“The Holy City Of Byzantium”

Sultanahmet by night — The Sultanahmet or Blue Mosque, from the top of the Hotel Arcadia Blue. Out of the photo to the left is the Hagia Sophia, and then, to its left, the Topkapi Palace — all of it enclosed on three sides by water.
(From the Hotel Arcadia Blue website.)

After the conference meetings today, we went out to dinner at the rooftop restaurant of the Hotel Arcadia Blue with some of the Latter-day Saints here, including senior missionaries (among them Kent and Gayle Brown) and Sharon Eubank, who dropped in to speak at the conference here on her way back from refugee camps in Syria and Iraq.

The food — Turkish cuisine — was okay. (Last night’s was much better, at the Develi Restaurant. But then, I wasn’t very hungry tonight.) However, the company was excellent. And the view — at night, of the Blue Mosque, the Hagia Sophia, and Topkapi Palace, and of the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn and the Bosporus beyond — is to die for. (The photograph above doesn’t even begin to convey it.)

I don’t know why this place has such power to move and overwhelm me — as much, as romantically melancholy, as any city on earth — but it surely does.

Sailing to Byzantium

William Butler Yeats

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.

III

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.

Posted from Istanbul, Turkey (aka Byzantium and Constantinople)

“The Holy City of Byzantium”