It's Friday afternoon as I write this. I'm listening to the live stream from St. Mark in Boca Raton, where they are holding a special prayer service in coordination with the Greek Orthodox churches around the world. The service is in mourning for the reconversion of the basilica of Hagia Sophia into a mosque after ninety years as secular museum. All the church bells in Greece are tolling as I write this.
As I've written before, my visit to that building in early July 1992 was one of the stirring events in my life. I just commented on the live stream of the prayer service that it was one of the reasons I came to my faith in God. This is because it connected to me to all the Christians who have ever worshipped there---commoners and Emperors, saints and wretched sinners. For someone else it wouldn't have been important as a step to faith, but for me it was.
That trip in the summer of 1992 was one of the big turning points in my life. I could write a great deal about it. I kept a detailed journal. I feel like I came back greatly altered.
There was perhaps no bigger moment in that trip that the few days I spent in Istanbul, or as the Greeks still call it, Constantinople.
While I was there I stayed in a cheap hostel along the square near the train station. It was along a street with other cheap hotels and outdoor restaurants that catered to tourists. No doubt the entire quarter has been changed beyond recognition over the years, but in my mind I can still picture how it was twenty-eight years ago.
The room was on the second floor of the small hotel building, and from the balcony out on the street the street, one could see down the street with a clear view to Hagia Sophia, as well as the Blue Mosque next to it.
The latter structure was built by the Ottoman Turks after they had conquered the city in 1453---the event being commemorated by the live stream I am watching. The mosque was built specifically as an imitation of Hagia Sophia, with the intention of surpassing it in beauty, to show the superiority of Islam over Christianity.
Certainly the mosque is beautiful structure in its own right, and the interior is a marvel to beyond. But for me, there is no comparison with Hagia Sophia, which is almost a thousand years older. There is an organic majesty inside Hagia Sophia, despite its desecration which destroyed so many of the mosaics there, which the Blue Mosque cannot compete with. But I suppose that is a matter of taste.
I spent almost the entire time in Istanbul in one of those two buildings. I had visited the city before, in 1985, so it was not a priority for me to explore it. Besides, much of the city is not very interesting outside the neighborhood around those two buildings. Back then if you tried to wonder around on your own, Turkish men would recognize you as a foreigner and approach you, hassling your for one reason or another, usually offering to provide a tour. I had just come from the Ukraine before going to Istanbul, so I pretended to speak only Ukrainian. I don't know if I was very convincing. All in all, it was easier to stay in the thick of the touristic area, as one was not easily singled out as one would be on the side streets.
While I was at the hostel I witnessed one of the most amazing sights of my life. One evening after dinner, while I was in my room, a massive storm front came upon the ancient city, darkening the sky over the the two structures side by side. I went out onto the balcony with a couple other guests and watched it play out, looking down the street towards the two massive buildings.
It was no ordinary thunderstorm, but one of those tempests that produced a quantity of magnitude of lightning that one rarely sees in ones life. At one point, at the peak of the storm, the thunderheads were aligned such that were directly over or in back of the two structures. The lightning bolts came down hard and thick, as if attracted by each structure, fighting back and forth with each other in a giant unceasing battle of electricity. I don't know if the structures themselves were the target of the bolts, or if they were striking the ground in back of them, but he effect was as if the electricity was flowing directly into them.
The storm seemed to stay in place an abnormally long time, unmoving while the lightning seem to strike the two structures repeated back and forth, as if replying to each other. Curiously the rain never reached the hotel. The entire drama took place at a distance from where I was.
Even at the time I thought I had been allowed to witness something beyond my comprehension to understand, something sublime and terrible. If it had happened today, I could take a video of it my smartphone and post it on Youtube. But in 1992 none of that was invented. We had to get along with witnessing things in person, with our own eyes.
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