Days before I left Georgetown I bought a new laptop.
My new Lenovo N23 Chromebook is not great, but good enough for my needs. Above all it is cheap. I bought it on Lazada for only 37 euros. Lazada is the largest e-commerce operator in South East Asia. I had chosen the option to pay on delivery at my hotel. The keyboard is great. It makes great clicking and clacking sounds when I type and it’s larger so I can type really fast. The reviews I read pointed out that it is a sturdy laptop, designed for students, so it won’t fall apart easily.
It is an extremely basic machine. After setup, I have just under 8 GB of memory left. It is sold as 16 GB, so I take it that the Chrome OS takes roughly 8 GB. It is not much. Mostly a browser and almost everything is done in the browser as far as I can see. So it is basically a browser with some memory. It has two USB ports. It works for me. All I want to do is read, listen, watch, and write stuff. And so far it works perfectly. It even has a camera for Zoom meetings. It also seems to support WhatsApp. I thought there would be no way that I could do any video editing, but apparently, there are some apps that can take care of that. Finally, it has a long battery life which can come in handy if I need to charge my phone.
The journey from Penang to Bangkok went exactly as I had foreseen. The passenger ferry to Butterworth, the commuter train to Padang Besar, and the night train to Bangkok. In the morning I had a coffee. I had some 39 baht in coins left from my last time in Thailand and this was enough for a coffee (20). From the new railway station, Krung Thep Aphiwat, I caught the free shuttle bus to Hua Lamphong station. From there the rambling city bus 53 cost me 8 baht to get me to my old stomping grounds. One baht left for refilling my water bottle at the water dispenser. I got a room for 200 baht in the Bella Bella. In Khao San Rd. I changed my 50 RM and that was enough for a room and meals for the first day. All is well.
I normally don’t write much about practicalities on this blog, but I want to warn travellers using the Padang Besar border crossing between Thailand and Malaysia that there is no ATM or money exchange on the station. This is extremely awkward and I ended up changing some money at the food court at an abysmal rate.
In Bangkok I bought an adapter for my new laptop for 36 baht. I can now report that I am very happy with my new laptop.
There was a Chinese festival, the old Chinese man at my hotel told me. You have to go. Only one time every year. One time, he wagged his bony finger. Very very good. Where is it? I asked. It’s over there, he waved his hand out of the hotel. He said something I didn’t understand. His wife came over and wrote it on a piece of paper. Chew Jetty. I walked over to the jetty after I had had dinner at Krishna. There was nothing to be seen or heard. I walked to the end of the wooden planked jetty. Some people were sitting there in the dark at the side of the water. A calm breeze made it nice. But there was nothing to be seen, no festival. I loitered around, but it didn’t look like anything was going to happen. Then I walked back to the hotel. I must have been too early. One hour, the old Chinese man told me. From every temple they go. This temple, he pointed outside, nine a clock. Your temple, he pointed at me, maybe nine tirty. Only now. You need to go. I went to my room and continued reading ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’. The Chinese always make a racket during these festivals. They bang their drums and cymbals and dancing dragons swirl around and colourful statues are paraded through Chinatown. They burn incense, toll bells, and throw fake money around. You never know what it is all about. Same with the Hindus. Flutes and flowers and dancing. Riding carriages with gods around the town. It’s just rituals they do every year. For the gods. For the ancestors, but mostly for good fortune or good karma. And because it’s exciting, it’s community, it’s doing stuff together. They’ve always done it and will always do it.
It is time to move on and I went to Butterworth on the mainland to buy a train ticket to Bangkok. Some years ago it was still possible to book train tickets from the harbour in Georgetown but things have changed. There used to be a direct train from Butterworth to Bangkok, but now the train leaves from Padang Besar at the border. The track from Butterworth to Padang Besar is now served by a modern commuter train. So I took a ferry to Butterworth. A modern sleek passenger ferry has replaced the hulky car ferry and now you can only pay with a debit or credit card. There is no possibility of paying with cash. My card didn’t work, but luckily it wasn’t very busy and I paid 2 ringgit to the cashier and he took a company card with a QR code to bleep me through the flap barrier gates. The ferry was modern, air-conditioned, and had a large flat screen showing emergency procedures. Absolutely nobody watched it. On the other side, I walked to the KMT station and the woman behind the counter had no idea how to buy tickets to Bangkok. She could only sell tickets to Padang Besar. I walked back to a bus station where I had seen an information booth. Two men were scrolling their phones. Information was not in high demand. I asked if they would know about a place where to buy a ticket to Bangkok. No, they told me, you have to go to Padang Besar and you can buy a ticket at the station. And what if the train is fully booked that day? They shrugged their shoulders. They also told me that there were no buses to Bangkok. So I went back to Penang. At the ferry, I went through the same routine with the ticket sellers. The man tried my card several times. He took a small rubber to clean the chip. Oh no, I thought, that’ll be the end of it. He’ll ruin my debit card. He put it in the machine, but it still didn’t work. He gave my useless card back and said: you pay two ringgit to her, and he pointed to a woman who stood at the next counter. I paid two ringgit to the woman and I got a ticket. Back in the hotel, I tried my luck on the internet and it worked. I found a railway ticket. I gave the details of my credit card and then I needed a 3D code. So I started up my computer where I keep that code in a file somewhere but the connection between the screen and the keyboard is tenuous so I had to wriggle it a few times before I had my cursor back and then I had to copy-paste a zero somewhere because the zero on my keyboard no longer works. I found the 3D code and entered it. Then I needed to get my code that was texted to my phone. Done. A screen appeared that asked me to wait till they processed the credit card request. I walked to the hallway to coax more WiFi from the router. Then my screen blinked. Your booking is complete!
I decided to buy a new computer.
I walked over to Pitt Street and sat on a bench close to the Sri Mahamariamman temple. The ecstatic jazzlike sound of a nadaswaram indicated that puja was performed. It was quite beautiful. When it stopped, it was nearly dark and I walked over to a small Chinese restaurant in Chulia Street. I had noodle soup with spinach and chicken. A minimal version but much to my liking. I chewed on the chicken, mindful, so mindful that I felt like I saw the world through the once-living eyes of the now-dead meat on my tongue. Eyes that saw differently because chickens have eyes on both sides of their heads. I tried to think what it must be like to have 360-degree vision, but it made me feel dizzy, and I decided to concentrate on the spinach instead. Be like spinach. I love spinach. It’s so uncomplicated. After my meal, I walked back to Pitt Street. Then the mosque started mumbling.
Around the corner from my hotel, I saw this notice. The third character I recognised as ‘Tao’. The Tao in Taoism.
Feasting on durian and having masala dosa or uttapam for dinner at Krshna’s. Wanton soup with roasted pork around the corner. Roti telor and kopi tarek for breakfast. Life could be worse.
And I bought new flip flops for three ringgits.
During one of my walks, I came across the Penang Philomathic Union on Armenia Street. I was overjoyed to learn the meaning of philomathic (from Collins) :
philomathic in British English(ˌfɪləˈmæθɪk ) or philomathical (ˌfɪləˈmæθɪkəl ) adjective. relating to or enjoying the process of learning new facts and acquiring new knowledge.
In 1905 the house in Armenia street was used by the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat Sen to meet his supporters and to raise money for the revolution against the Qing dynasty. Sun Yat Sen became the first Provisional President of the Republic of China and had just time to draft a constitution and introduce a new calendar. After only two months, Sun Yat Sen had to step down because, due to a small oversight, the government had no army and a warlord had taken down the Qing government and wanted to be the new Provisional President of the Republic of China. Sun Yat Sen went on to found the Kuomintang and do a lot of revolutionary shit before he “died of illness” in 1925 (official website of China).
My hotel is near the Goddes of Mercy Temple. This is a Chinese temple and I took some photos.
In the park, I came across this bit of Thai logic:
Thai logic?
I ran the Thai text through Google Translate and it came out as “No guns or climbing trees”… Best not to mention any guns, somebody must have thought.
This morning I made my usual round to the 7-Eleven for my ham and cheese toasties and 2 small bananas. This has been my habitual breakfast since I found out that the toasties cost 58 baht and the bananas 10 baht. But because of a combo discount of 11 baht, the bananas come at a cost of -1 baht instead. I find this very pleasing.
Before me in line stood two Chinese girls and I watched them as I was waiting for my toasties to be prepared. The first girl gave the cashier a handful of change and looked at him expectingly. After he had counted the money, he motioned to her that it was not enough. After some rummaging through her wallet, she gave him a random note. The second girl, when it was her turn, took no risk and paid for her coffee with a 500 baht note.
The sun was out and it promised to be another hot day in Bangkok.
In Bangkok, I visited the Wat Traimit temple in Chinatown which features the largest golden Buddha in the world; it weighs a whopping 5,500 kilograms. As is evident from the style, it was likely made in the Sukhothai period, which dates back to the 13th to 14th century of what we now call our common era (CE). In the 18th century of that same era, it was taken apart and covered in plaster to keep it hidden from Burmese invaders. When times had quieted down, all the monks had died. Or at least the ones that knew about the golden Buddha, and its true value was no longer known. For centuries it served as the principal Buddha statue of a mediocre temple somewhere in a street, around the block, across the canal, not far north of here. It would look much like any of the torpid-looking Buddhas that you see in temples throughout the country these days.
During a renovation in 1955, the statue fell and some of the plaster broke off, revealing a little of the gold underneath. Upon further consideration, it was a miracle that they had been moving a statue of 5.5 tonnes around without thinking what all that weight could be. After all, brickwork has a density which is roughly ten times less than that of gold. Yes, I looked that up. Ten times. So, instead of roughly weighing 600 kilograms, it weighed a dazzling 5.5 tonnes.
Golden Buddha
The Buddha is now housed in a newly refurbished temple and, as with visiting any Thai temple, one should behave oneself. That means taking off your shoes, no spitting on the ground, or on the monks, not pointing your feet to other people and wearing decent clothes. The Buddha likes Armani and Gucci, but something cheaper isn’t a problem as long as you look nice. The entrance fee for seeing the Buddha is 100 baht and it comes with a leaflet that brings the news that the value of the statue is 28.5 million pounds (sic) and that “The image is unrivalled in beauty”. Unrivalled in beauty. Take that, Michelangelo!
The leaflet ends with: “May the sanctity of Golden Buddha bless you with good luck”.
But it’s just gold and not even pure gold for that matter. It’s quite large though.
And it looks disturbingly like C-3PO:
Now, if you are anything like me, you want to know how much all that gold is in real money. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article on the Golden Buddha comes with confusing information about how different parts of the statue have different gold contents. Apparently, the statue was taken apart in nine parts before they covered it up. The body was made up of 40 per cent gold, the face 80 per cent and the hair and the top knot 99 per cent. It then goes on to refer to an article that estimates the value of the statue clearly based on pure gold. The article was from 2017 and the historical gold price showed that the author had done a simple calculation based on 5.5 tonnes of pure gold multiplied by the gold price at the time. It also inexplicably mentions a purity of 18 karat1 gold (this is 75 per cent) which does not concur with the calculated value and is not found anywhere else in the article. Many sources on the subject give these high values which I think are based on the many references to the Buddha as ‘made of pure gold’. In 1991, the Guinness Book of Records listed it as the sacred object with the highest intrinsic value: 21.1 million pounds sterling. A quick calculation with 1991 gold prices in pound sterling showed that that would amount to a gold content of roughly 58 per cent. In 2003 the Guinness Book of Records came with a new value of 37.1 million pounds which to my surprise pushed the gold content to over 90 per cent.
My research didn’t go anywhere because practically all articles had taken, as was evident from their word choice, Wikipedia as their principal source and Wikipedia used contradictory information from articles that just state their numbers as God-given facts. It appears that nobody knows, or nobody wants to tell the public, or Wikipedia, how much gold is used in the statue and how much it is worth.
In this text, I used the word karat. When spelt with a ‘k’, karat means the purity of gold. It is a fraction of an alloy of 24 parts. So, 18 karat is 18 / 24 th or 75 per cent gold. However, when spelt with a ‘c’, carat means the weight of precious stones. One carat is 200 milligrams. ↩︎
Shortly after arriving on the island of Koh Chang, I realised going there had been a mistake.
The accommodation was a long walk from the beach and walking was not a pleasure in the heat and the humidity. The seawater was very warm and swimming was like wading into a warm and briny soup.
Then I got sick. The first day wasn’t the worst. I woke up with a fever and my body was aching. Boa, the wife of the owner of the bungalows, gave me paracetamol. The pain cleared and I even went to the main road for some noodles. Then the fever returned and the night came, tossing, turning, never sleeping, ghostly, feeling full of pain, no matter how I lay, and overcome by weariness.
The next day I needed to go to the toilet. The shared bathroom was 30 metres away. I tried to get up from my bed and managed to sit upright on the side of my bed, but I lay down again. Breathing without strength. But I needed to go. I got up and walked through the door and sat myself on a chair in front of my small bungalow. I leant on my elbows. To my surprise, I woke up with my hands in the dirt, splayed out, and my chair fallen over. I got up and slowly, foot by foot, I walked to the toilet. Heavily breathing, lightheaded, I sat down. Okay, I thought, let go. I stared at the white tiles. Then I hosed myself down. I got back to my bungalow, ever so slowly, and collapsed on the bed. An empty worn-out shell.
On the third day, the fever and the pain receded, and I could lay down without pain. But now diarrhoea and vomiting had taken over. My stomach fell bloated. It was hot. I had no appetite and no energy. I lay on my bed. I stumbled to the toilets and back, sweating. Then I lay down again. In the semi-darkness I listened to the tireless fan whirring overhead.
It rained ceaselessly. The rain thundering on the tin roof. Geckoes scurried around on the thin wall.
I hated being miserable, I hated the heat, the humidity, the dank food, the water. I hated Thailand, the island, the sun. I hated sweating in my suffocating room. I hated travelling. I hated it. How could everything have gone so wrong?
Then, after four days, I had breakfast again. I drank tea and a breeze moved the leaves and the sun shone on the grass. I listened to the blabbering television in the background, but this time I didn’t mind. The garden was beautiful. How had I not seen that before?
My only photo of Koh Chang: a gecko
During my recovery, I was reading the third part of Stieg Larsson’s famous Millennium Trilogy. It was utterly captivating, even though it is fairly clear, very early on in the novel, that the evil conspiracy against the girl who kicked the hornet’s nest is not going to succeed. The last chapters are tidying up the trilogy and if you are reading it as a separate novel, as I did, it seems a bit forlorn. To me, it felt like Stieg had told his story, but was not ready yet to stop.
In the early evening, the mosquitoes came out and I killed many, sitting crouched, with my head over my knees and my hands wavering around my lower legs ready to strike. Ready to kill. Some were full of blood. My blood.
I needed to renew my visa and so I had to go to Laem Ngop on the mainland. The cost was 1900 baht and I went to the ATM on the main road. Even though it was early in the morning, the sun was out in full force and it was hot and extremely humid. I couldn’t read the display because of the direct sunlight. A man came out of the building with a large umbrella. Now I could negotiate with the machine but for some reason, the man felt that I needed more assistance and gave me detailed instructions on which buttons to push. I didn’t care. I pushed on the buttons and the money came out. I stuffed it in my wallet, but I felt hot and dizzy. When I started to breathe faster and faster, I realised I had to cross the street to get into the shade. I sat on the steps of a closed restaurant and after a few minutes, I felt better again. I took the pickup to the ferry, but on the other side, on the mainland, I found no other passengers to share a vehicle. The driver of the pickup asked for 300 baht. He looked like he could be a character in a James Bond movie. The good guy who helps James Bond, but later gets caught by the bad guys and ends up being fed to the sharks. I negotiated 600 baht for the return trip. He would wait for immigration to extend my visa and then drive me back to the ferry. As it turned out, he also knew where to stop for passport photos and some copies of my passport. Because I was the only customer and the process was uncommonly smooth, I had my visa extension before lunch so it all worked out. I had been a bit concerned because I had overstayed my visa for one day. But they simply ignored this fact (and the corresponding 500 baht fine that comes with it), even though I voluntarily pointed it out to them. The women were all happy to help. I filled out a form, sign here, sign here, more papers, sign here. And here. Thank you. Sign here, here. After I had signed all the forms, they took a digital photograph of me and I had to sign some more forms where I think it said I would forfeit all my assets and money to the Thai state and would work in one of their silver mines in perpetuity. I signed and got my passport back with a beautiful extension for another 30 days.
My driver was waiting and we drove back to the ferry. I gave him 600 baht and it was worth it. It had all been surprisingly swift and painless. I wondered if I should warn him of the sharks, but it looked like he could take care of himself.
The middle of the island is mostly a National Park. One day I saw a pair of Great Hornbills that seemed to check out a fruit tree close to the accommodation. They are remarkable birds. They form monogamous pairs and in the breeding season, the female builds a nest in the hollow of a tree. She seals the nest off with plaster that mainly consists of faeces and relies on her partner to feed her till the chicks are old enough for her to leave the nest. In this way, more and more hornbills come into the world. I listened to their screeching and barking, and when they flew away I felt like I had witnessed something from Jurassic Park.
Oddly enough, by the time I went back to Bangkok, I had gotten strangely attached to the place.
I flew with SalamAir from Istanbul to Bangkok for 270 euro and this included a very reasonable 7 euro for my checked baggage. SalamAir is a no-frills budget carrier based in Oman, so we flew via Muscat, where we had a short layover of under two hours. This nicely broke the flight into two halves which brought some relief to my cramped lower legs. Muscat International Airport, I am happy to report, has a new terminal. It is clean, spacious and is fitted out with water fountains, so you can fill up your water bottle for free. Spacious here means the terminal covers 580,000 square metres which they were proud to show off to the passengers of SalamAir.
I love pottering around in Bangkok. It’s low season because of the rain which means it is quiet and the prices are lower. I had a room with an attached bathroom for 8 euro but have now moved to a bare-bones room with a shared bathroom (spotless and with a towel) for 200 baht. This is less than 6 euro. Because I am the only guest on my floor, I practically have my own bathroom.
On a visit to Chinatown, I tried bird’s nest soup. It was expensive, but not insanely expensive. Two hundred baht (which is the same as I pay for my inexpensive room) is the price for a tiny bowl of soup. It was served with an even tinier bowl of honey and three yellow lumps of what I thought were chickpeas, but which later proved to be Ginkgo nuts.
This is a still image from a small video I shot
Ginkgo nuts come from a tree. Charles Darwin called the Gingko “a living fossil” and ever since it has become a bit of a trend to refer to the tree that way when describing it. You see, it’s the only surviving species of its phylum and it hasn’t changed much since Jurassic times. Six trees survived the Hiroshima atomic bomb blast, even though they grew only a few kilometres from where the bomb fell. From the trees’ perspective, it was just something else from raving dinosaurs.
Bird’s nest soup is a Chinese delicacy and is actually made of bird’s nests. These are made by swifts that live in caves all over South East Asia and consist mainly of the birds’ saliva. The reason that the bird’s nest soup is so expensive has to do with the difficulty and the danger that comes with collecting these nests. The birds typically build their nests high in the ceilings of deep caves where they are harvested with the use of rickety ladders.
And the taste of the soup? I am afraid it didn’t have any discernible taste to my inexperienced palate. So it was a total waste of two hundred baht. Elsewhere in the world, bird’s nest soup is served at much higher prices, so I can live with that.
Chinatown in Bangkok
In other culinary news: I tried Yen Ta Fo, the famous Pink Thai Noodle soup. I think it comes in different varieties but the goal seems to be to include ingredients of as many different species as possible. The soup I had contained jellyfish, fishballs, several crispy things with meat in them, liver jelly and, oddly, tofu. The colour comes from fermented beans.
I had the soup when I was out shopping for fruit. I have written about tropical fruits before and often I look up their health benefits. Since I had just bought some mangoes (three for 40 baht, a bargain) I searched for the benefits of mangoes. There are many. One cup of mango, for example, contains 4 per cent of our daily needed intake of thiamine. If you don’t get enough thiamine, or vitamin B1 as it is better known, you might get dry beriberi, wet beriberi, and all other sorts of beriberi. One cup is 165 grams and 4 per cent is 1/25th of our daily needed intake. A simple calculation showed that to prevent beriberi, it is enough to eat roughly 4 kilos of mango per day.
The Ottoman travel writer Evliya Çelebi, tells us how in 1638 Hezarfen Ahmed Çelebi fastened wings to his body and took off from the roof of the Galata Tower. He allegedly achieved the first intercontinental flight, eventually landing in Üsküdar, which is on the Asian side of the city. Soon, regular passenger flights were scheduled and a control tower was built. Some people, however, question the authenticity of this story. If you pay a visit to the Galata tower and look out over the choppy waters of the Bosphorus for yourself, you would probably come to the conclusion that this Ahmed was full of shit and most likely broke his neck when he landed on the continent right at the foot of the Galata Tower.
The Galata Tower was built by the Genoese who had acquired the rights to live in the area as a concession from the Byzantine Emperor in the early 1300s. It was a thank you for helping to recapture the city from the Latin Empire. This empire was the result of the Fourth Crusade that set out to reconquer the Muslim-held city of Jerusalem. Instead, they sacked the largest and most sophisticated city in Christendom.
The image on the left is an albumen print that I found on the internet. Albumen prints were an early form of photography, and this print dates from between 1875 and 1886. It was taken by Pascal Sebah, an early photographer established at the Grand Rue de Pera in Istanbul. This grand avenue is now known as Istklal Avenue and is the most fashionable shopping street in Istanbul. I once walked up and down Istklal Avenue for I don’t know what reason. I got tired, there was nothing that I wanted to see, there was nothing that I wanted to buy, and there was nowhere to sit down. It sucked.
On sunny days I like to go to Şok Market on Ebussuud Caddesi and buy bread, cheese, fruit and ayran. Then I walk over to the Gülhane Park which is not far away and has lush grass. It’s lovely to have a picnic under the shady trees and read a book. Right now I am reading The Flea Palace by Turkish writer Elif Shafak. I found this book in German, where it is translated as Der Bonbon Palast, and I love it. It tells the story of a bunch of people who live in a grand house in Istanbul. The characters are quirky and lively and not at all German. After more than five hundred pages, it was perfectly fine for the characters to speak German. Istanbul am Rhein…
Just across from the Hagia Sophia is the legendary Pudding Shop. It was a famous restaurant on the hippy trail. Many travellers on their way to India ate there, had a coffee, and left messages on its bulletin board to hitch a ride to Kathmandu. It’s still there. The bulletin board is still there. But nobody is hitching any rides to Kathmandu anymore.
Constantinople, formerly known as Byzantium and later Istanbul, is built on a unique outcrop where the Bosporus1 links the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara2 and, from there, with the Mediterranean Sea. Throughout history, its strategic position has been coveted by Persians, Greeks, Macedonians, Romans, Arabs, Goths, Bulgars, Russians and Crusaders. The Chinese also claimed Constantinople as an inalienable part of China, but frankly, that was never very realistic. Eventually, the Ottoman Turks captured the city and made it the capital of their empire. As a result of all that, it was besieged an astonishing 34 times. The First Bulgarian Empire alone tried four times. At times, armies had to line up and wait for their turn to lay siege to the city. No wonder somebody came up with the idea of building a wall.
This is it.
The walls of Constantinople were an extensive network of defensive structures on both the landside and the seasides. When I was exploring the part of Istanbul that once encompassed the old Constantinople, I constantly ran into restored walls, remnants of old walls and crumbling gates. It piqued my curiosity and when reading up on the subject, I learned about an early wall in Roman times and how defenders during one of the Roman civil wars ran out of things to throw at their attackers. In the end, they toppled bronze statues over the walls. Think of all the other useful things to throw at your enemies before you eventually end up kipping over the bronze statues! The Roman attackers must have stood amidst heaps of household goods, garden tools and kitchenware by then.
Remarkable was the short battle of Constantinople in 378 when the Goths besieged the city. The defence was reinforced with a contingent of Arabs and the Goths were not a little surprised when one day an Arab rushed out of the city, dressed only in a loincloth, and killed one of the Goths, slit his throat and drank his blood. After figuring out that the city was filled with lunatics and that it was actually much bigger than they had thought and that, moreover, they were greatly outnumbered, the Goths decided to go back to pillaging the country. Something they were more comfortable with.
The Arabs tried a few times. I visited the Arab Mosque (Arap Camii) on the Galatean side of the Golden Horn where I read a plaque with a wonderful story about how the mosque was built in the early 8th century and how it was from here that the call for prayer first sounded over Constantinople. This is not true. The attack was a disaster and the structure that is now a mosque was built some 500 years later. The Arabs had devastated the surrounding countryside on their way to the city. When they sent their navy in, the Byzantines used a new weapon: Greek fire3. This effectively destroyed the Arab fleet. This meant that the defenders were now free to use their own fleet to provide food and weapons for the city, while the Arabs were suffering from famine and their people died from pestilence before the impenetrable walls of Constantinople. Yet, the Arabs persisted. They were convinced of their victory because of a prophecy ‘that a Caliph bearing the name of a prophet would capture Constantinople’. The Caliph at the time was Suleyman and the Islamic faith regards the biblical Solomon as a prophet. It was believed that Solomon was able to speak to both, Jinns and animals. Long story short: the prophecy turned out to be more something of a legend or a rumour. The Arabs got nowhere, their reinforcements were ambushed, and the Bulgarians attacked them from the rear. After two years the survivors packed up and left. Screw Solomon.
More walls
But over time Constantinople grew weaker and weaker, not least because of the growing chasm between Western and Eastern Christianity. It is hard to understand what the differences are between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. The theological debate appears to hinge on the fact whether the Holy Spirit comes from God the Father or from God the Father and Jesus. I know. Empires fell and thousands of people got slaughtered because of that. In the end, it was just ordinary politics. The Pope of Rome excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Patriarch of Constantinople, not very imaginative, excommunicated the Pope of Rome, and there was a lot of finger-pointing. In 1182 the Byzantines had enough of the finger-pointing and attacked the Westerners, who lived in their own quarters in Constantinople, killing most of the men and selling the women and children off as slaves to the Turks. They killed the Papal Legate, tied his head to the tail of a dog and chased it through the city. Not a great way to make friends.
The animosity culminated in the Fourth Crusade and the subsequent Sack of Constantinople, which led to the Latin Empire in 1204 AD. It lasted less than sixty years, but the end of the Latin Empire in 1261 was interesting because of two Venetians who fled for the returning Byzantines. They were Niccolo and Maffeo Polo, the father and uncle of Marco Polo, who had lived till then in the Venetian quarter of Constantinople. They packed up their business and left for Soldaia, a city on the Crimea peninsula which is across the Black Sea. They couldn’t go back by sea and the overland route to Venice was closed because of all sorts of people fighting bloody wars with each other. I forgot what kind of people they were, but believe me, it wasn’t pretty. So they decided to travel east to the Mongol Empire where they settled in Bukhara for three years. Three years! And I was thinking that I got a bit stuck with this whole COVID thing. Then they met an envoy of Kublai Khan who took them to Khanbaliq to meet the Great Khan. The Khan wanted diplomatic relations with Rome and some of the oil from the lamp of Jerusalem. I have no idea what lamp he was going on about but a quick search on the internet suggests that you can purchase some of it at the online Jerusalem Gift Shop. Anyway, the Polos accepted the request and went back to Europe. Years later they returned to China with Marco Polo and some oil. The rest is history. You can read about it in Marco Polo’s report: Book of the Marvels of the World. A very catchy title.
Isolated, Constantinople eked out another two hundred years of existence as an independent state, before it finally fell to the Ottomans in 1453. The fall of Constantinople is an intriguing story and I’ve read a great deal about it. Maybe I will write another blog post about this, but not now. It’s late and I want to go to bed.
Some interesting notes:
1 Bosporus and Oxford have a very similar etymology. They both refer to a fording place (-porus, -ford) for cattle (bos-, ox-) through a river. The minimum depth of the Bosporus is 13 metres and therefore not very fordable. The name is related to Greek mythology which you can read about on the internet. These notes are getting way too long. 2 The Sea of Marmara was named after an island that was known for its marble quarries. 3 Greek fire was a highly combustible compound aimed at enemy ships. To this day, the composition is unknown. Apparently, it was a state secret. Sorry.
After having received an astonishing amount of emails with questions from serious students of history, philosophy and, occasionally, religion, I decided to write a follow-up on my last blog post. It is very satisfying that so many have found the way to my blog in their pursuit of a deeper understanding of what has happened to the world, why it happened and how much it cost. Some of the emails are hard to understand. Awful grammar isn’t even the worst of it.
A few days ago, I walked into the Hagia Sophia. It was in the early evening, the time of day when there are no queues because the usual visitors and their ugly children have retired to fast food restaurants to eat grilled meat with chips, salad and drink buckets of Coca-Cola. Thus tempted, I decided on an impromptu visit. When I collected my daypack from the X-ray baggage scanner, the security guard asked me to step aside. Do you have a knife in your bag, sir? he asked. I admitted that I had a knife and showed him the blunt butter knife that I use to spread Nutella on my bread. I am sorry, sir, but you cannot take the knife with you. I rolled my eyes and put the knife in my daypack and turned back. A few days later I walked across the square when an aspiring guide advanced towards me. You want Hagia Sophia tour? he said. Normally, I would have ignored him, but now I stopped and looked at him. I am not allowed inside, I said. I carry a knife with me. The man turned around and walked away.
Some days later, I left my knife in the hostel and was duly admitted to the Hagia Sophia. During this visit, I noticed a plaque in the vestibule which read the translation of the Endowment of the Great Mosque of the Hagia Sophia as stipulated by Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople. It specifies the functions and salaries in dirhams of the people who work for the upkeep of the mosque. Dirhams were silver coins and a harder currency than the current Turkish lira. The endowment accounts for an Imam at fifteen dirhams per day. Six muezzins, the men who call for prayer, will receive five dirhams each per day. A timekeeper, who is versed in prayer times, will receive ten dirhams per day for telling the muezzins when to start running up their minarets. I am sure somebody already made an app for calculating the prayer times, so this guy can go look for another job. Furthermore, there are four people for opening and closing the doors and cleaning up the mosque. They get four dirhams per day. And three people for taking care of the oil lamps, five dirhams per day. These days the lights are fully electric so these people are mostly redundant now too. Additionally, some money is allocated to a number of people for reciting the Holy Koran by heart. Nowadays you can find recitations of every single surah on YouTube, so, provided the Hagia Sophia has WiFi, these people can go now too. Alexa, switch on the lights! Alexa, call for prayer! Alexa, recite Surah mumble verse mumble… what? Yes, yes…
The vestibule also features two mosaics that I had missed the first time.
Justinian and Constantin presenting Lego models of the Hagia Sophia and the city of Constantinople to the Virgin Mary and Christ
Then there is the Omphalion, which is Greek for navel and consists of an intriguing pattern of coloured marble circles on the floor, exactly in the middle of the Hagia Sophia. Nobody knows when it was made, what its meaning is or if it had any function.
It looks like this:
The Omphalion is the only part of the floor that is not covered up with a hideous green carpet.
My guess is it has to do with aliens…
The Rüstem Pasha Mosque was worth a visit alone for its location close to the Galata Bridge. It is part of a complex and below the mosque is a maze of narrow alleys with vaulted shops and warehouses. The mosque itself is tiled in dazzling blue and is another of Sinan’s masterpieces. The blue carpet is felicitous. There must have been a coffee merchant nearby as the mosque carried the fragrance of freshly roasted coffee. The mosque is named after the Grand Vizier of Suleiman the Magnificent who was also his son-in-law.
I thought I had a good photo of the mosque, but I can’t find it.
I revisited the Suleymaniye Mosque. During my first visit, I had missed the tomb of Mimar Sinan. His mausoleum is actually not on the grounds of the mosque, but across the road which is fittingly named after him. The headstones in the graveyard on the premises of the Suleymaniye Mosque reflect the height of the people buried there. I have this from a YouTube video of an episode of Michael Palin’s travels.
Peter on the move 