Mystery Coat-of Arms

For numerous years, I've passed by this unusual blazon that stands embedded to the walls of the famous Galatasaray high school in Taksim.

Placed on a wall that was later partially demolished to make way for the school's side gate, this unusual symbol defies all attempts to decipher its secrets. Who made it? What is its purpose? How old is it? It might be a symbol from one of Istanbul's old Levantine families or the remnant of a bygone Peran church, but none of these examples are backed by any kind of evidence.

Perhaps the most fantastic, but eerily plausible theory of its origins hints to the followers of Sabbatai Sevi, who referred to their messiah as "the King." But why such secretive people would construct such a visible mark for their idol remains a mystery, and in any case no evidence supports this hypothesis either.

A detail of the intricate reliefs surrounding the mystifying blazon.

Here is what we do know: The Galatasaray High School was founded in the late 15th century as an Ottoman "university", but its current incarnation goes back to the 1830s, when it was re-constituted as a Westernized college. This school has massive doors that were once used for its main entrance, but since the 1950s these stand locked and a side entrance is used instead. It is this add-on side entrance that has changed the wall this blazon is on into this ramp.

Do YOU know what on earth this sign is, or what it means? I'd like to find out before a random act of gentrification destroys this mystery too.

Two Mosques

House of Peace: A magnificently restored Ottoman mosque still serves the tiny Turkish community of Rhodes. I am not Moslem, yet even I find it peaceful and inviting.

House of War: This ramshackle "mosque" with cracking walls, shapeless features, shoddy exterior and a last-minute minaret made out of a steel pipe, serves only as a rude "retaliation" to the Hagia Triada in Taksim Square.

Hardly any people go to pray in it, yet its loudspeakers are turned up so high that it hurts your ears to be around this mosque when the call to prayer is sounded. A sad reminder of how badly populism, politics and nationalism have corrupted this "religion of peace."

The Spiders of London

With spring in full swing, everywhere in London is crawling with tiny, strange spiders of unidentifiable (for me) kinds. Here is one I saw in the living room of one of my friends, around Camden.

While I saw this small, longish, yellow one in the grass outside my school in New Cross Gate.

But the most interesting arachnid encounter of recent weeks has to be this teeming cluster of baby spiders, probably from a family of orb-weavers. Most spiders are fiercely antisocial and will gladly eat each other given the chance. This makes these gregarious younglings even more remarkable.

A Dead Seagull

A seagull's skull I found last summer in Alacati. Notice how lightly it is constructed, with sheet-like bones and many hollow "windows" for reducing mass.

Mystery Structure

Mystery structure! This incomprehensible, windowless stone "building" sits silently among modern apartment buildings in the Acibadem district of Istanbul.

No one I know seems to have any clue about what this building is, how old it is, or who built it. (Postsrcipt: Not anymore, the building is almost certainly a "water balance"- read below.) It is quite old, perhaps Ottoman or even Byzantine from the looks of it. Pieces of even older buildings stand out among the mystery structure's walls, suggesting that its stonework has been scavenged from ruined masonry. It has been neglected for quite some time, and now has trees growing from its top.

Some residents say that this place is the tomb of some "holy man," but it is just too large and strongly built to be a tomb in my opinion. My guess is this thing is either part of an old wall, or one of the "fire towers" used to watch out for potential fires in Ottoman times. My guess, of course, is as good as any other.

Do you know what this structure is, or might be? Please let us know in the comments.

UPDATE!

Many of my on-line viewers pointed out that this structure was actually a Byzantine "water balance", a tower that maintained even water flow and pressure across the aqueducts that carried water to Chalcedon, now known as Kadikoy. Thanks for the help!

Alevi Outsider Art

The ghost of Jean-Michel Basquiat must be alive and well in the streets of Istanbul, painting signs for local shops.

Nalbur means "hardware store" in Turkish. Man, check out that Opel logo!

Eventually I followed the arrows and actually found the "Nalbur" in one of the side streets. It was a pretty ordinary store, except from the awesome examples of naive art on its walls.

The store was owned and run by a couple of brothers who were Alevis, members of an indigenous Anatolian religion that borrows from Sufism, Shamanism and Eastern Christianity. Alevism has a special emphasis on mankind's mystical link with nature, and we can see this connection reflected with a charming simplicity in these walls. The figures, in their multitude, sort of "become one" with the mountains and the trees.

More details from the tree/people figures. Notice the delightfully drawn turtle and the mushrooms.

The highlight of the walls was this portrait, which the store owner explained as "Ali's tears turning into wine." Drinking wine has a special significance in Alevi rites.

Almost as impressive was this figure, which the store owner told me was the "tree of life." The guys running the shop were very friendly and enthusiastic about the photos I took, so I made a silent resolution about buying all of my future hardware needs from their shop.

A Walk from Kadikoy to Moda

The district of Moda/Kadikoy, once (and still) home to many of Istanbul's non-Turkish minorities, boasts some of the most splendid neo-classical architecture in the City. Here we go with a brief, wordless survey.











While most of the houses have given way to large apartment blocks, some, like those you've seen above, still have families living inside. Yet others, abandoned and decaying, lie barricaded behind such "protective walls" recently erected by the municipality. They are all shiny and bright now, but in due time such ugly barriers will be wholly encrusted with layers of graffiti, posters and mud.

The particular tag here, of "%52", belongs to a local group of anarchist activists.

A New Street Artist in Town

An up and coming graffiti artist with a unique style has recently been leaving his marks around Kadikoy...

As Kadikoy becomes home to more of Istanbul's young/creative people, street art like this looks set to increase.

Unlikely Bedfellows

Meet the Yeniden Anadolu ve Rumeli Müdafaa-i-Hukuk (Association for Defense of National Rights of Anatolia and Rumelia Again) magazine, one of the many "national" publications out and about in Turkey.

This movement, which has grown up considerably in the last five years against the ruling party of Machiavellian conservatives, defends an unusual combination of Atatürk's principles, xenophobic nationalism and authoritarian leftism. Self-titled as a "monthly Kemalist publication," this issue blasts Turkey's Wahhabi-wannabes for looking up to the U.S. Hypocritical and ironic, ain't it? All is well until...

...you flip the cover and see a full-page, glossy color advert from Ülker, a Turkish food products conglomerate that is widely known to support religious conservatives. (They also recently bought Godiva.) Secular Kemalists supported by ads from Turkish wingnuts? Turkish wingnuts buying Godiva? Just two of the baffling contradictions that makes our brains hurt every day.

Return to the Great Salt Lake

The bleak, unearthly landscapes of the great Anatolian Salt Lake (Tuz Gölü) stretch before us, to infinity.

En route to Cappadocia, me and my family stopped over at the Salt Lake for a brief rest.

The weather being warm, my sister immediately walked into the water. I'm saying "walked in," because the lake is never more than a few meters at its deepest point. It is possible to walk inside for miles and the water doesn't even come up to your knees. I immediately followed her, although I had to strip off my pants and shoes to enter the water. This left me in an uncomfortable, Borat-like situation which I quickly avoided by running as far away from the shore as possible.

Our brief "expedition" was rewarded by a rock encrusted with huge, pink salt crystals...

...and feet stinking with tar-like, alkali mud, which lies immediately beneath the crust of salt that covers the lake bottom. At some times, the experience was comparable to walking on a great big birthday cake.

Co-incidentally, this had not been the first time I'd walked on the Great Salt Lake. Here, on a photograph taken exactly ten years ago, me, my brother and our friend Necdet are trekking across the gleaming, mirror-like surface. Unearthly.

Akmar!

Behold the entrance of the Akmar arcade in Kadikoy, on the Asian shores of Istanbul!

Located in a center of schools, university prep-courses, cafes and bars built on (naturally) the houses left vacant by Istanbul's Greeks, Akmar has something of a legendary reputation in Istanbul.

It was in Akmar that the heavy metal craze first hit Istanbul, during the early nineties. I was too young to know about it back then, but Akmar was (and still is) full of record shops and clothes stores selling metal paraphernalia.

Its legend grew in intensity when in 1999, when self-termed "Satanists" murdered a young girl and the resulting Satanist hysteria branded Akmar as a "gathering ground" for junkies, devil-worshipers and wayward punks. There were even rumors of orgies and sacrifices taking place in its depths.

Of course, Akmar was never such a place. Most of its stores were (and are) innocent bookstores that sold schoolbooks and old magazines. The most threatening thing to be found there were probably some Turkish gothic lolitas.

(Well, not completely. I think there was some drug dealing going on down there in certain times. Still, that's a far cry from the Satanic blood dungeon newspapers portrayed Akmar to be.)

Now recovered from its hysterical labels of the past, Akmar is a more quiet place. Most of the heavy metal record shops moved away, and the school-book shops dominate it almost entirely. But there are still those of us who remember...

Millipede Special

Millepede time! Here are some millipedes I encountered last month while trekking over the hills of Smyrna (Izmir.) This black, shiny variety was a familiar species...

...while I'd never seen these yellow ones before. Weird! Recall that this was not my first encounter with unusual millipedes, however.

Apparently, millipedes can only be identified with precision after microscopic dissections of their male genitals, so I'm completely lost over their exact identities.

Extremely Provocative Graffiti - The Aftermath

Remember those extremely provocative graffiti I'd seen on a Peran street? Well, here's how they looked like when I checked out a mere two weeks later. Dogma-bashing vandalism had been challenged by counter-vandalism in the shape of these frustrated marker scribbles. It used to say "I'm gay and I'm dominant" here...

...while it used to say "I wear the hijab and I love anal sex" here. The offended censors have crossed out "hijab" and "sex", but apparently the word "anal" causes no problems for these unknown defacers.

This battle between slogan writers and cross-outs continued for over a week before the Pera (Beyoglu) municipality took heavy-handed action. Here, a blanket of paint covers the "I live in Tarlabashi and I want to stay here" slogan.

The municipality painted out not only the offending slogans, but an extremely large "gallery" of pretty and meticulously-done street art. If those cats could speak...

...they would tell you that the street which looked like this... (Sofia took this photo.)

...now looks like this.

But fear not, for in each death there is new life. Only a day after the paint-out, new graffiti began appearing in the same street, mourning the tragedy. Is there no tomorrow? I don't agree. I'm sure the talented street artists of Istanbul will get the place dancing with new works in no time.