Browse Month

April 2019

Troy and its Travails


(Shameema Dharsey at the Wooden Horse at Troy ‘replica’ for tourists. © Photo: M. C. D’arcy

The giant wooden horse stands silent amongst the excavated ruins of Troy; its sleek beauty belies its sinister historic intent. This modern horse is for tourists. But, once long ago another wooden horse, a ‘gift from the Greeks’, spelled death by fire and sword of a vibrant incarnation of the glorious city of Troy, Queen of Asia Minor, in what is now Turkey. This Troy goes back to 1600 BCE, its history tumultuous, but only the Trojan wars of love, lust and betrayals, as extolled by the blind Greek historian and poet Homer in his Iliad and Odyssey epic poems, live on today; a favourite subject of the movies.

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Heavenly Art and Hot Air Balloons.

The Hagias Sophia in Istanbul is doubtless a gem of architecture. Built as a church in 537CE by the Byzantines, it was the biggest church in the world. In 1453 Mehmet II conquered Constantinople and converted it into a mosque. With the secularisation of Turkey in the nineteen twenties, the mosque was turned into a museum. It is now being restored to its initial glory.

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The Blue Mosque of Sultan Ahmed I – Architectural Caviar

A journey of discovery is sterile and insipid without an inkling of what the eyes are seeing, what music the ears are hearing, and what rich and wondrous tales of history that the intellect can savour.

In a 2013 census, Turkey had over 82 thousand mosques. Our tour-guide snidely commented: ‘That’s too many.’ Perhaps so for a follower of the rigid secular state that the autocratic regime of Mustafa Kamal Attaturk instilled following the post World-War I collapse of the Ottoman Empire Caliphate in 1924.

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