Sailing to Byzantium

Posted by Unknown October 08, 2010

Sailing to Byzantium

San Vitale, Ravenna

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

W. B. Yeats

After leaving Venice we sailed for Istanbul - the Byzantium of Yeats' poem on the Azmara Journey, an American cruise ship registered in Malta. I'm not sure whether Yates had this kind of luxury in mind when he wrote of the soul's spiritual journey but certainly it agreed with both Sue and me!

The Azmara Journey

Eleven years ago, I visited Italy and found myself in Ravenna a small city on the Adriatic coast. That I was there at all was Herman Hesse's fault, he wrote a poem about the place which inspired me to go there and I also came to see the famous Byzantine cathedral of San Vitale with it's golden mosaics (which were in part the inspiration for Yates poem).

I wasn't disappointed, indeed while I was there (as I was want to do), I fell for an older woman. The pity was that she had been dead for 1440 years.

She's second to the right of the empress

But despite that small impediment, I decided then and there that I must go to Istanbul when I was able.

The Istanbul I've found on brief acquaintance is the one I was expecting: A busy, busy city (14 million souls), spreading across the Bosporus and straddling Europe and Asia.

Perhaps it's because we've come in mid-Autumn but there is an unmistakeable air of melancholy, shabby beauty about the place. We stayed in Sultanahmet - the old part of town, built on one of the seven hills upon which Istanbul, like Rome, proverbially stands - very close to the famous blue mosque.

Courtyard of the blue mosque

Below the mosque is a small bazaar, owned by it and the rental from which helps pay for the upkeep of the building. It's tiny in comparison to the grand bazaar, but a much more pleasant place to wander around and below it and the steps leading to the it are a number of outdoor restaurants. We were eating at one of these when I looked up at the sound of a commotion. "What, another altercation between a rug pedlar and an unwilling client?", I said to myself but no it was just an ex-president of the USA going for a walk after lunch.

Bill Clinton goes for a postprandial walk near the blue mosque

Just up the road from the blue mosque are the remains of the hippodrome where the blue's and the green's once supported their chariot teams with such intensity, that after one race riots began between the spectators and within two days, Constantinople - the second Rome - was burned to the ground.

The Obelisk at the Hippodrome - the chariots turned about it

As we were initially in Istanbul for only two days (we will be returning to it later in our trip), we rounded out our trip with a glass of Turkish tea in the public gardens beneath the Tokapi palace overlooking the Bosporus.

A winding pathway through the gardens beneath the Tokapi gardens

As the autumn sunshine faded and the sea breeze picked up in the late afternoon, we sipped Turkish tea to keep the cold at bay and watched the ship that brought us to Istanbul slip its moorings and head off, like some brave adventurer borne for ports unknown to us.