These pictures had better be worth a thousand words because I'm not writing the thousand words
So I have been meaning to write up my Deep Thoughts about our trip last month to western Crete, Athens, and Istanbul - thoughts about nationalisms and histories, continuities and discontinuties in uses of the material remains of the past, grilled fish, 19th c. archeology as the ruination of ruins, the spiritual uses of beauty, the ways in which physics conferences differ from history conferences, the fabulous generosity of Islamic architecture, "Europe" as a category of analysis, and the globalization of weeds - but I can see that's not going to happen. Instead, here are some nice pictures:
This was my favorite moment in Athens: this tsambal player, busking near the Monastiraki metro station, spotted Fishwhistle immediately as a musician and gave him a lesson. The guy was a master player but Fishwhistle picked it up pretty well. He turned out to be mainly Romanian-speaking, but luckily Fishwhistle has a few words of Romanian, and anyway the tsambal player was the kind of teacher who mostly works by gesture and little sounds of approbation, so that was okay.
Athens had some wonderful street performers - shadow puppets and dance but music most of all. The best was this guy and then a duo from the Congo, playing small drums and guitar and singing, near the Roman Agora beneath the Parthenon. It sounded like they were playing blues, though for all we could tell they might have been singing "look! there goes another gaggle of stingy tourists clutching their water bottles!" or "Greek walls have excellent graffiti, don't they?" Which they do by the way.
This is graffiti from Iraklio, Crete's biggest city, for instance. As far as we can tell it portrays Vladimir Lenin as a ninja.
There's really no comment I can make about that.
Anyway, the next time we travel together I am definitely bringing a little microphone and using the iPod as a recorder, because music - or, anyway, interesting sounds - seems to happen around Fishwhistle. So for instance the call to prayer in Istanbul was always a beautiful canon, even when (as a friend who lives there remarked on the last call to prayer of the day which we heard from the veranda of her apartment) the local muezzin seems to be suffering from a sore throat. Or our last night in Kolymbari, at the physics conference on Crete, we got no sleep at all because there was an all-night dance party in the village nearest to the apartment we were using and it was really loud. No, REALLY LOUD. But it was live music, sort of a fusion of techno and bouzouki, and who could complain about that? (Well, we did complain, but only to each other.)
This was the view from that apartment, just to give you the idea - we weren't that close to the village. Those are all olive trees, by the way. Every inch of Crete that is not covered in tourists is covered in olive trees. You notice the smell of olives the minute you get off the plane. If a room is closed up for too long there it starts to smell like rancid olive oil. In a good way.
The other aspect of Cretan agriculture that especially interested me was the goats. Goats! Fishwhistle took this picture of goats on a hilltop next to a cross. I took no pictures of goats because I was too busy gasping "goats! Fishwhistle, I want a goat! Can we bring one home with us? GOAT!!!" Well, most of you know how I feel about goats. They're cute, they produce milk for delicious thick Greek yogurt, they eat weeds: what's not to like?
They may or may not have been weeds, but Crete also had a profusion of trumpet vines and morning glories, just like the ones in my backyard (as I kept remarking to Fishwhistle, who was pretty patient while I went on about it) - except much, much more luxuriant. Crete is pretty dry but they have excellent irrigation systems; in the middle of the island you see small windmills that generate the power for the pumps.
And speaking of flowering plants that either are weeds or are not weeds: One of the two best things about the Parthenon was this bacopa, growing through the floor of the Dionysus Theatre. I know bacopa because I use it as a ground cover near the lilac in my front yard. And there they were in the exact location where Euripides premiered his plays. That tension between the everyday present and the deep, deep past ... it just ... well.
That's the thing about Athens - the way the classical past and the touristic present just bang into each other all the time. Like a proper Edwardian lady tourist I carried around a sketchbook the whole time but mostly I used pencils and we couldn't get them to scan properly, which is a pity because now I can't show you a zillion poorly-executed drawings of gorgeous Cretan beaches with gorgeous Italian tourists on them, but anyway, this drawing is an example of that - you look up from your tourist lunch at your tourist cafe with the nice people from Texas at the next table over complaining about how Coke in Europe is just not like real Coke from back home, and there it is: Hadrian's Library, holy fuck.
Although at least there will be plenty of multi-lingual signage all over saying, hey, this was Hadrian's Library. My other favorite thing from the Parthenon was favorite because it was utterly unmarked and unremarked:
This inscription on a stone from Athena's temple must be left over from the Ottoman era, right? But that's the part of the Greek past tourists aren't supposed to notice (which is why the Bernake museum of Islamic art in Athens is so fucking great.)
So while I was noticing the presence or absence of the past in daily life, plus weeds, Fishwhistle was noticing cats. Swear to God, half the pictures he took in Istanbul were of stray cats. Here he is with another stray cat:
You can't tell from the picture, but this was the courtyard of a random mosque near the Grand Bazaar. Not one of the important mosques - Sultan Ahmet or the New Mosque - just a regular one, but still mind-bendingly gorgeous. I spent a lot of time drawing domes and minarets. There was a big crew of Japanese teenagers touring around the same places at the same time we were, and they drew domes and minarets too (far more skillfully than I could.) But the mosques were so overwhelmingly beautiful that taking snapshots seemed like entirely the wrong thing to do - the fragment could never, ever stand in for the whole. So this image will have to do.
The Blue Mosque, which was the single most beautiful physical space of them all - maybe my favorite building ever - smelled of feet, but pleasantly. It is still a mosque, so if you don't have your knees and elbows covered - and your head, for women - the nice people at the entrance will offer you big pieces of cloth to use as scarves and sarongs, as well as a plastic bag for your shoes. I was appalled to see that nearly everyone - mainly German and French tourists - who had been handed these coverings immediately uncovered themselves again upon entering the building, but the guards and the people who were there to pray seemed very relaxed about it. Why would you go to a mosque and then make a big deal of refusing to dress modestly there? Why go to the mosque at all?
Parenthetically, we spent a while in Athens hanging around with a very jolly mixed-gender group of Iran civil engineers, only one of whom was covered, but Fishwhistle was saying that a much higher percentage of women on the street in Istanbul were wearing scarves than had been the last time he was there ten years ago, and his friend there was saying that this is true even though women who cover their heads even a little face all kinds of discrimination in employment in Turkey, and anyway now, in the most touristy and orientalist manner, I am all kinds of interested in the sociology of covering or not covering.
Also interesting: the architecture of water. Istanbul is full of ferry docks and fountains and riverside parks and places like this one:
where people can wash their feet. (This one was interesting because not obviously attached to a mosque, so perhaps not a masjib, which is what you call a place to wash your feet before prayer.) Also in the women's bathrooms of the Istanbul airport there is a sign over the sinks with an icon of a footprint with a slash through it saying, in English: Please Use the Masjid Facilities for Ablution.
So, anyway, Crete was lovely, Athens was great, but Istanbul - that's the place I'd like to live for a while.
...
This was my favorite moment in Athens: this tsambal player, busking near the Monastiraki metro station, spotted Fishwhistle immediately as a musician and gave him a lesson. The guy was a master player but Fishwhistle picked it up pretty well. He turned out to be mainly Romanian-speaking, but luckily Fishwhistle has a few words of Romanian, and anyway the tsambal player was the kind of teacher who mostly works by gesture and little sounds of approbation, so that was okay.
Athens had some wonderful street performers - shadow puppets and dance but music most of all. The best was this guy and then a duo from the Congo, playing small drums and guitar and singing, near the Roman Agora beneath the Parthenon. It sounded like they were playing blues, though for all we could tell they might have been singing "look! there goes another gaggle of stingy tourists clutching their water bottles!" or "Greek walls have excellent graffiti, don't they?" Which they do by the way.
This is graffiti from Iraklio, Crete's biggest city, for instance. As far as we can tell it portrays Vladimir Lenin as a ninja.
There's really no comment I can make about that.
Anyway, the next time we travel together I am definitely bringing a little microphone and using the iPod as a recorder, because music - or, anyway, interesting sounds - seems to happen around Fishwhistle. So for instance the call to prayer in Istanbul was always a beautiful canon, even when (as a friend who lives there remarked on the last call to prayer of the day which we heard from the veranda of her apartment) the local muezzin seems to be suffering from a sore throat. Or our last night in Kolymbari, at the physics conference on Crete, we got no sleep at all because there was an all-night dance party in the village nearest to the apartment we were using and it was really loud. No, REALLY LOUD. But it was live music, sort of a fusion of techno and bouzouki, and who could complain about that? (Well, we did complain, but only to each other.)
This was the view from that apartment, just to give you the idea - we weren't that close to the village. Those are all olive trees, by the way. Every inch of Crete that is not covered in tourists is covered in olive trees. You notice the smell of olives the minute you get off the plane. If a room is closed up for too long there it starts to smell like rancid olive oil. In a good way.
The other aspect of Cretan agriculture that especially interested me was the goats. Goats! Fishwhistle took this picture of goats on a hilltop next to a cross. I took no pictures of goats because I was too busy gasping "goats! Fishwhistle, I want a goat! Can we bring one home with us? GOAT!!!" Well, most of you know how I feel about goats. They're cute, they produce milk for delicious thick Greek yogurt, they eat weeds: what's not to like?
They may or may not have been weeds, but Crete also had a profusion of trumpet vines and morning glories, just like the ones in my backyard (as I kept remarking to Fishwhistle, who was pretty patient while I went on about it) - except much, much more luxuriant. Crete is pretty dry but they have excellent irrigation systems; in the middle of the island you see small windmills that generate the power for the pumps.
And speaking of flowering plants that either are weeds or are not weeds: One of the two best things about the Parthenon was this bacopa, growing through the floor of the Dionysus Theatre. I know bacopa because I use it as a ground cover near the lilac in my front yard. And there they were in the exact location where Euripides premiered his plays. That tension between the everyday present and the deep, deep past ... it just ... well.
That's the thing about Athens - the way the classical past and the touristic present just bang into each other all the time. Like a proper Edwardian lady tourist I carried around a sketchbook the whole time but mostly I used pencils and we couldn't get them to scan properly, which is a pity because now I can't show you a zillion poorly-executed drawings of gorgeous Cretan beaches with gorgeous Italian tourists on them, but anyway, this drawing is an example of that - you look up from your tourist lunch at your tourist cafe with the nice people from Texas at the next table over complaining about how Coke in Europe is just not like real Coke from back home, and there it is: Hadrian's Library, holy fuck.
Although at least there will be plenty of multi-lingual signage all over saying, hey, this was Hadrian's Library. My other favorite thing from the Parthenon was favorite because it was utterly unmarked and unremarked:
This inscription on a stone from Athena's temple must be left over from the Ottoman era, right? But that's the part of the Greek past tourists aren't supposed to notice (which is why the Bernake museum of Islamic art in Athens is so fucking great.)
So while I was noticing the presence or absence of the past in daily life, plus weeds, Fishwhistle was noticing cats. Swear to God, half the pictures he took in Istanbul were of stray cats. Here he is with another stray cat:
You can't tell from the picture, but this was the courtyard of a random mosque near the Grand Bazaar. Not one of the important mosques - Sultan Ahmet or the New Mosque - just a regular one, but still mind-bendingly gorgeous. I spent a lot of time drawing domes and minarets. There was a big crew of Japanese teenagers touring around the same places at the same time we were, and they drew domes and minarets too (far more skillfully than I could.) But the mosques were so overwhelmingly beautiful that taking snapshots seemed like entirely the wrong thing to do - the fragment could never, ever stand in for the whole. So this image will have to do.
The Blue Mosque, which was the single most beautiful physical space of them all - maybe my favorite building ever - smelled of feet, but pleasantly. It is still a mosque, so if you don't have your knees and elbows covered - and your head, for women - the nice people at the entrance will offer you big pieces of cloth to use as scarves and sarongs, as well as a plastic bag for your shoes. I was appalled to see that nearly everyone - mainly German and French tourists - who had been handed these coverings immediately uncovered themselves again upon entering the building, but the guards and the people who were there to pray seemed very relaxed about it. Why would you go to a mosque and then make a big deal of refusing to dress modestly there? Why go to the mosque at all?
Parenthetically, we spent a while in Athens hanging around with a very jolly mixed-gender group of Iran civil engineers, only one of whom was covered, but Fishwhistle was saying that a much higher percentage of women on the street in Istanbul were wearing scarves than had been the last time he was there ten years ago, and his friend there was saying that this is true even though women who cover their heads even a little face all kinds of discrimination in employment in Turkey, and anyway now, in the most touristy and orientalist manner, I am all kinds of interested in the sociology of covering or not covering.
Also interesting: the architecture of water. Istanbul is full of ferry docks and fountains and riverside parks and places like this one:
where people can wash their feet. (This one was interesting because not obviously attached to a mosque, so perhaps not a masjib, which is what you call a place to wash your feet before prayer.) Also in the women's bathrooms of the Istanbul airport there is a sign over the sinks with an icon of a footprint with a slash through it saying, in English: Please Use the Masjid Facilities for Ablution.
So, anyway, Crete was lovely, Athens was great, but Istanbul - that's the place I'd like to live for a while.
...