From the moment that we landed in Istanbul, it was clear that Kivunim’s time in Turkey would be equal parts eye-opening and full of familiar, or at least fitting, steps in our journey. Embodying the “third time’s a charm” ethic as our third international trip this year, our time in Turkey brought me to a new level of endearment to the international story of the Jewish people that we are trying to reclaim this year, and represented in many ways the core and climax of everything we have done thus far. Even from a linguistic perspective I challenged myself more during this trip than on any other before to learn local phrases. Above all, our visit to Turkey this past week was evidence of progress—not just in terms of our year and our development as students of the world, but also in visiting a place, like many others where we have been and have yet to go, where the process of the development of human civilization, and many of its different stages, are especially evident.
As I mentioned briefly in my last entry, Turkey is about as “in between” as a place gets. I maintain that every place we have visited, perhaps especially Jerusalem, holds the seeds of converging cultures and civilizations. However, I must admit that few other places in the world are as much of a crossroads as Turkey. Turkey borders Greece and Bulgaria on one side, and Georgia, Armenia, Iran, and Syria on the other. It is at once Asian, European, Middle Eastern, and not quite any of these. Over the course of the week, moving from Istanbul to Ankara and eventually to Izmir, we physically traveled inter-continentally, while staying inside one country. The cross-cultural nature of Turkey centers on Istanbul. A city physically split between Europe and Asia by the Bosphorous Strait, it has served as the seat of government for both Eastern and Western powers. Many parts of Istanbul could easily be London or Madrid (or Athens or Haifa for that matter), but the minarets of its plethora of mosques dominate the skyline.
As soon as we got off the plane from Tel Aviv, we made our way to the ancient Roman Hippodrome and the Blue Mosque of Ottoman Sultan Ahmet I, and then saw the two cultures combined just across the square in the Hagia Sophia—one of the world’s most majestic Byzantine churches (in fact, it was the largest cathedral in the world for a thousand years), which was turned into a mosque shortly after the Ottomans captured Istanbul (then Constantinople) in 1453, and then into a museum in 1935 when the Republic of Turkey was established. I find it pretty profound that one building can hold the remnants of so many chapters of Turkish history. The Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia are awe-inspiring in their sheer size and style. They are truly tremendous feats of architecture, especially given the tools that the builders had when they were constructed. At first glance they appear to be sister buildings; they stand opposite one another, with their massive domes complementing each other. Yet their constructions were separated by over a thousand years. It is quite striking to consider how the style of Istanbul’s mosques, which most clearly demonstrate the city’s Muslim character, must have been inspired by Christian innovations in religious architecture. The roots of this interaction between cultures, especially on a religious and architectural level, made me feel right at home. Indeed, the relationship between the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque is all too reminiscent of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Dome of the Rock, which also share almost eerily identical measurements in their domes—not to mention the less physical historical parallels in Istanbul and Jerusalem of the relationship between Islam and Christianity, and Romans and Ottomans, that such buildings represent.
After visiting the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia, we went to Istanbul’s Grand Covered Bazaar, which was yet another interesting variation—after Morocco in particular—of the marketplace culture that is so integral to life in the Middle East and the development of international trade that connects and affects the world today. What was most thrilling about the bazaar in Istanbul, again, was the multicultural and multilingual atmosphere. While I was there I spoke English, Arabic, Spanish, Hebrew, and even a few words of Turkish, employing basically all of my linguistic tools in one market. The vibe of cross-cultural interaction took on an almost playful air as the shopkeepers tried to guess their customers’ origins (at two separate shops I was asked if either of my parents were from Syria or Iraq!).
Over the course of the next couple of days in Istanbul, we experienced the city through several different lenses. We met with the Chief Rabbi of Turkey, a charming and wise man, who entreated us to greet our future with a smile on our faces. We visited Istanbul’s Jewish school, which was an impressive institution, with high ideals and expectations and state-of-the-art facilities. Turkey doesn’t allow religion to be taught in schools, so the school had integrated its Jewish curriculum into an ethics class based on Jewish values. We had a dance party with some of Istanbul’s Jewish youth, and learned more about the Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) music culture of Istanbul’s Sephardic (expelled-from-Spain) Jewish community.
We spent Shabbat in Istanbul, mostly dividing our time between an Ashkenazi synagogue and an old-age home where we ate our meals, while overlooking an absolutely breathtaking view of the city. Praying in an Ashkenazi synagogue, in a country that we associate much more heavily with the Sephardic Jews, who were taken in by the Ottoman Empire in 1492, was an interesting reminder of Turkey’s complexity. We visited a number of old synagogues and museums, where we saw chanukiot (Chanukah lamps) with the Turkish/Muslim crescent-and-star symbol and even one that resembled a model of a mosque’s minaret. We visited a synagogue that had a bima/teva (podium for leading a prayer service) that was in the shape of a boat—Noah’s Ark, or a tribute to the Ottoman ships that brought these Jews to refuge from Spain? After visiting Spain in January, it was fitting that Turkey would show us the pinnacle of the comfortable relationship that Sephardic Jews shared with Ottoman society, and also serve as a transition into the Ashkenazi culture that we will be studying in the coming weeks before our trip to Central Europe at the end of April.
On our last day in Istanbul, we visited Topkapi Palace, which was the home of the Sultan when Istanbul was the Ottoman Empire’s capital. We saw the Sultan’s ceremonial clothing and jewels. We visited the old Harem, where women from all over the world were kept for the Sultan. We even saw relics of the Prophet Mohammed. At the end, the palace compound opened up to the best view of the Bosphorous Strait that the city has to offer. I felt overwhelmed as I stood literally on the boundary between Europe and Asia. The culturally and historically diverse and fluid identity of this place was suddenly manifest in a shockingly physical way. Seeing both continents was as simple as looking over a relatively narrow body of water, even as I could only imagine what truly lay over the horizon in front of me and behind me. I looked downstream towards the Marmara Sea, which feeds into the Aegean Sea through the Dardanelles, and then into the Mediterranean towards Israel, Greece, Spain and Morocco. I looked upstream towards the Black Sea and Bulgaria. I felt the entire curriculum of Kivunim thus far converging on this point. I closed my eyes and heard people speaking English, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, German, Turkish, and many other languages that I couldn’t understand. Maybe it is just a tourist hot spot that brings people together, but there’s nothing like tourism in Istanbul. Later that night we would cross the bridge over the Bosphorous, and board an overnight sleeper train to Turkey’s capital of Ankara.
Our tour guides would compare Ankara’s relationship with Istanbul to that Washington D.C. with New York City. If Istanbul is the country’s cultural crown jewel, then Ankara is the heart of the national identity. The capital of Turkey was moved to Ankara when the modern Republic was founded, largely because the War of Independence had been waged from its more central location. The most obvious manifestation of Ankara’s importance to national identity, besides the government buildings, is the Mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. From a Turkish standpoint, this might be the most important stop in our entire trip. Ataturk literally means “father of the Turks.” He was a military genius, who became the Republic’s first head of state, with seemingly endless political capital. He is all but personally credited with saving the country by winning back key territories that were apportioned to other nations when the Ottoman Empire dissolved, and enacting major cultural reforms that secularized and modernized the country (try changing the alphabet from Arabic to Latin overnight).
Today, Turkey’s increasingly Muslim government is a bit at odds with the secular elites, who have their own sort of religion in Ataturk. Everywhere one goes in Turkey, Ataturk’s portrait is posted—in restaurants, hotel lobbies, schools, city-centers, and taxis. For a group of American Jews, his ubiquity was intriguing, if not a bit startling. A large part of our study this year has concerned the role of heroes and myth in a nation’s identity, but if there are parallels between Washington and Ankara then imagine what the National Mall would be if the entire area was dedicated to one person. Structurally, the Mausoleum may resemble the Lincoln Memorial (visa vis the Parthenon), and Americans certainly tell their own story through grand structures in the capital, but Ataturk’s Mausoleum is a unique place, and, as any Turk will tell you, Ataturk was a pretty unique guy.
We also visited the old city of Ankara, the latest in a series of citadels and acropolises that we will visit this year, beyond the one we live next to in Jerusalem. We toured the Anatolian Civilizations Museum, which is ranked among the best museums in Turkey, showcasing the ancient culture of the region, dating back tens of thousands of years to the Hittite tribes and beyond. Rarely do the routes to our roots take us all the way back to our origins as human beings, but that is the essence of the civilizations that we study—in their differences and common origins.
Another feature of our stay in Ankara was the city’s synagogue. This was one of the most sobering experiences of the trip. Besides the fact that the police had specially opened the synagogue for our visit, and were stationed all along the route to the entrance (precautions after the recent conflict in Gaza caused local unrest in Ankara), we also found a community that was in dire straits. We met the 21-year-old daughter of the president of the Jewish community of Ankara. She was confused as to why a Jewish group would choose to come so far to visit the synagogue, or even the city itself. She said she plans to move out of the country, and expressed pretty definitively that she expects her community to cease to exist in the future. Kivunim has made it a sort of tradition, since our first trip to Greece, to sing in all the synagogues that we visit. We have filled many all but empty synagogues, but this one was especially powerful to see. Here was a synagogue where we didn’t just find older caretakers; the representative of the community’s future had also given up hope in the long-term continuity of her community.
For us, this encounter was simply very sad. However, it also represented concretely how important this year is, and, frankly, as we spent the rest of the day with our new Turkish friend, I began to wonder if our visit might lead to a change of heart. As our director Peter has reminded us, we are not simply students or even representatives of North American Jewry on these trips. As powerful as these travels are for us, we are also engaged in a reciprocal process with the people that we meet, as evidence of the value of international interaction, and—when it comes to the Jews—of reacquainting each other and ourselves with the global story and identity of the Jewish people, on behalf of our shared future.
After leaving Ankara we made our way to Afyon. On the way we stopped in Gordium, which is where Alexander the Great cut the legendary Gordion Knot. It is also the site of many tumuli, or hills constructed as tombs, where notables of the city were buried. There were also ruins from the Hittite period, and then Greek, and then Roman, and so on. Afyon is a beautiful small city with Turkish baths and Turkish coffee—neither of which, our tour guide told us, happen to be Turkish. Turkish baths are Roman and Turkish coffee is Arab. Early in the morning we climbed a rock formation in the middle of the city to a citadel, from which we viewed the entire city in all directions, with the majestic Taurus Mountains in the distance.
En route from Afyon to Izmir, we stopped to visit Sardis, home of an ancient synagogue. We have visited many ancient ruins during this year, but to see evidence of Jewry in such antiquity was very powerful. Of course Jerusalem brings us about as close as possible to ancient Jewry, but seeing a synagogue with its columns and internal structures surviving its roof, painted an image like so many Greek and Roman ruins, and hit a different chord of Jewish historical resonance altogether. Being at ancient ruins usually leads to more general societal projections—about the Parthenon as a model for the Empire State Building in the 45th century for example—but Sardis gave this idea a Jewish twist. I found myself thinking back to the future of emptiness anticipated soon for the synagogue in Ankara, and wondering what our modern synagogues will look like and hold in thousands of years—and, of course, whether we will have new ones that make our contemporary structures look ancient in their own way… The synagogue in Sardis also happened to be gigantic, at one time housing a thousand people. Of all the synagogues we have visited this year that have no community or a diminishing one, few ever held a thousand people, so Sardis represented a peak in the trend, in age, size, and emptiness.
In Izmir we visited another Jewish youth group, and danced to Israeli music (so far from the summer camp where I learned them!) over dinner. During our last day in Turkey we visited a number of old synagogues in Izmir and one last bazaar. Our visit to these synagogues was personally very special, because of one completely unexpected encounter. We met an older woman named Esther Benmayor, who has become a volunteer caretaker for the city’s synagogues, making sure that the buildings are maintained as part of the city’s Jewish culture, right in the heart of the bazaar. Besides the meaning of Esther’s work in the interest of keeping up the Jewish community’s heritage spots in Izmir, her acquaintance was particularly exciting for me because there had been a Professor Isaac Benmayor from Salonika on the speakers panel that I was a part of at the UN in January. When I asked Esther if she had any family in Salonika, she got very excited by the idea that maybe I was a Benmayor. Her father was from Salonika, but she said he never talked about it, so she wasn’t in contact with any family that she might have there.
Only time will tell if the two are in fact family, but, regardless, this experience was a powerful example of the bridges that this program builds between Jews all around the world. I have never felt so viscerally connected to anyone we have met in our travels as I did when I talked to Esther. We were both on the brink of tears as we talked about and experienced in real time the importance of seeking out and “remembering” our own story as Jews, a story that has been lost, or perhaps never truly fleshed out before, of a people that has lived in over fifty countries and, in Peter’s words, worn every costume, listened to and danced to every music, eaten every food, and spoken more languages than any other single people. I was exhilarated by the idea that such foundational recent experiences in my life might actually bring someone else’s family together across borders. For Esther the idea of finding lost relatives was overwhelming, and the fact that I was invested in her story and her family was touching. For both of us the reality that our stories are shared was what brought tears to our eyes.
After lunch in the bazaar we boarded a bus to Ephesus—an ancient city in the heart of Anatolia that serves as one of the most comprehensive ruins of Hellenistic society. The difficulty of trying to imagine that a quarter of a million people lived in this city at one point (put in perspective by the fact that only 160,000 live in Afyon, which we had seen in expanse from a mountaintop) lessened dramatically when we set eyes on the huge amphitheater that is still all but intact. Then we got back on the bus to return to Izmir’s airport, to lay eyes on our last unique vantage point of the Mediterranean Sea in our travels this year (rounded out by Israel, Greece, Morocco and Spain), to fly back to Istanbul (my first domestic flight in a country other than the United States) for a connection flight to Tel Aviv, to see once more the Bosphorous and its physical separation of Europe and Asia and the beautiful bridge that connects them, before flying back to Israel for the fourth time this year.
Looking back on our time in Turkey, I keep thinking about the mosaics that we saw at Gordium (not to forget those in the Hagia Sophia of course!). Recently, in light of my thoughts about the importance of balancing appreciation for commonality and diversity, for specifics and the big picture, I have come to find the mosaic to be a poignant and powerful expression of these ideas. The pattern recognition ability of human beings to find unity in disparate elements, and to maintain curiosity for individual parts of a whole, is embodied by the work of a mosaic artist. He or she must meticulously pick and place each tiny piece of stone, all the while keeping the finished, zoomed out product in mind. This is equally pertinent to the scientist, who learns about the world through a microscope or a telescope, or the politician who must balance short-term and long-term goals for societal development.
From Jerusalem to Istanbul, Kivunim has seen some of the world’s most beautiful mosaics this year, and I am always struck by how they develop in complexity and intricacy as we move through history. A few monumental steps in that process are still evident today in Gordium. When we looked at the Greek and Roman mosaics in Gordium, Peter took us through a quick study of art in the Torah. He talked about how the Torah passively describes how the Golden Calf emerged in an almost supernatural way from the flames at the base of Mount Sinai, and how just a few chapters later we are introduced to the first Biblical artist Betzalel. Besides Betzalel—the artist—Peter posited, no one else in the Torah is described as being full of the spirit of God. This speaks to the same energy that I felt in Delphi, of our uniquely human power to create while feeling humbled by our idea of a Creator—or at least by the wonders of Creation.
Places of ancient traces like Gordium and Delphi make one wonder what evidence of progress and capacity we will leave behind for generations to come in hundreds and thousands of years—not to mention whether those ancient artists and scientists were thinking far ahead enough to consider us. Our ability to keep on making more and more beautiful and complicated mosaics is clearly evident; just look closely at the pixelated universe that we live in through television and computer screens. We can see how such development is important today for artists, scientists and policymakers alike. For me the challenge seems to be to recognize what such a balance for the particular and universal, the ability to zoom in and zoom out, could mean for us, and the questions that such a dynamic presents, in terms of how we interact and approach our public and private life, our academic and experiential learning, and our amateur and professional work—no matter what field we choose to enter.
I think art probably imitates life as much as life can imitate art. Our unique ability as human beings to imagine and create mosaics is also part of a process of discovering the wonder of what already is. Indeed, in so many ways the world and each of us is a breathtaking mosaic, including Turkey and any other place; looking up at the Milky Way, out over the Bosphorous, or into a friend’s eyes, we can see that the big picture is beautiful, but every level zooming in, even to an individual cell, is a universe of its own. That being said, neither we nor our world are perfect. The dynamic between our ability and our reality presents constant opportunity for growth. Seeing different mosaics all over the world shows me that we must keep challenging ourselves to improve, and offer that positive change to the world. A finished piece of artwork is wonderful, but in the scheme of human civilization and development each masterpiece is also a piece of a much greater work in progress.
