There is no centre

I went to the Hilton Hotel in Ankara's desk today and asked whether the city had a centre. To which the answer was no. To which, I discovered, the answer was that it used to have.

The community that nestles around the citadel, the ancient heart of Ankara, is dilapidated but being restored, slowly. Narrow lanes fade from cobbled to dusty and broken, houses fade from restored to impoverished. I took lunch in one of the newly restored houses, sitting in the courtyard, on my own, and I sat thinking, 'how extraordinary'! Here I am in the capital city of an emergent power, sitting in its ancient heart, alone, on a Saturday afternoon. It is sadly not so unfamiliar - cities that have grown neglecting their centre are deeply familiar yet how do we persist in allowing it to happen?

A deeper question is how do we allow ourselves in this expansion to the periphery so deeply to neglect beauty? The citadel, though battered, is beautiful. The traditional architecture sings of community and a blend of private and communal space. The architecture coherently blends domesticity and business - and it was wonderful to watch a traditional craftsman shape metal objects below where he lives. I fear it will, in time, become over-developed - a place to visit rather than a living place. We will visit to restore ourselves from the pedestrian everyday of our new environments - efficient, cheap, boxed. If only we could overthrow in ourselves that mentality and build around us our aspiration and needed delight.

Lunch was very nostalgic, sitting in the courtyard of an Ottoman house eating tarator (yogurt and cucumber, herbed salad) and eating lamb stew. so reminiscent of my former home in Macedonia (indeed an American accented traveler I passed in the street was comparing it to the Macedonian town of Ohrid, where I have spent many happy days).

Close by the citadel is the Museum of Anatolian Civilization. It is being refurbished and so only two galleries were open but they are wonderful. The Hittite freezes especially.

Here is an early representation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, expressing his power over the animal kingdom. They are vivid, full of life and a sense of embedded story. There was a gallery full of such quiet wonders - gods consorting with men, beings both half men and animal, men, beings, all, transforming across boundaries of possibility. Magical.

So to the surviving examples of Roman glass - fragile, clouded with age and yet resilient.

Comments

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...

The Beckoning Land that is within

In spite of the fact that all three of Rowena Farre's books were in a certain measure autobiographical, she remains a mystery. The place of her birth, her real name, and ancestry, whether her first book was an autobiography, in fact, or fiction? It is, on reading her last book, a matter on which, beyond a certain notional interest, I find myself wholly and happily agnostic. Whoever she was, she was a person out of sorts with the world she was born into and on, an ever more consciously realized, spiritual quest. In this way, the book leads on from her earlier one about her life with Roma and Traveller communities. There she was following a nomadic impulse that ran in parallel to 'ordinary life' whilst here she is following a nomadic life that enfolds and transforms 'ordinary' life. https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2018/07/on-hopes-realities-and-shadows-of-being.html In this her third book, she returns to places associated with her childhood, Hong Kong, Ceylon, a...

Golgonooza

Search This Blog