Free The Sultan of Byzantium by Selcuk Altun Page A

many?’
    At home that night I browsed my pile of poetry magazines. The rhythmic sounds rippling from the pages as I flicked them seemed a challenge to the night, cracking like a whip in the intensifying silence. I rose and went to the balcony to contemplate old Istanbul. I saw a horde of horsemen galloping across the plain bathed in the light of churches and mosques. In the forefront was a prancing white horse that seemed to be saying ‘Let’s go!’ to the commander it was waiting for. I was as thrilled as a child on his first trip to the amusement park.
     
    *
    Instinctively, I picked twenty-two Byzantine monuments that I hadn’t visited yet. I was a stranger to the names and faces of all but four of them. My excursion might be received by Nomo as an act of deception. But I had no private agenda for this safari, although I thought I might receive a sign of some kind while paying my twenty-two visits. One gift of Persian is the word ‘serendipity’: in the course of searching for one beauty, to end up with another …
    It would have been disrespectful to chronology not to begin my trip through the time tunnel with the city walls: this ring of stone from Sarayburnu to Ayvansaray, from Yedikule to Topkapi, had made Constantinople the best-protected city on earth from the fifth to the fifteenth century. I executed a slalom on and around them both with and without a car. Iskender Abi drove the Lancia that I took out of the garage once a month. I knew he would ask ‘How long are those huge walls?’ at the first opportunity. I rewarded him with the information that they were a little over twelve miles in length and incorporated ninety-six watchtowers. I waited for the next question – ’What’s a watchtower?’
    I felt the thrill of entering a foreign country without a passport as I passed outside the walls from Samatya, the only place whose name has remained unchanged since the beginning of Byzantium. There was once a wide moat in front of these walls, and on the other side of the moat another row of walls thirty feet high. Invaders who made it past those two obstacles would come back empty-handed from the ninety-foot inner walls. If you looked closely from the outside, the walls looked like heavyweight wrestlers standing shoulder to shoulder, whereas from the inside they resembled a troop of retirees who could hardly stand straight. This picture was an accurate portrayal of the Byzantium that was handed over to Palaeologus.
    I walked along the walls, mentally skipping the ‘restored’ sections. I scrutinized them as if I were reading my own coffee-grounds, and interpreted the lack of insight as: ‘No obstacles on your road.’ It was mildly satisfying to see Iskender Abi watching me prostrate to the walls out of the corner of his eye as if he were reluctantly witnessing an outlandish and bizarre ritual.
    Traversing the coordinates of the Imrahor Mosque (St John the Baptist Church), Molla Gurani Mosque (St Theodore Church), Fethiye Mosque (Pammakaristos Church), and the Gül Mosque (St Theodosia Church), I zigzagged from the fifth to the tenth, then the thirteenth to the twenty-first centuries. My guide to these mysterious and remote corners of the city was the Byzantine expert Cevat Mert. When he remarked that in the thirty-three years of his professional life this was the first time he had directed a tour like this, I explained that I was doing ‘preliminary research for a Selçuk Altun novel’. I’m sure he was convinced.
    I thought of the most important playwright in history – Samuel Beckett – as I wandered in and out of the minimuseums and churches-become-mosques. His masterpiece,
Waiting for Godot
, was received with unworthy criticism when it was first staged in 1953. He made a gesture to the theater world by emphasizing that the whole play was a symbiosis. It was tragicomic how the sole clue he gave went unnoticed – in fact it could have been the stuff of a play within a play. Symbiosis is a