Actually, the carpet shop is an interesting one built above a double slice of Byzantine history. Steps down into the basement come first to a piece of mosaic with geometric patterns of a type that crops up all over the Roman-Byzantine world, then even more unexpectedly to a huge barrel-vaulted room where, in the corner, there's an ayazma (sacred spring) above which can be discerned faint traces of a fresco of the Mother Mary and Jesus. The experts suggest that the mosaic might have belonged to the palace of Marina, a sister of Emperor Theodosius II, while the hall may well be a chapel dating back to the 11th or 12th century and belonging to the Hodegoi Monastery. They are poignant reminders of the fact that there is almost nowhere in Sultanahmet which is not standing on layer after layer of ancient history.All of which is by the by, really, since few things could have been further from the thoughts of the diners on the rooftop than the misty mysteries of long ago Byzantium. I arrived to find two men already busily grilling trout on a mangal (barbecue) while three Italian tourists who had popped in for a carpet and stayed on for the food and drink were doing their best to communicate in slow and carefully enunciated English.
There was some mildly diverting entertainment when I sat down on a wooden chair that instantly imploded beneath me and some sheepishly shamed faces as one by one we caved in and demanded a knife to supplement the fork which was all the Turks amongst us deemed necessary for eating fish. Then shortly afterwards someone pulled out a saz and the evening began in earnest.
At once I was transported back to the courtyard of the Kirkit Pension in Avanos, where night after happy night, I had listened to Turkish folk music and marveled at the readiness of my trilingual hosts to switch effortlessly between Turkish, English and French. It was all so wonderfully civilized and all so wonderfully un-British, I'd thought at the time, this easy familiarity with music and multiple languages is treated as the norm rather than as something demanding exclamations of wonder and astonishment.
And now here I was, more than a decade later, once again dunked into that wonderful linguistic minestrone, except that now I was part of it too as I chatted with the Italians in English and the Turks in Turkish, while struggling hard to deflect those of the Avanos crew who were determined to address me in French.
“Bellisimo!” we shouted to the musicians, only to be quietly corrected by the Italians who told us it should be “Bravisimo!” “Teşekkürisimo!” we finally chanted in harmony, which set the seal on the evening perfectly.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
