The Water Mosaic: An Elemental Journey

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. I read this book in one day and well into the night. This book shows us how we are connected in every way to every one and every thing.

The practical information woven into the story about our chakras, what they are, what they do,how they develop and how to use them can be used as a resource for everyone. This experience has stayed with me long after the reading.

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A fabulous book that moves you, challenges your beliefs and changes the way you think about your life! I could not put it down! I read it from cover to cover in one sitting! Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway. Set up a giveaway. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Learn more about Amazon Prime.

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ComiXology Thousands of Digital Comics. East Dane Designer Men's Fashion. Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands. Remarkably, the sultan allowed several of the finest Christian mosaics to remain, including the Virgin Mary and images of the seraphs, which he considered to be guardian spirits of the city.

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Under subsequent regimes, however, more orthodox sultans would be less tolerant. Eventually, all of the figurative mosaics were plastered over. Where Christ's visage had once gazed out from the dome, Koranic verses in Arabic proclaimed: Until , Muslim calls to prayer resounded from Hagia Sophia's four minarets—added after Mehmet's conquest. In that year, Turkey's first president, Kemal Ataturk, secularized Hagia Sophia as part of his revolutionary campaign to westernize Turkey.

An agnostic, Ataturk ordered Islamic madrassas religious schools closed; banned the veil; and gave women the vote—making Turkey the first Muslim country to do so. He cracked down harshly on once-powerful religious orders. If we want to be men, we must carry out the dictates of civilization. We draw our strength from civilization, scholarship and science and are guided by them.

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We do not accept anything else. Says Ortayli, "At the time, this was an act of radical humanism. Although ethnic Greeks constituted a sizable proportion of Istanbul's population well into the 20th century, the heritage of Byzantium was virtually expunged from history, first by Mehmet's Ottoman successors, then by a secular Turkey trying to foster Turkish nationalism. Nobel Prize- winning author Orhan Pamuk says that by the s, Hagia Sophia had become a remnant of an unimaginably distant age.

No one had told me that it was their grandchildren's grandchildren's grandchildren who now ran the shoe stores, patisseries, and haberdasheries of Beyoglu," a center-city neigborhood. Turkish authorities have made little effort to excavate and protect the vestiges of Byzantium apart from Hagia Sophia and a handful of other sites that lie buried beneath modern Istanbul. The city's growth from a population of 1 million in the s to 12 million today has created development pressures that preservationists are ill equipped to resist. Robert Ousterhout, an architectural historian at the University of Pennsylvania, has worked on Byzantine sites in Turkey since the s; he was once awakened in the middle of the night by work crews surreptitiously demolishing a sixth-century Byzantine wall behind his house to make room for a new parking lot.

A Monumental Struggle to Preserve Hagia Sophia

Byzantine Istanbul is literally disappearing day by day and month by month. Hagia Sophia, of course, is in no danger of being knocked down in the middle of the night. It is almost universally regarded as the nation's "Taj Mahal," as one conservator put it.

But the monument's fate remains hostage to the roiling political and religious currents of present-day Turkey. Nevertheless, religious extremists are bent on reclaiming it for their respective faiths, while other Turks remain equally determined to retain it as a national symbol of a proud—and secular—civilization. Hagia Sophia has also become a potent symbol for Greeks and Greek-Americans. At the same time, Turkish Islamists demand the reconsecration of Hagia Sophia as a mosque, a position once espoused by Turkey's current prime minister, year-old Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, as a rising politician in the s, asserted that "Ayasofya should be opened to Muslim prayers.

The effect of increased religiosity is evident in the streets of Istanbul, where women wearing head scarfs and ankle-length dresses are far more common than they were only a few years ago. As prime minister, Erdogan, re-elected with a large majority in July , shed his earlier rhetoric and has pursued a moderate and conciliatory course, rejecting political Islam, reaffirming Turkey's desire to join the European Union and maintaining—however tenuously—a military alliance with the United States. Although Erdogan has not publicly repudiated his stance on reopening Hagia Sophia to Muslim prayer, he has scrupulously enforced existing law against it.

To more ideological Islamists, Hagia Sophia proclaims Islam's promise of ultimate triumph over Christianity.

A Monumental Struggle to Preserve Hagia Sophia | Travel | Smithsonian

The pope intended this as a gesture of goodwill, having previously antagonized Muslims by a speech in which he quoted a Byzantine emperor's characterization of Islam as a violent religion. But tens of thousands of protesters, who believed that he was arriving to stake a Christian claim to Hagia Sophia, jammed surrounding streets and squares in the days before his arrival, beating drums and chanting "Constantinople is forever Islamic" and "Let the chains break and Ayasofya open.

Thirty-nine male protesters were arrested by police for staging a pray-in inside the museum. When the pope finally arrived at Hagia Sophia, traveling along streets lined with police and riding in an armored car rather than his open popemobile, he refrained from even making the sign of the cross. In the museum's guest book, he inscribed only the cautiously ecumenical phrase, "God should illuminate us and help us find the path of love and peace.

For secular Turks, also, Hagia Sophia retains power as a symbol of Turkish nationalism and Ataturk's embattled cultural legacy. Many are dismayed by the possibility of Islamic radicals taking over the building.

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It is not just a mosque, but part of the world's heritage. As a symbol, its future would seem to be caught in an ideological no man's land, where any change in status quo threatens to upset the delicate balance of mistrust. They always assume the worst of each other. Secularists fear that religious groups are part of a conspiracy funded from Saudi Arabia, while religious people fear that the secularists want to take their mosques away from them.

Meanwhile, scholars fear offending either group, getting in trouble and losing their jobs. All this makes it harder and harder to work on Byzantine sites. Astonishingly—although many scholars have studied Hagia Sophia over the years—the building has never been completely documented. New discoveries may yet be made. In the s, during emergency repairs on the dome, workers uncovered graffiti that had been scrawled by tenth-century repairmen, imploring God for protection as they worked from scaffolds feet above the floor.

Daunting work must be done for Hagia Sophia to survive for future centuries. They're put back together and then forgotten about until the next emergency. Meanwhile, there is a continual deterioration. Huge sections of ceiling are peeling and flaking, stained by water seepage and discolored by age and uneven exposure to light. Acres of stucco must be replaced.

Windows must be repaired, new glass installed, warped frames replaced. Hundreds of marble panels, now grime-encrusted, must be cleaned. Irreplaceable mosaics must somehow be restored and protected. We just don't know how stable [it] is. How should the work be prioritized? First we need to assess how much damage has been done to the building. Then we'll at least know what must be done. Meanwhile, Hagia Sophia continues its slow slide toward decay. I watched a trapped dove swoop down through ancient vaults and colonnades, then up again toward the canopy of shimmering gold mosaic, its wings beating urgently, like the lost soul of bygone Byzantines.

Bordewich frequently covers history and culture. Photographer Lynsey Addario is based in Istanbul. Subscribe or Give a Gift. Humans Reached the Roof of the World 40, Years. Learning to Speak Latino. Science Age of Humans. A New Treatment for Blindness. America's Most Revolutionary Artist. At the Smithsonian Visit. Looking at Artists Looking at Themselves. Photos Submit to Our Contest. Photo of the Day. Subscribe Top Menu Current Issue.

A sixth-century historian wrote of its "marvelous beauty, overwhelming to those who see it. The basillica and its storied mosaics constitute a matchless and threatened treasure.