Something very similar also occurred with the Sublime Porte, which is to say the Ottoman Empire, alias Muslim Byzantium. Once again, we have an autocracy, heavily militarized and somewhat more despotic. The absolute head of the state was the Padishah, or Sultan. Alongside him, however, existed the Grand Mufti, a position combining— indeed, equating—spiritual and administrative authority. The whole state was run by a vastly complex hierarchical system, in which the religious—or, to put it more conveniently, staunchly ideological—element predominated.
In purely structural terms, the difference between the
Second Rome and the Ottoman Empire is accessible only in units of time. What is it, then? The spirit of place? Its evil genius? The spirit of bad spells—porcha in Russian? Where, incidentally, do we get this word porcha from? Might it not derive from porte? It doesn't matter. It's enough that both Christianity and bardak with durak came down to us from this place where people were becoming converted to Christianity in the fifth century with the same ease with which they went over to Islam in the fifteenth (even though after the fall of Constantinople the Turks did not persecute the Christians in any way). The reason for both conversions was the same: pragmatism. Not that this is connected with the place, however; this has to do with the species.
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Oh, all these countless Osmans, Muhammads, Murads, Bajazets, Ibrahims, Selims, and Suleimans slaughtering their predecessors, rivals, brothers, parents, and offspring—in the case of }.1urad II, or III (who cares?), eighteen brothers in a row—with the regularity of a man shaving in front of a mirror. Oh, all these endless, uninterrupted wars: against the infidel, against their own but Shiite Muslims, to extend the Empire, to avenge a wrong, for no reason at all, and in self-defense. And, oh, those Janissaries, the elite of the army, dedicated at first to the Sultan, then gradually turning into a separate caste, with only its own interests at heart. How familiar it all, including the slaughter, is! All these turbans and beards, that uniform for heads possessed by one idea only—massacre—and because of that, and not at all because of Islam's ban on the depiction of anyone or anything living, totally indistinguishable from one anotherl And perhaps "massacre" precisely because all are so much alike that there is no way to detect a loss. "I massacre, therefore I exist."
And, broadly speaking, what, indeed, could be nearer to the heart of yesterday's nomad than the linear principle, than movement across a surface, in whatever direction? Didn't one of them, another Selim, say during the conquest of Egypt that he, as Lord of Constantinople, was heir to the Roman Empire and therefore had a right to all the lands that had ever belonged to it? Do these words sound like justification or do they sound like prophecy, or both? And does not the same note ring four hundred years later in the voice of Ustryalov and the Third Rome's latter-day Slavophiles, whose scarlet, Janissary's-cloaklike banner neatly combined a star and the crescent of Islam? And that hammer, isn't it a modified cross?
These non-stop, lasting-a-thousand-years wars, these endless tracts of scholastic interpretation of the art of archery— might not these be responsible for the development in this part of the world of a fusion between army and state, for the concept of politics as the continuation of war by other means, and for the phantasmagoric, though ballistically feasible, fantasies of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the grandfather of the missile?
A man with imagination, especially an impatient one, may be sorely tempted to answer these questions in the affirmative. But perhaps one shouldn't rush; perhaps one should pause and give them the chance to turn into "accursed"' ones, even if that may take several centuries. Ah, these centuries, history's favorite unit, relieving the individual of the necessity of personally evaluating the past, and awarding him the honorable status of victim of history.
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Unlike the Ice Age, civilizations, of whatever sort, move from south to north, as if to fill up the vacuum created by the retreating glacier. The tropical forest is gradually ousting the conifers and mixed woodland—if not through foliage, then by way of architecture. One sometimes gets the feeling that baroque, rococo, and even the Schinkel style are simply a species' unconscious yearning for its equatorial past. Fernlike pagodas also fit this idea.
As for latitudes, it's only nomads who move along them, and usually from east to west. The nomadic migration makes sense only within a distinct climatic zone. The Eskimos glide within the Arctic Circle, the Tartars and Mongols in the confines of the black-earth zone. The cupolas of yurts and igloos, the cones of tents and tepees.
I have seen the mosques of Central Asia, of Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva: genuine pearls of Muslim architecture. As Lenin didn't say, I know nothing better than the Shah-i- Zinda, on whose floor I passed several nights, having nowhere else to lay my head. I was nineteen then, but I retain tender memories of these mosques not at all for that reason. They are masterpieces of scale and color; they bear witness to the lyricism of Islam. Their glaze, their emerald and cobalt get imprinted on your retina, not least because of the contrast with the yellow-brown hues of the surrounding landscape. This contrast, this memory of a coloristic (at least) alternative to the real world, may also have been the main pretext for their birth. One does, indeed, sense in them an idiosyncrasy, a self-absorption, a striving to accomplish, to perfect themselves. Like lamps in the darkness. Better: like corals in the desert.
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Whereas Istanbul's mosques are Islam triumphant. There is no greater contradiction than a triumphant church—or greater tastelessness, either. St. Peter's in Rome suffers from this as well. But the Istanbul mosques! These enormous toads in frozen stone, squatting on the earth, unable to stir. Only the minarets, resembling more than anything (prophetically, alas) ground-to-air batteries—only they indicate the direction the soul was once about to take. Their shallow domes, reminiscent of saucepan lids or cast-iron kettles, are unable to conceive what they are to do with the sky: they preserve what they contain, rather than encourage one to set eyes on high. Ah, this tent complex! Of spreading on the ground. Of namaz.
Silhouetted against the sunset, on the hilltops, they create a powerful impression: the hand reaches for the camera, like that of a spy spotting a military installation. There is, indeed, something menacing about them—eerie, otherworldly, galactic, totally hermetic, shell-like. And all this in a dirty-gray color, like most of the buildings in Istanbul, and all set against the turquoise of the Bosporus.
And if one's pen does not poise to chide their nameless true-believing builders for being aesthetically dumb it is because the tone for these ground-hugging, toad- and crablike constructions was set by the Hagia Sophia, an edifice in the utmost degree Christian. Constantine, it is asserted, laid the foundations; it was erected, though, in the reign of Justinian. From the outside, there is no way to tell it from the mosques, or them from it, for fate has played a cruel (or was it cruel?) joke on the Hagia Sophia. Under Sultan Whatever-His-Redundant-Name-Was, our Hagia Sophia was turned into a mosque.
As transformations go, this one didn't require a great deal of effort: all the Muslims had to do was to erect four minarets on each side of the cathedral. Which they did; and it became impossible to tell the Hagia Sophia from a mosque. That is, the architectural standard of Byzantium was taken to its logical end, for it was exactly the squat grandeur of this Christian shrine that the builders of Bajazet, Suleiman, and the Blue Mosque, not to mention their lesser brethren, sought to emulate. And yet they shouldn't be reproached for that, partly because by the time of their arrival in Constantinople it was the Hagia Sophia that loomed largest over the entire landscape; mainly, however, because in itself the Hagia Sophia was not a Roman creation. It was an Eastern—or, more precisely, Sassanid—product. And, similarly, there is no point in blaming that Sultan What's-His- Name—was it Murad?—for converting a Christian church into a mosque. This transformation reflected something that one may, without giving the matter much thought, take for profound Eastern indifference to problems of a metaphysical nature. In reality, though, what stood behind this, and stands now, in much the same way as the Hagia Sophia, with her minarets and with her Christian-Muslim decor inside, is a sensation, instilled by both history and the Arabic lace, that everything in this life intertwines—that everything is, in a sense, but a pattern in a carpet. Trodden underfoot.