The Turkish capital, bathed in history, is a testament to accord and discord

Istanbul is a mosaic, in many senses of the word. Relics of history - some well preserved, some badly worn, some merely in bits and shards - are strewn all over this sprawling transcontinental metropolis. At times, cultural and religious images coexisted, or more often, superimposed themselves upon one another.

And if you stare into a mosaic - beautifully beguiling and charmingly chaotic - long enough you may begin to feel that it is melting and flowing toward you, until you meld into it.

The day my friends and I - there were four of us - arrived, on a sunny afternoon, we went to the beach, to see the water that has washed the shore of Istanbul for as long as one can remember, and has famously cut the city in two. The sun was setting, casting a sprinkling of its golden light onto the ruffled surface of the ocean. The slanting beams silhouetted the anglers on the rocky beach, giving them, at least for a brief moment, a statuesque quality that the city - and by extension the country - is quite familiar with.

Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that marble statues from the Roman era and further back fill the museums - both roofed and open-air - in Turkey. But here in Istanbul, sauntering along the beach assured me that this is not a city teetering under the crushing weight of history, but one that has long learned to rise with and above the tide.

The tide rose and fell, not without having left its marks. One place in Istanbul to contemplate the vicissitudes of time is Hagia Sophia - Ayasofya in Turkish. Since it was first built in the mid sixth century, the building, repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt, has served, in order, as a Byzantine Christian Cathedral, or Roman Catholic Church, a Greek Orthodox Cathedral, an Ottoman Mosque and now a museum.

In 1453 Constantinople - which Istanbul has been called down the centuries, after Constantine the Great (272-337), another name being Byzantine - was conquered by the Ottoman Empire under Mehmed the Conqueror, who ordered the Christian church to be converted into a mosque. Mosaics depicting Jesus, his mother Mary, Christian saints and angels were either destroyed or plastered over. Islamic architectural features were added where the Christian ones used to be. Today a large part of those long-buried Christian wall paintings - the perfect embodiments of Byzantine art with their shimmering golden surfaces - has been brought to the daylight thanks to extensive restoration work.

Today these paintings and mosaics, partly erased, share the same vaulted ceiling with typical Islamic decorative patterns and calligraphy. The diffusion of light, sifted through the colored mosaic windows high above, has done less to illuminate the place than to enhance its holy ambience, making one more aware of the existence of an outside world, and an inner one.

For those like me who feel slightly daunted by Turkey's tumultuous and extremely complicated history, Hagia Sophia offers an easy entry. It perfectly sums up a prevailing theme in Turkish history - the conflict between Christianity and Islam, the triumph of the latter and now the coexistence of the two, in a place that, judging by its current status as a public museum, is more secular than religious.

But there is more to it than that. In 2007 Chris Spirou, a Greek American politician, set up an international organization, Free Agia Sophia Council, championing the cause of restoring the building to its original function as a Christian church. The reaction from the other camp was vociferous. Most notably on March 31 this year, Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a Muslim, recited the first verse of the Quran in the Hagia Sophia, strengthening a drive to make the place a mosque once again.

The sanctuary has always reflected the shifting political and social tableau of Turkey. Thanks to its humbling beauty and magnificence, it was spared the violent end that befell many of those who had worshipped and sought refuse there, most notably during the fall of Constantinople to Ottoman forces in 1453.

The day we visited, restoration work was still going on, with floor-to-ceiling scaffolding taking up almost one fifth of its inside space. This is nothing new to Hagia Sophia. Over the past one and half millennia the main structure has suffered damage including partial crumbling at one time or another. Each time efforts were undertaken to ensure that this monument to change continues to stand.

Just a few steps away is the Blue Mosque (the Sultan Ahmed Mosque) - also under restoration, which means its beauty cannot be fully appreciated. The mosque owes its name to the hand-painted blue tiles adorning its interior walls. It was built between 1609 and 1616 on the orders of Sultan Ahmet I, to rival, or better surpass, the grandeur of Hagia Sophia, which was by then the primary imperial mosque in Istanbul.

Whether that mission was accomplished is debatable. But today the Blue Mosque has certainly earned its fair share of fame, attracting visitors who, with shoes in hand, queued up for long time in order to step onto the lush red velvet carpet inside.

In fact, that fame has grown so much as to overshadow other mosques in Istanbul, some equally beautiful if not more so. One is Suleymaniye, also a major imperial mosque, and one that I had the good fortune to visit on a rainy, mildly cold morning.

The leaden sky pressed in on the mosque's tall, vigilant minarets, and on its multiple helmet-like grayish blue domes, on whose top black birds alighted. From a vantage point on the mosque's outer wall, one can look down to tiers of the same grayish blue domes, forming a terrace that seems to have extended all the way to the Aegean Sea and is punctuated by nothing but more white, slender minarets.

The mood is solitary, brooding, even apocalyptical.

But to feel dark power one has to burrow further into history, literally. The vast, barelylit chamber of the Basilica Cistern just southwest of Hagia Sophia is where people marvel at what the ancestors were capable of building, with the same amazement and disbelief they might have shown toward the Great Wall of China or the pyramids of Egypt.

Covering 9,800 square meters and with a water storage capacity of up to 100,000 tons, the rectangular-shaped cistern was built in the sixth century to supply water to the capital of the Byzantine Empire. In an engineering feat, the ceiling weight is distributed through arches to 336 giant columns, each 9 meters high and lined in 12 rows.

The locals call it "the sunken palace". Anyone who has descended the 55 steps of staircase to stand at the doorstep of this palace must feel that this is one presided over by Hades, the Grecian god of the dead and king of the underworld. If you want proof look for the two Medusa heads used as plinths in the southwestern part of the cistern.

In ancient mythology Medusa had the power to turn into stone whoever looked at her. But this female monster, according to another myth, was in fact a lush, beautiful girl who loved Perseus, the son of Zeus, and attracted the hatred of Athena as a result of that love. An envious Athena later turned Medusa's long hair into snakes. The girl, forever embittered and vengeful, started to command that terrible power of hers, until her head was cut off by Perseus, the man she loved.

Realized with force and artistry, the Medusa heads of the cistern, placed upside down or on one side, lips tightly closed and eyes shut, has further mystified this place, imbuing it with a dark regality. Yet if Medusa's fire of anger is impossible to put down, then there was something else that must have charged this place since its completion.

That is the sorrow, and possibly rage, of those who died building the cistern. Among all the pillars, there is one that is never dry. Water keeps seeping through and, according to a tour guide, the drips are tears of the coolies on whose bones the underground edifice sits.

The rediscovery and restoration of the cistern was just as dramatic. Locals had been taking buckets of water from large well holes, where they also fished. When comprehensive restoration took place in the mid 1980s, workers extracted 50,000 tons of mud and, according to rumors, more than a few corpses believed to be the victims of unsolved murders.

The cistern, together with the nearby Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, formed a close circle, physically and symbolically. The Grecian and Roman legacies, the Islamic cultures - all took root and flourished on this fertile ground. There were of course instances when one culture invaded and replaced another. But on other occasions, as in the case of Hagia Sophia, or the Suleymaniye, whose design combines Islamic and Byzantine architectural elements, what happened was cultural blending and seeping-through, because of or despite the will of the rulers.

The result is a mosaic, like the tile floor in some Grecian or Byzantine-era abode, or pixilated window panes in the opulent palaces of sultans, with psychedelic patterns that absorb and reflect the many beams of light emanating from the depth of history.

But wait, one piece is missing: Istanbul as the capital of a modern, republican Turkey. For a brief glance back, especially one at Istanbul from the 1970s to the early 2000s, when rapid economic development buoyed the spirit of the city, go to the Museum of Innocence. Envisioned by the Nobel Prize literature laureate Orhan Pamuk and named after his novel of the same name, the museum opened in 2012, four years after the book was published, and since then has become a place of pilgrimage for Pamuk aficionados, many of whom from China.

However, those who have yet to read the book should not feel intimidated. According to the novelist, the museum and novel were conceived and developed in tandem from the outset, and therefore could be appreciated separately.

That is true. All the more than 1,000 exhibits, from a whole wall of suspended cigarette butts and grainy pictures to wine bottles, street fashions and stuffed animals and doll parts, are arranged in such a grippingly grotesque way that it is impossible not to read stories into them. Salvaged personally by Pamuk between the mid 1990s and 2008 from the lives of his own, his family and friends, as well as the strangers he met, these items are curios, detritus and reminders, and their display, a fine, emotional and infinitely inspiring exercise in museum curatorship.

And it's part of Istanbul - the museum and the narrative spun around it. The city is always capable of proposing a toast - to the history that has both enriched and impoverished it, to the majestic that still shines, and to the mundane that never fails to carry through.

In fact, the city itself is a good enough reason for a toast.

When the Suleymaniye Mosque was built on the orders of Suleyman the Magnificent in the mid-16th century, the powerful sultan envisioned it as a declaration of himself as a second Solomon, referring to the wise and wealthy ancient king of Israel. He must have had in mind Justinian, the Roman emperor who, upon the completion of the Hagia Sophia, is said to have declared: "Solomon, I have surpassed thee."

What they did not know was that in a place where nothing but change is constant, the ultimate greatness belongs only to Istanbul.

zhaoxu@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 12/22/2018 page14)