued, and realize that maybe we were not so far apart after all.

There is a wonderful poem written nearly eight centuries ago by Rumi; mystic, poet, founder of the Sufi order of Islam, the whirling dervishes known as the Mevlani, as he searched for meaning in his life:

            “Cross and Christians, end to end, I examined.

            He was not on the cross.

            I went to the Hindu temple, to the ancient pagoda.

            In neither was there any sign.

            To the heights of Herat I went, and Kandahar.

            I looked. He was not on height or lowland.

            Resolutely I went to the Mountain of Kaf.

            There only was the place of the ‘Anqa bird.

            I went to the Kaaba. He was not there...

            I looked then into my own heart. In that place I saw him.

            He was in no other place.”

If I sometimes feel as though I never knew my father well, I also sometimes look at myself, and I look at my son, and I see him there.

There is an age-old axiom that says that a person dies three times: first at the time of their demise, second upon their disposition (burial, cremation...), and third the last time their name is spoken. I talked a lot about my father on this trip, more than I have in many years. I hope that my son will find inspiration and great strength in his thoughts of his grandfather and that he speaks his name fondly, and often.

Istanbul is a city of extraordinary monuments, some designed to rival the temples of Solomon, others simple, even austere, but all are preserved with the same purpose. Here in this ancient city and Muslim world, remembrance is paramount and there is great respect for history, and for age, and all that it brings.

Or perhaps it’s just that ancestor worship seems more appropriate the older I get. I’ll have to remember to tell my son.