Look at the picture.

The chimp is sad because a) National Love-a-Chimp day only comes once a year; and, b) He has a banana allergy and can only eat soy bananas.

I was going to write a long, maudlin entry about travelling alone. But instead, there’s the picture. Look at the monkey!

I finished my time in Istanbul. By the end I had seen almost everything mentioned in Lonely Planet, and certainly everything I could find related to Byzantine Constantinople. I met several academics, including a Byzantium expert, someone who knows their Seljuk Turkish pottery and the head of an historical research department. The last person I met was convinced she wouldn’t be much use to me, as she was an art historian, but we hit it off immediately on artistic grounds. She was sick so we met at her house overlooking the Bosphorous, sipping tea and talking about all the hidden architectural meanings of the Hagia Sophia and how encoded in its stone are the mysterious divisions between the earthly and the sacred, written out in architectural language.

I indulged in a few non-research related activities on rainy days when there was not much to do, including visiting a WWII era submarine that is now a floating museum and getting to feel like a submarine captain. For research I found a few more mosaics glittering down at me with their mystery, all faces except those of Christ turned down in sadness as they are burdened with the imperfection of sin.

And as my time in Istanbul drew to an end I was no longer alone. A Bulgarian linguist friend, whom I met when I lived in Iceland, joined me on the final night and together we headed off to keep chasing the Crusaders.

We came to Iznik, formerly Nicaea, where the Nicene Creed was agreed upon, as in, ‘I believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost…’ It is still surrounded by its medieval walls. It was the first town in Asia Minor the Crusaders besieged, but as it sits by a huge lake they could never blockade it completely. Cue the Byzantines, who dragged boats across the land from the Sea of Marmara using oxen and a lot of human muscle power. As soon as those Byzantine boats appeared on the lake, the town surrendered, and to the more peaceful Byzantines rather than the plunder hungry Crusaders. The Crusaders also fought the Turks there when they tried to relieve the city. I got to stand on the hill where the Kilic Arslan would have looked down at the town and the Crusaders encamped around it before sending his own men into the fray. He would have had a good view!

I also tried ‘Couchsurfing’ for the first time. We stayed with a magnificent Turkish family who bike around the world, going across several countries at a time with pedal power. The man of the house was also a history teacher so he was able to tell me a little about the town’s past. Iznik itself is lovely and the lake gives it a peaceful air, despite the odd snake jumping out to surprise hapless tourists.

I was in Anatolia, Asia Minor, which was considered enemy territory by the First Crusaders as they plodded along on their three year trek to Jerusalem. Now my pilgrimage was really under way.