Promise of life

Early morning. Gulls and ships’ sirens are crying, sea is whispering his secrets to stones of embankment. I sit on a bench and look at its silhouette. It’s used to be a world’s largest Orthodox church for almost thousand of years, an imperial mosque for another half a century, and finally it becomes a museum. But, of course, it is much more than a museum. It’s a promise of life, bigger than any religion, historical circumstances and human actions. Hagia-Sophia. Eternal beauty.

People are passing me by, someone is fishing four meters away, and morning glory of Bosporus with its minarets, domes, broken lines of geometric buildings, smell of roasted chestnuts and sea is capturing me into its feast. I came here with a secret sadness so deep I couldn’t smile for a few months. Some human beings (or all human beings?) know weight of such sadness. It’s weight of broken promises and hopes, weight of loss and pain. He was my old passion, the one whose soul was echoing mine, but at some point it just stopped. I didn’t understand why and at that time I felt like emptiness of these questions would be tearing me apart forever.

I sit on a bench and look at Hagia-Sophia. I went there yesterday. Hagia-Sophia was constructed in 537 and until 1453 it served as the largest Orthodox church, symbol of Byzantine Empire, it was an imperial mosque from 1453 till 1935 during Ottomans rule. I was looking at it, and I saw how different empires rose and felt down around its divide dome, Istanbul changed its names and administration systems, but Hagia-Sophia with arrows of its minarets is still here, between Europe and Asia, at the end of a continent, at the beginning of a continent. I was walking among cold stones, Christian frescos, and Muslim ornaments, and thinking that people came and went away, but something important would stay.

I sit on a bench. Early morning light is conquering city and Bosporus, strait that connects two seas – Marmara sea and Black one, and divides Europe and Asia. Hagia-Sophia, the queen of that landscape looks at me, and I smile. Love is universal feeling; it’s a universal form of existence, which is bigger than attachment to any particular person. Our relationships showed me something about myself and with these discoveries I continue journey in this beautiful world. Red walls of Hagia-Sophia and morning sea feast fill me with lightness of being and promise of life, bright as this dawn at Bosporus, where any end is just a new beginning.