The Johnson's in Moscow

Hello again from Moscow. I have not blogged for several days because we went to Istanbul, Turkey on the 18th and did not return 'home' until Sunday evening the 26th. I think I will do three of four posts to accommodate the mass of pictures we have. The system takes forever uploading pictures, so I'll do them in batches. We had a very nice time and were impressed with Istanbul.

We are standing on where a Roman hippodrome used to be. The Blue Mosque is to the right of the picture. The gentleman in the middle is our guide, Vulkan. He was wonderful, communicative, friendly, and knew his history. That's Marlene in the middle, and the lady taking the picture is Marina Sokolova, our trip planner.

Some young men have surrounded us and are trying to sell us books about Istanbul. They were pleasantly aggressive. Not too bad. Istanbul was, as you know, Constantinople. Constantine, the Roman emperor who converted to Christianity made Nova Roma his capital in about 350 A.D. I read somewhere that Rome had become almost uninhabitable at that time--dirty, smelly, etc. So the emperor decided to start over. The Greeks had been there first, so the Romans came next, followed in 1453 by the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks.

The Eastern Orthodox church lasted 1,000 years longer than the Roman empire, that was kaput in about 450 A.D. The church is still around but the empire is gone or course.

Vulkan is explaining to Oleg (our Moscow super duper travel guy), Marina, and Cenk's (Jenk's, who is Vulkan's boss) something about the Blue Mosque.

These first series of pictures comes from our first day in the city. We came on Saturday, ahead of the Tuesday start for the meeting so that we could get a sense of how far things were from the hotel, how far it was between venues, etc. We did not enter any of the attractions on this day, but just got perspective. We are leaving the Blue Mosque area and are going to walk about a half mile to Hagia Sophia, a Christian cathedral, started I think in about 400 a.d. The dome has collapsed about three times in its 1,700 year history, but it may be the oldest functioning cathedral in Christendom. The minarets you see adjacent to the church were added by the conquering Muslims, but they left the building mostly intact (except for covering most or all of the Christian art in the building.) Throwing up a few minarets to surround the building was a lot less expensive than starting from scratch.

This is a vendor selling a kind of sweet, hot, milk drink on top of which he sprinkles a little cinnamon.

Vulkan treated all of us to some of it. The temp was about 40 so we were were glad to get something hot to drink and to warm our hands.

You know how picky I am about food. I liked this quite a bit.

Here is the Hagia Sophia again. The Romans invented the unsupported dome. This building dates from about 400, as I mentioned. The Blue Mosque, behind us now, dates from the 1,500's. It's dome was copied from this building that is a thousand years older.

This gentleman is a friend of Vulkan's and is one of some small number of artists who are trying to save a painting form called 'marbling.' They create an image on a pool of water, then place their paper on top of the paint, and then (carefully, I'm sure) pick the paper off of the water. The effect is quite unique. He, with amazing skill, is writing in calligraphy 'Istanbul.' He did this free-hand of course, I was astonished at his skill.

We had no idea of what was going to happen next but he gave each of the ladies (Marina and Marlene) his work. We will bring our copy home and show it to you.

On Sunday we headed for the Istanbul branch for church. We got there too early so Vulcan had his driver take us around the neighborhood and we ended up at this lovely overlook of one of the bodies of water that surround Istanbul.

We made it to church and had a wonderful sacrament meeting. The four missionaries spoke briefly in Turkish, then Elder Neuenschwander and President Schwitzer spoke. The missionaries had been in Istanbul since Tuesday. They are learning 100 words a day and making amazing progress with the language. These are your typical Primary children and Young Women.

Marlene at the front door of the meeting house.

The chapel is a converted villa. The branch has about 120 members. On this day, with all of the guests, missionaries, etc. there were probably 50 people in attendance.

These are the missionaries (probably not in order Christensen, Huish, Redpath , and Seymor) the Cakir's (he is the brand president) the Canfield's (humanitarian missionaries), Sister and President Schwitzer, and Sister and President Nuenschwander.)