journal

Day 7 – September 7 2024 – Bursa – İznik

that was dinner, this was, for which we are prepared to forgive a multitude of sins, breakfast, kahvaltı (it remains, as I write this high above İzmir and the muezzin sings, the best),

by bus and Bursa card we go to İznik, and, as it also was known, Nicaea, described by John Ash, the scene of the 1st Crusade, boats portaged crossing the lake to take the city back under Byzantine rule, crusaders intent on rape and murder parceled into small groups of tourists and so allowed entry into the city by arrangement with the sultan for a peaceful handover of power …

a building,

İznik smelt of bread in fact. No tile manufacture was to be seen. Under Byzantine rule it had been famous for its highly coloured tiles, in particular, blue. We soon came to …

entrance free,

note the weighting towards pre-Byzantine antiquity,

We were free to wander over the site.

Having completed this part of the tour, it remains the most impressive theatre.

something John Ash says, “Simple neglect I could understand–it is preferential to insensitive restoration”…

I suppose we should have counted ourselves lucky that the municipal power was not trying to make money off of this site, and thereby paying for and somehow justifying the insensitive restoration, as it was in others, notably Ephesus, and most horribly the Buckle Church, Тоkalı Kilise, outside of Göreme, funpark antique world.

everywhere the arches were survivors.

We went in search of the walls and many towers, 120 by memory. A helpful local guessing what we were looking for gave us directions.

something went wrong with my exposure,

returning into town, past the lines of tractors,

hamam and the firewood by which you can tell it is authentic but not however thermal,

[this is a placeholder for a piece called the reconstruction.

[we sat in the central square of Iznik, formerly Nicaea, and discussed how NZ has never acquired the instinct to preserve its cultural institutions, or even learnt to recognise them.

[It brought to mind a personal archeology … in this town of breads.

[Cultural continuity or in our case cultural discontinuity of loss of institutions each decade, increasing dispossession, on the installment plan…

[Then, J is from outside it.

[And, I, from inside it, have found myself outside.]

off the main market street, where the lost art of Iznik ceramics was on display, there was this,