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Sultan Ahmet mosque, Istanbul
We had watched the solar eclipse of August 11, 1999, from a village
called Shenyurt near Turhal in eastern Turkey, and were on the
way home. During a last and sleepless night in Istanbul I climbed
stairs to a roof and got suddenly this eyeful. Gulls played in
the light pouring upward over the domes and ledges and pinnacles,
and a fireball of the Perseid meteor stream flashed over.
The mosque was built by architect Mimar Mehmet Aga for Ahmet
I, who became sultan in 1603, not yet thirteen, and died at twenty-seven.
It used to be called the Ahmediye, or the Blue Mosque, but now
everyone seems to call it and the jumble of little streets
it dominates just Sultan Ahmet, as if it were that fairly
generous and pious and strong-willed young man himself.
A few days later, on August 17, a terrible earthquake shook
all this part of Turkey. Concrete tenements collapsed, burying
hundreds, but the slender minarets stood, as they had done for
four centuries.
(This became the cover painting for Astronomical Calendar
2000.)

Ayasofya seen through the portal of Sultan
Ahmet
Hagia Sophia ("holy wisdom") was the basilica of Byzantium,
and for a thousand years the largest church in the world. After
the conquest by the Turks, they turned it into a mosque and modelled
their own great mosques on it. I was standing in the crowd with
my sketchbook.

Assos
I explored the Troy-land by bicycle (not quite so adventurous
as old geographers such as Walter Leaf who did it on horseback).
After passing through thirty miles of interestingly twisted country
south of Troy, I didn't get to the rugged corner, but crossed
toward Assos, a place I wanted to see because of its curious situation.
A river, the ancient Satnioeis, now called Yirmidere Çayi, "twenty-valley
stream", almost gets through the hills (the westward arm of Mount
Ida) to the sea on this southern coast, but turns back inland
and takes another twenty miles to come out on the western coast.
It was strategically obvious to found a place, Assos, on the narrow
threadwhich I imagined as a meadowbetween river and
sea. Walter Leaf, following Thacher Clarke, identified classical
Assos (where Aristotle lived in exile) with Homer's "steep" Pedasos,
stronghold of a race of Leleges allied to Troy.
It didn't appear as I expected: instead, as I came up what seemed
to me yet another mountainside, something tall appeared on a skyline,
and when I came to it I found it was Assos; so that I almost turned
and went back down the road to understand again the approach I
had missed. The tall something was these three pillars, re-erected
presumably by archaeologists. They towered from the cleared pavement
of the floor of the temple of Athena. Beyond them, dissolved in
the southern sun, was the twelve-mile-wide gulf, combed by waves
from the Aegean sea to the right, and the bulk of Lesbos, reduced
to a flat purple wall. I made a large pencil drawing, noting some
colors for painting.
Assos was now called by the Turks Behramkale (Persian plus Arabic,
"Bahrâm's castle"). Though it did seem high above the sea, I had
no idea that as soon as I went over the edge there would be such
a long zigzag drop to the little port, the skala.
I found a way to make here the closing scene of The
Troy Town Tale. The ruined temple reminds of the ruin
that Achilles made of this place and its neighbors in his raid
on Troy's friends.
And I used this painting as the wraparound book jacket. The three
pillars echo the initials of the title, and the T-like pillars
on the titlepage. The printer got the image too yellow; it looks
muddy compared with the original.

Mycale
The headland now called Samsun Dag by the Turks. Sketched from
a shrine of Hera while cycling around the Greek island of Samos,
to which I had come by ferryboat from Kushadasi in Turkey.
The long mountain range, projecting into the sea as the promontory
of Mycale, divided the ancient countries of Lydia and Caria. Later
the Ionian Greeks colonized the coasts ro either side, and on
the north (left) slope of the ridge was the Panionium, where their
twelve cities met for a communal festival. At Mycale in August
of 479 BC the Spartans and Athenians, having sailed over from
Greece to rescue Samos, defeated the Persians on land and destroyed
their beached navy; this, together with the battle of Plataea
over in Greece on the same day, ended Persian rule over Ionia,
as well as the second attempt of the Persians to conquer Greece.
Some of my sketches on the way to Troy

Guzelyali
on the road along the Dardanelles coast; in the distance the Sigeum
promontory beyond Troy.

Tevfikiye
village just before Troy. |