No, Mark Twain is not a member of the Mark Anderson family...but we sort of claim him since he lived in Muscatine where we do, here on the Mississippi River in Iowa. He lived here for only a few months as an 18 year old and worked for his brother who owned the Muscatine Journal at the time. Mark Twain (then called Samuel Clemens) also wrote some short stories for our local paper using pen names, of course, but we don't know which pen names he used and lots of folks wrote stories back then.
We've decided to add his observations of places that someone from our family has also visited.
In this case St Sophia of Constantinople. The city is now called Istanbul and the St Sophia is no longer a mosque but a museum. As recorded in "Innocents Abroad".
The Mosque of St Sophia is the chief lion of Constantinople. You must
get a firman and hurry there the first thing. We did that. We did not
get a firman, but we took along four or five francs apiece, which is much
the same thing.
I do not think much of the Mosque of St Sophia. I suppose I lack
appreciation. We will let it go at that. It is the rustiest old barn in
heathendom. I believe all the interest that attaches to it comes from
the fact that it was built for a Christian church and then turned into a
mosque, without much alteration, by the Mohammedan conquerors of the
land. They made me take off my boots and walk into the place in my
stocking-feet. I caught cold, and got myself so stuck up with a
complication of gums, slime and general corruption, that I wore out more
than two thousand pair of boot-jacks getting my boots off that night, and
even then some Christian hide peeled off with them. I abate not a single
boot-jack.
St Sophia is a colossal church, thirteen or fourteen hundred years old,
and unsightly enough to be very, very much older. Its immense dome is
said to be more wonderful than St Peter's, but its dirt is much more
wonderful than its dome, though they never mention it. The church has a
hundred and seventy pillars in it, each a single piece, and all of costly
marbles of various kinds, but they came from ancient temples at Baalbec,
Heliopolis, Athens and Ephesus, and are battered, ugly and repulsive.
They were a thousand years old when this church was new, and then the
contrast must have been ghastly--if Justinian's architects did not trim
them any. The inside of the dome is figured all over with a monstrous
inscription in Turkish characters, wrought in gold mosaic, that looks as
glaring as a circus bill; the pavements and the marble balustrades are
all battered and dirty; the perspective is marred every where by a web of
ropes that depend from the dizzy height of the dome, and suspend
countless dingy, coarse oil lamps, and ostrich-eggs, six or seven feet
above the floor. Squatting and sitting in groups, here and there and far
and near, were ragged Turks reading books, hearing sermons, or receiving
lessons like children. and in fifty places were more of the same sort
bowing and straightening up, bowing again and getting down to kiss the
earth, muttering prayers the while, and keeping up their gymnastics till
they ought to have been tired, if they were not.
Every where was dirt, and dust, and dinginess, and gloom; every where
were signs of a hoary antiquity, but with nothing touching or beautiful
about it; every where were those groups of fantastic pagans; overhead the
gaudy mosaics and the web of lamp-ropes--nowhere was there any thing to
win one's love or challenge his admiration.
The people who go into ecstasies over St Sophia must surely get them out
of the guide-book (where every church is spoken of as being "considered
by good judges to be the most marvelous structure, in many respects, that
the world has ever seen.") Or else they are those old connoisseurs from
the wilds of New Jersey who laboriously learn the difference between a
fresco and a fire-plug and from that day forward feel privileged to void
their critical bathos on painting, sculpture and architecture forever
more.
Tell us about your favorite place in Istanbul and include your best photograph. Is it the Grand Bazaar? Or maybe some quiet little shop on a sidestreet, that very few know about, or the people...we'd love to hear about your adventure.
Buy Cool Turkish Stuff Here
OK....let's see...carpets, towels, silver, gold, kilims, stamps, postcards, maps...you get the idea? Yup...just about anything from Turkey can be found here. It's almost as good as visiting the Grand Bazaar in person...
