thomas m wilson

I have a contribution in this new UWAP book Four Rivers, Deep Maps, where I write about my connection with the Swan River.

Come along to the launch 4 November, 2022.

https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/book-launch-uwap-four-rivers-deep-maps-tickets-444449078157

The image above is what you expect from Istanbul. Its the terminus for the old Orient Express and the bridge from Europe to Asia.

The tourist numbers – seen in the queue to get into Topkali Palace below – are also part of the scene in 2022 post-Covid lockdowns.

But as usual I will follow Walt Whitman in this blog: “Keep your face always toward the sun and the shadows will fall behind you.” In other words I won’t be writing much about the downsides of travel, such as walking down a street with restaurants, even outside the tourists areas of Istanbul (and I have certainly gone far beyond them) and getting solicited by an unsmiling tout with an almost robotic tone of voice… and then immediately the exact same thing happening with the next young man outside of his establishment. Or laying in bed at at 6am and hearing the call to prayer, amplified in a dirge-like wail, dropping in descending tones, and often conflicting with another call to prayer coming from another nearby mosque.

A carved capital from inside Hagia Sophia. I entered Hagia Sophia early one morning, and went to the far right to find a corner of the space and sit down away from the crowds by myself with stillness and quiet. I was able to sink into the thick carpet and lean against the 1500 year old green marble panelled wall, and contemplate the vast dome of Justinian and the beautiful carved capitals above the marble columns and pilasters.  It felt so good to just lean against the wall and be still and quiet out of the vast noisy crowds that churn along the streets of Istanbul.  As this really is a city of noise and crowding – so many million people spread out in low and high rises. I relished the space to just be here and sense the elements of the architecture and the emptiness high above me, felt and sensed by members of the Roman empire one thousand five hundred years ago. 

The next morning earlier this week I had a wonderful start to the day – went to the Archaeology Museum next to Topkali – many Greek and Roman sculptures, and by far the most beautiful relief carving from ancient Roman civilisation I have ever seen on sarcophagi.  Much of it was found underground in a dark chamber in rural Lebanon in the late nineteenth century.  The reliefs are absolutely peerless – one with mourning women in shawls is a picture of grief. 

This figure stood out to me particularly as a picture of grief.

This is from around 350BC in Sidon in Lebanon, and was brought here in the late nineteenth century when the area was part of the Ottoman empire. Can you imagine peering a torch down into a burial chamber and seeing such huge marble sarcophagi when these were discovered back in the nineteenth century? What a sense of wonder this moment must have occasioned.

Another section of another relief, not so much for its carving but for the happier subject matter – a vision of the good life. Peace and plenitude and wine and company – and a dog.

Not to mention cats… I had seen the 2016 film Kedi, about the cats of Istanbul, when back in Australia. They certainly do get around and there are lots of them. Here I saw one cheeky ginger taking up a seat at a very busy tram stop.

I was on the way to the Prince’s islands – about an hour’s ferry ride from the mainland.

We got off on the second island stop and walked up the steep hill through tightly packed houses with locals going about their business. After a very steep climb we burst out into the trees at last.  I found my way out into the woods, and sat looking down on a bay, with the mountains of Gallipoli far away in a dark line on the horizon over many kms of sea.  The trees were pines and had a bonsai like twist and bend in many of their trunks, and the undergrowth was sparse enough that you could see and walk with a sense of openness.  It made me think of John Fowles’ opening scenes in The Magus, based on his time teaching at a school on a Greek island in the fifties and contemplating philosophy and the creative impulse of Apollo on lonely hill sides amongst such trees, high above the Aegean.  I was high above the Sea of Marmara, and I savoured those moments by myself amongst the pine trees, with the still sea below as wine dark as Homer’s Aegean. 

Walking on a quiet street on Heybeliada I found a decayed Ottoman era mansion.

Nature was engulfing this old home, but the carpenter’s skill is still to be seen, high up above in the sky.

The perspective down the hill is to the sea and on the other side, modern Istanbul, city of 15 million.

I could write more about history, commenting on Topkali Palace for example with its warren-like hareem. However I will leave you with a cliche of Turkey, food that still makes my mouth water.

Now I’m sitting in this hotel room, waiting for the final few moments to pass before I take a short taxi ride to Istanbul’s new airport, and then, all going well, lift off for Dubai, and hence to Bangkok.

I spend 100 dollars just to have a hotel room in the country near the airport today as I had had enough of crowds and noise and cities and movement.  It has been perfect to be solitary and silent and think and write my blog, looking back on the last three weeks. Here I am waiting for my plane to Asia. I have experienced so many cultures and countries these past few weeks. Voyages extraordinaires, and they aren’t over yet.

The Persia-born Rumi — who was living in Konya, 700 years ago, the capital of the Turkish Seljuk Empire — told his followers, “There are many roads which lead to God. I have chosen the one of dance and music.” Last Saturday night I watched members of this Suffi sect move into transcendence.

As a teenager in Australia I had watched Ron Fricke’s documentary Baraka. Baraka is a sufi term meaning blessing, essence or breath. His images of the world, from Jerusalem to Kenya, to Bali to France, and to Turkey, had inspired me and stoked my sense of wanderlust. One image I always remember is the upwards turned hand of a whirling dervish, rotating with a sense of calm and praise among the spinning chaos of life. Being at a dervish ceremony myself in the home of Rumi himself reminded me of this impression from many years ago.

But I had another reason to go to the conservative city of Konya in central Turkey: Çatalhöyük.

Çatalhöyük, the first city in the world.  It is on a mound about 40 minutes drive out of Konya, on a mound amongst agricultural fields.  There is a small museum attached, a little ramshackle.  9000 years ago 8000 or so people lived in the mud brick houses I could see partly exposed at the site.  They buried their dead under the house floors to keep them close.  They painted animals that they hunted on their walls in two dimensional red ochre paintings.  The rooms were simple and entered through holes in the ceiling and sat cheek by jowl to the house next door.  Walking around the ruins of this city, exposed by archeologists in recent decades (there is a large covering structure which keeps the rain off the site), I tried to imagine meeting one of these long dead people in the marshy, biodiverse surrounding landscape, and being invited through sign language or perhaps grunting communication back to the city.  Walking there and seeing so many people going about their lives.  But then the imagination fails.  What did they think?  What did their language sound like?  What was their view of the universe like?  Who did they worship? How did they court the opposite sex?  What kind of hairstyles did they have? 

Today people write science fiction novels and set films in imagined future times, but why do they bother when we have such incredible gaps in human understanding of another lifeworld here on earth in our own archeological record?  As I stood their looking at the ruined mudbrick walls and trying to fathom what these people thought and felt a few metres from where I stood, 9000 years ago, I met a blank wall.  We can’t know. 

Below is a reproduction of what one of the houses looked like inside.

On the other hand, we can guess.  One feels as if these were hunter gatherers, who happened to live in built structures.  Here I get an inkling that this society and this culture was close to our hunter gatherer heritage, but that they had simultaneously added the first tentative steps towards urban life and agriculture to their repertoire.  One important thing about this city was that everyone seems to have been equal – not like seventeenth century Rome with its Palazzo Collona while there were peasants crouching in the ruins, or the high ceilinged domus of Pompeii, while most ancient Romans lived in crowded insula (apartment blocks).  Here you didn’t show off by having a mansion while the rest crowded in meagre shanties – rather everyone was on equal footings architecturally.   

It was humbling to have stood at the start of the journey from living in the wild natural world, to living in a city, and so recently walked through the apotheosis of the City, the Caput Mundi, Rome. From tentative beginnings to lavish fulfillments.