ISTANBUL SNOW

I’d always dreamed of going to Istanbul: arriving to find it romantically blanketed in snow was completely dream-like. Hagia Sophia, above, and an old Ottoman graveyard, below, looked magical on the first night, as did the lovely old Byzantine brick of one of the extraordinary churches the next morning.

Above, views from the upper gallery of Hagia Sophia, where the empress and her ladies would sit during services: the Blue Mosque in the distance; the interior glimpsed through the grille, with one of the Swiss Fossati brothers’ huge calligraphy discs of 1849; the Fossatis’ fake ‘gravestone’ for the dreadful Venetian Doge, Dandolo, blind, nonagenarian destroyer of Constantinople in 1204; the 1122 mosaic of Virgin and Child flanked by Emperor John II Comnenus and Empress Irene; and, below left, smaller pavilions outside. What a feeling, to stand in that vast space built in 532, surrounded by so much beauty and history. 

Above, Topkapi, the next day, with melting snow raining from the roof of an arcade, the old kitchen chimneys beyond (bizarrely adapted by architect Michael Hopkins for Westminster MPs’ offices) and the balcony of the Yerevan Kiosk of 1635, a sophisticated combination of turquoise glazed tiles, white marble and porphyry. Below, a venerable, old tree beside the Gate of Felicity that marked the beginning of the private quarters; on the left, the Tower of Justice, unfortunately rebuilt in a completely alien, neoclassical style in 1825.