Teopantitla: A Place to Remember

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Cicadas - The Song of the Rainbirds

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Ajijic - Pre-Columbian Memories

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Punta Ixtal - Primal Migrations

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Oaxaca!

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Monte Albán

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San Cristóbal de las Casas

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Palenque

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Zinacantán

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Cañón del Sumidero

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Misol Há & Agua Azul

In the mountains surrounding the ancient Mayan site of Palenque in the Mexican state of Chiapas, close to the Lacandon jungle and Usumacinta River which divides Mexico and Guatemala, thundering waterfalls dot the landscape. Cascada de Misol Há falls from a height of 115' into a nearly circular pool surrounded by lush tropical vegetation. The water is clear crystal blue due to its mineral content and on a warm spring day the water is perfect for swimming! There is a 60' long cave along the massive rock face that allows you to walk behind the waterfall and provides stunning views of the world from behind the veil.

Aqua Azul is a seemingly endless series of spectacular cataracts one following another as they cascade down the mountainside. Surrounded by tropical forests, banana trees, brilliant pink hanging heliconia and bright red ginger. The place is truly magical.

Photography by Bill Sheehan

Indigenous Apostles

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The Dingle Peninsula

From Killarney we headed west to the Dingle peninsula. Jutting out into the cold Atlantic, the journey along Slea Head and the Wild Atlantic Way leads to the western most point on the mainland with views of the mist shrouded Blasket Islands on the horizon. This is a region of Gaeltacht, a bastion of Irish heritage where the traditional language and culture are embraced and Gaelic is the voice of songs, shop signs, and small talk.

The landscape is wild and remote. The locals love to say that “the next town over is Boston”. When it rains it doesn’t so much fall as blast in horizontally from the storm-gray North Atlantic. But when we were there the sun was shining if not entirely warm, and the mist had receded to the far horizon.

Dingle, as you would expect, is a fishing village with restaurants serving salmon, sole and mussels caught that morning in the cold Atlantic, but it's also become a fabulous foodie town. Celebrated chefs from all over Ireland (and beyond) are attracted here not only for the abundance of seafood but also for the salty march grasses and seaweeds used for broths and wraps, locally grown organic produce, grass fed lamb and beef, and locally made, award winning cheeses. There's also the superb gin from the Dingle Distillery flavored with local botanicals, rowanberries, hawthorne, heather, and fuchsia. Then there are the bakeries! And the butchers! And the cheesemakers! And the ice cream! Not to mention the plethora of pubs with local beers and local musicians playing local music. This is a place that gives real voice to the national Irish greeting, "Ceád Míle Faílte," a hundred thousand welcomes.

As we rounded the wide curve where Castlemaine harbor opens to the ocean there’s a beckoning view of the North Atlantic. Inch beach, despite its name is not the smallest beach in the world, but a wide flat tideland, a long peninsula really, and it’s a haven for the hearty Irish surfing crowd. If it were twenty degrees warmer and we hadn’t become such cold weather wimps since moving to Mexico, we’d have walked its entire length but the draw was still so irresistible that we had to walk, seemingly forever, to the water’s edge 'til the outgoing tide lapped at the tips of our shoes.

This is where David Lean, director of the film "Lawrence of Arabia" built a stone house on the side of a hill for his filming of "Ryan's Daughter". Farther down the Wild Atlantic Way is where Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman starred in "Far and Away", and the remote island of Skellig Michael off the tip of the peninsula was used in the filming of the latest "Star Wars" epic.

As seems to be the case all over this island, epochs collide and the past and present sit tolerantly side by side. Prehistoric stone monuments stand like silent sentinels of the past scattered across the landscape and the farms. The ancient beehive huts or ringforts, stone piled on stone without mortar, used now for sheep pastures or pig shelters still stand in great abundance after more than a thousand years.

A short distance down the road the bones of a Famine Cottage stand defiantly on the side of a hill staring blankly across an open field toward another  prehistoric stone complex perched precariously atop the bluff. The cottage and the surrounding grounds are preserved as they were in the mid-1840’s when the potato crop rotted in the fields, a million people died, and a million more emigrated from Ireland with the hope of a finding better life. 

Stone stacking is an ancient and sometimes religious impulse, but it's a way of life in Ireland, both commonplace and high-art. Stone cairns lead lost hikers to the safety of a trail, stone walls define pastures and farms, and guide sheep from one grazing ground to another, stone monuments bear witness to deeds and graves, and stone chapels lead the faithful to a place beyond the hardships of their daily toils. The thousand year old Gallarus Oratory combines all these things. Its origins and purpose have been lost to the ages but it still holds visitors spellbound standing as it does in stark solitude in defiance of the years and the endless battering of the North Atlantic. 

Like much of Ireland, the Dingle peninsula is remarkable for its stark and rugged beauty. The stone walls and monuments bear silent and reverent witness to the toils of previous generations. It's easy to imagine how the famous Irish hospitality could be born of such natural beauty and remote isolation.

Dublin

That Dublin is renown for both the gift of gab and the Book of Kells is not merely a coincidence. This is a city of stories, a city of writers and poets, wordsmiths and playwrights, a city of intricate flourishes and grand ideas. 

Georgian Doors around St. Stephens Green, Dublin

This is also a city of pubs, perhaps because as someone once observed, “no great novel ever began by eating a salad.” Here, it’s all about the conversation. Although some pubs provide entertainment, in many there are no fiddles or pipes, no mournful renditions of “Danny Boy”, nothing to distract from the pressing task of putting the world to rights. 

“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, 

which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” 
                                                   ― William Butler Yeats

James Joyce liked to hang out at Davy Byrnie’s pub, William Butler Yeats at Toner’s where tall tales and great literature share a corner table with the poetry of Seamus Heaney and the plays of Samuel Beckett. Dublin is a UNESCO City of Literature, there are few cities that care so deeply about the written word. 

The Book of Kells, Trinity College, Dublin

And Ireland’s greatest national treasure is the holy grail of the written word; The Book of Kells. The impossibly intricate designs and elaborate flourishes on the the 1,200 year old vellum remind me of the haiku describing the excruciating weight of the moth on the one ton temple bell. Pages are sumptuously illuminated with Celtic knots, floral designs, swirls and flourishes, but hidden among and between is another whole miniature world of cats and mice fighting over food, an otter with a fish, and rows of heavenly seraphim. The book is ceremonial rather than functional, designed to extoll the greater glory of God and it is a remarkable insight on the impact that the Catholic Church had on the life of the country.

“An idea that is not dangerous

is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”

~ Oscar Wilde

Although we didn’t have an opportunity to walk the pagan pathway to the sacred site of Cnoc na dTobar in the mountains of Kerry, we did make another required Irish pilgrimage. Jameson’s Irish Whiskey has been distilling Uisce beatha, literally “the water of life”, since 1780 and although they slowed down a bit during prohihition the demand for whiskey around the world is through the roof and the distinctively smooth finish of Irish Whiskey gives it a leg up over most other whiskeys. Jameson’s 15 y/o Redbreast quickly became a favorite. But we couldn’t stop with just Jameson’s and headed off to Teeling Distillery for a sample of the competition. Teeling’s 34 year old Vintage Reserve Single Malt is at the top of everyone’s top ten list, but at $5,000 USD a bottle, it’s not your every day, or every year, or perhaps even every lifetime kind of whiskey. This list goes on, Green Spot, White Spot, Dead Rabbit… so many whiskeys, so little time!

Jameson's Distillery, Dublin

And there is yet another well known Dublin landmark of particular importance. Located at 17 Chatham St. just around the corner from Grafton St. is an old Irish pub painted a traditional red and black with gold lettering above the door announcing “Sheehan’s Pub”. This is the place that our grandfather’s brother Jeremiah Sheehan founded in 1933. It’s been handed down a couple of times from father to son and is now in the capable hands of Paul Sheehan, the grandson of Jeremiah. 

Sheehan's, 17 Chatham St, Dublin

We had briefly met Paul when we were here 25 years ago and had been looking forward to seeing him again but we arrived unannounced to find that he was off that day but his sister, Alana, was there. We had no idea that Paul even had a sister but in fact he has two, Alana and Evelyn. We did not meet Evelyn but Alana was wonderful. The pub was busy that night but she took time to have multiple (if briefly interrupted) conversations, even presenting us with traditional Irish snap-brimmed caps emblazoned with the Sheehan logo!

Bill, Alana & Sue

Oh, and the Pope was there! Not at Sheehan’s Pub unfortunately, but he was in the city trying to drum up more interest in what the Catholic Church has accomplished , or perhaps deflect criticism from what the Catholic Church has accomplished. But anyway he drove right by us in his bubble-top PopeMobile, waving to anyone who would pay attention! For a prominently Catholic country, I was surprised at the mixed reception, some obviously thrilled that he spent several days here and others expressing regret that, with the country facing significant issues of homelessness, and neglect, millions of dollars was being spent on security and other issues surrounding the papal visit. 

"This never was my town,
I was not born or bred
Nor schooled here and she will not
Have me alive or dead
But yet she holds my mind
With her seedy elegance,
With her gentle veils of rain
And all her ghosts that walk
And all that hide behind
Her Georgian facades."

                                                    ~ Louis MacNeice

The Cotswolds

We had originally planned to ditch the rental car and spend 3 – 4 days hiking from village to village in the Cotswolds but eventually came to our senses and decided on a more prudent approach. We would stay in the car and attempt to avoid driving into the hordes of other tourists who were walking on narrow country roads no wider than a bar of soap continually dodging cars operated by drivers like us, sitting on the wrong side of the car, driving on the wrong side of the road, in an unfamiliar country, with unintelligible road signs. 

This is quintessential England. Pastoral landscapes, grazing sheep, sleepy villages, thatched roofs, honey colored coloured stone cottages nestled into narrow lanes, stately manor houses, and of course the ever present, perfectly tended English country garden overflowing with roses, geraniums, and honeysuckle. 

The Cotswolds was the center of the English wool industry in Shakespeare’s time but as Australia and New Zealand emerged as the new woolen capitols, prices here declined and as the rest of the country was caught up building factories and cities in the industrial revolution, the Cotswolds slept. Lucky for us!

Stow-on-the-Wold, Bourton-on-the-Water, Moreton-in-Marsh, Chipping Camden, (I love the names) were bustling market towns in the 17^th century. Street names like Shepherds Way and Sheep Street are reminders of the origins of these towns’ remarkable history and wealth. 

The towns are all protected now. Various covenants and restrictions are in place that prevent what may not be in keeping with these 400 year old farms and villages. The stone used for all these buildings and homes is locally quarried, honey-hued limestone that lends each village a warm and inviting glow. And the towns are thriving! Tourists have replaced the sheep as the main inhabitants and there are fabulous restaurants, quaint tea rooms, art galleries, antiques, interesting shopping, and intriguing historical sites to appeal to just about everyone.

And of course no English town would be quite complete without a splash of gin, and Cotswolds Distillers does not disappoint! The varieties here are mind boggling. Think rhubarb, blackberry, pink grapefruit, and Cotswolds lavender. And then there's the cheese! From the traditional Double Gloucester, to Baron Bigod, and Stinking Bishop, to ewe and sheep cheeses the variety is endless. And the breads and pastries! And the restaurants! The wild rabbit that scampered across the meadow earlier today is now on the menu, vegetables that have been pulled from the ground 20 minutes before they arrive at your table, that cute little lamb that you cuddled this morning... well, never mind.

London Calling!

We met Sue and Bill in London and spent a day touring the  city before heading off to the Cotswolds and then to Ireland. London is a fascinating town! Extraordinary history, a wonderful mix of architecture, art and culture.

We wanted to see Westminster Abbey but, hard as it is to believe, the lines were even longer than the lines at the opening of the new iPhone store! The history of the place is pretty impressive. The coronation of all the kings and queens of England have occurred here going back to William the Conqueror in 1068, and of course there's more than a few well-known dead Brits buried here. Some of the monuments are majestic, ornate, and impressive, but as you can imagine, having buried people here now for more than 1,000 years, space is getting a little tight, so parts of it seem more like a filing cabinet or one of these new pod hotels where you crawl into a little box and someone else closes the door behind you. Still the list of people is impressive, including St. Crispin, Edward the Confessor, Henry V, Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, Percy Shelly, and Charles Darwin to name but a few. Steven Hawking was interred here next to Sir Issac Newton earlier this year bringing the total of permanent residents to more than 3,300. The memorial plaque reads "Here lies what was mortal of Stephen Hawking" and includes a version of the Berkenstein-Hawking Entropy Equation relating to black holes. But even the exterior is impressive, I was startled to see a statue of Martin Luther King Jr. standing shoulder to shoulder with nine other guys peering out from a niche above the 15th century door on the west facade. Not a bad legacy for a poor, black, Baptist preacher from the South!

Big Ben was muffled in plastic and tied up in scaffolding, perhaps a reminder of the struggles and turmoil churning below in the Houses of Parliament as Brexit continues to limp toward an uncertain future. A statue of the puritanical despot Oliver Cromwell continues to rage against the Irish, the Catholic Church, and the British Monarchy from atop a stone pedestal in the sunken gardens outside the House of Commons, while at the other end of the building Richard, Coeur de Lion incongruously sits astride his bronze steed, sword held high seemingly saluting or challenging the House of Lords surrounded now, not by his vast armies arrayed  in  an unholy war against the  Muslims during the third Crusade, but the cars and buses jockeying for space next to him in what has become a vast parking lot. All this serves as a reminder of the conflicts in our own shrine to democracy, the U.S. Capitol building, where at least a dozen statues still celebrate the Confederacy despite multiple skirmishes to enact legislation to remove them.

A little further away St Paul's Cathedral sits atop Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the city of London. It is the crowning achievement of Sir Christopher Wren's remarkable career as England's pre-eminent architect and has dominated the skyline of the city for more than 300 years. This is where Prince Charles and Lady Diana were married, where the Duke of Wellington, Horatio Lord Nelson, Florence Nightingale, Lawrence of Arabia and John Donne are buried. Many memorials include commemorative plaques with inspirational statements or quotes from speeches or sermons once given by the deceased. The inscription above church dean and poet John Donne's memorial includes a quote from one of his sermons beginning with "No man is an island..." and ending "Therefore, send not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee". 

Funerals for Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and George Mallory were also celebrated here although their remains are interred elsewhere. George, most notably absent from his own funeral, remains somewhere near the summit of Mount Everest. Sir Christopher Wren was the first person to be buried here and a plaque on the wall above his tomb reads in latin "Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice" - Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.

But by far the most fun, and entertaining attraction, if those are words that can be used to describe a place that once served as a medieval prison and torture chamber, where multiple traitors were hanged, drawn, and quartered, where princes were murdered and queens of England beheaded, was the Tower of London. The Yeoman Warders, dressed in full regalia, and armed with commanding voice and dry British humor, are the quintessential tour guides to this historic site. The captivating and irreverent stories about Anne Boleyn and the unfortunate wives of Henry Vlll, Guy Fawkes, Sir Walter Raleigh, the uproarious comments about Mel Gibson's portrayal of William Wallace, as well as the disparaging comments about the Brits favorite punching bag, the French, and fellow compatriots in the Royal Marines, are brilliant and hilarious. "We didn't execute ALL our prisoners" he barks gruffly at one point, followed by " Well it's a better ratio than the state of Texas!" If my  teachers had been half as knowledgable and engaging, I'd have chosen history as a life long career. The following link is to a video of a tour of the Tower of London, given, not by the same Yeoman Warder as we had, but one equally enjoyable and informative. https://youtu.be/8YS0vGq0QsE

Saying goodbye is always painful but saying goodbye to London was particularly difficult, not because I was sad to leave (which I was) or that driving out of the city was particularly arduous (although it was) but because no one simply says goodbye here. It's Cheerio! or Ta Ta! or Cheers! or Bob's your uncle! or something unintelligible in an indecipherable British accent or slang. Best to just wave. The Queen's wave of course, otherwise known as "opening the marmalade jar".

Running Away To Home

The house is in ruins now, a corrugated metal roof set incongruously atop the crumbling walls of stone gathered from the mountainside some 200 years ago and placed one atop another to build a home on this remote farm near the top of the Gap of Dunloe near a place called Coimín Sléibhe.

Mrs. Moriarty's House

Labeled as “The Gap Cottage” on maps from the 1830’s and referred to in local lore as “Saint Patrick’s Cottage” this was the place, according to legend, from which St. Patrick drove the last of the snakes from Ireland. A series of photographs, undated but perhaps from the turn of the century mostly label the home as “Mrs. Moriarty’s house”, and it is this designation that is most intriguing. Our great grandmother, Johanna Moriarty, was born in the Gap of Dunloe in 1850. Her family had lived in the Gap for many generations, and it’s of course impossible not to speculate that the people in the photographs might be our family. Photographs taken over the years of what appears to be the same house are not dated, street names and numbers did not exist in rural communities, and surviving records from the time are vague, so current attempts at identifying the people in the photographs are purely speculation.

Bill & Sue Brinkert in front of Mrs. Moriarty's House (2018)

Families no longer live this high in the Gap, most having sought a better or more hospitable life lower on the mountain or somewhere more distant. The only visitors this high on the mountain now are red, orange, and purple sheep, spray painted with spots of identifying color (yours are purple, mine are orange), and the trap and pony men who carry tourists to the top of the Gap for spectacular views of the Black Valley and beyond.

Our trap and pony driver was Joe Coffey who recommended that if we wanted to learn more about the families that lived here, we should go down to Kate Kearney’s Cottage and talk to Sean Coffey (the current proprietor) and he could put us in touch with a woman by the name of Mary Coffey who knew a lot about the families in the area. I asked if Sean and/or Mary were related to him and Joe said “Not that I know of, but ask Mary, she will probably tell you different”. (We did, and they are).

Bill & Cathy and Bill & Sue in the Gap Dunloe

Kate Kearney’s Cottage is another house surrounded by legend and lore, and it is here that things get interesting. The following excerpt is from the Gap of Dunloe website (www.gapofdunloe.com)

“As with many an interesting history, the story of Kate Kearney’s Cottage begins with strong drink—and an even stronger woman. Kate Kearney was a woman of exceptional beauty and character who lived in Kerry in the years before the Great Famine of 1845 to 1849. The legend began in a cottage at the eastern edge of the McGillycuddy Reeks mountains and has captured the popular imagination ever since. It was at this síbín that Kate distilled a particularly potent form of poitin, called Kate Kearney’s Mountain Dew. So strong that it could not be drunk without at least seven times its own quantity to temper it, this Mountain Dew was illegal, but Kate ignored the law and continued to create her special liquor and sell it to tired travellers in need of reviving."

Kate Kearney's Cottage (2018)

Unfortunately the “mountain dew” concoction of goat’s milk and poitin (homemade whiskey) is no longer served at Kate Kearney’s Cottage, but the legend and the cottage business continues.

A fixture in the Gap now for over 150 years, Kate Kearney’s Cottage was actually built by Donal Mór Moriarty in 1849 at the entrance to the gap at a place called Doirín an Chuileann. The house was eventually handed down by Donal Mór Moriarty and his wife Julia Burke to their daughter Mary Moriarty, who married another Moriarty who lived in a house at the top of the Gap at a place called Coimín Sléibhe.

So, backing up a few years,  a John Moriarty was born in approximately 1795 and married Ellen Burke in 1815. They lived in a house at the top of the Gap in a place called Coimin Sléibhe, and had two sons, both redheads, named Daniel (Donal Ruadh) Moriarty and John (Sean Ruadh) Moriarty. Daniel grew up and eventually married Catherine Barry. They had a son named John in 1850 who eventually moved down the mountain and married Mary Moriarty, daughter of Donal Mór Moriarty and Julia Burke. Mary and John inherited Kate Kearney’s cottage from Mary’s parents and continued to operate it as a Public House (Pub). 

The other brother John (Sean Ruadh) Moriarty also moved down the mountain and he married a woman by the name of Mary Ferris. In 1850 they had a daughter named Johanna Moriarty who eventually married a man also from the Gap named Jeremiah Meara. Jeremiah and Johanna had a daughter on April 1, 1878 and named her Mary Josephine Meara. This is our grandmother.

Moriarty Family Tree (detail)

Both Sean Coffey, and Mary Coffey are descendants of Mary and John Moriarty. Sean continues to run Kate Kearney’s Cottage and Mary, now retired, spends much of her time there. Sean and Mary were extremely warm, gracious and hospitable, and from the first moment we met, treated us like family, which it turns out, we are.

Bill and Sue with Sean Coffey and Mary Coffey Coghlan

When we first contacted Mary Coffey and we told her we that we were descendants of both the Moriartys and Mearas, she was thrilled to meet us., both of these names having been prominent in The Gap for many generations. Mary has done extensive genealogy research and is a wealth of information on the Gap of Dunloe. It is Mary who provided us with the information that connects our family to hers. According to Sue, who is far more proficient in these matters than I, Mary Coffey is a 4^thcousin, and Sean is a 4^thcousin, once removed. Kate Kearney’s Cottage is filled with photographs of the Gap, the Moriartys, and the many families who lived here. All the lives in this once isolated community were intimately intertwined for generations, and Mary Coffey seemingly knows all the connections.

Our sister Sue has painstakingly compiled an extraordinary family history complete with interconnected family trees, birth and death dates, marriages, and personal stories, maps and details of peoples lives. I suggest you contact Sue to find out more. As I said eight years ago, in my original search through the shadows and ghosts of this small corner of Ireland, if it weren’t for Sue’s extraordinary ability to discover and document our family heritage, we would be a family without much history.

A Village in A Circle

The juxtaposition is jarring. The audacity is outrageous. That a society 5,000 years ago could conceive of a landscape so intricate and complex that it literally connects heaven and earth, and then structure their culture and society such that they could construct this colossal monument over many generations is simply astonishing. The henge survives as an enormous bank and ditch (originally 55' high and 30’ deep) nearly four football fields wide, encompassing the largest stone circle in Britain which in turn encloses two other stone circles. The standing stones are enormous, some as high as 14’ and weighing over 40 tons. The earth here is mostly chalk and the site of this enormous walled circle glistening in the sun must have been truly awe inspiring.

That other people in the recent past could barge into this extraordinary landscape, build homes and farms on this seemingly sacred ground and break apart these enormous stones to build churches, barns and chicken coops seems stunning and outrageous, but the same actions are being pursued by the United States Government today in areas like the Bear’s Ears National Monument in southeast Utah.

The neolithic complex dates from around 2850 BC, the beginning of the Bronze Age, before the pyramids of Egypt, a thousand years before Abraham. It is a landscape that gave physical expression to that community’s ideas about the relationship between heaven and earth, and their own place within that cosmos. 

This is a grand design that fulfills the societal need for a ritual landscape as an expression of a community’s desire for stability and continuity. We have always been drawn to the comfort of constancy and order, that night follows day, spring follows winter, and the stars arc across the heavens each night, returning to the same position in the sky each year. This landscape reveals the order and the constancy of the universe on a grand scale and provides stability to our seemingly chaotic lives, and the promise of a predictable future.

The sprawling randomness with which the town and farmhouses have encroached on this landscape is perhaps a reminder that, despite our attempts at preservation all this will, like us, eventually be churned under and a new landscape will take its place.

Burma

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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.