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Israel Attacks aid convoy..

Israeli naval commandos brutally attacked an international aid convoy intending to bring humanitarian supplies to the long-besieged Gaza city and killed more than a dozen civilians while the convoy was sailing on international waters.

Early Monday morning, as it has threatened several times as the aid flotilla set sail for Gaza, Israel intercepted the convoy of vessels carrying hundreds of activists from around the world and some 10,000 tones of humanitarian aid, possibly causing an irreversible damage to Turkish-Israeli relations, foreign ministry said in a statement released a few hours after the attack.

International community has earlier warned Israel not to engage in an offensive on civilian vessels full of peaceful activists whose aim is to break the three-year-old economic blockade on Gaza which has severely plagued its people.

Hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered in front of the Israeli consulate in İstanbul to show reaction against the violent intervention. Thousands of Gazans who were expecting a helping hand from committed civilians but later learned of the attack also gathered at the port of Gaza, carrying Palestinian flags and banners read “End to Israeli persecution.”

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Much of the action in novelist Jenny White’s gripping 19th century detective story “The Abyssinian Proof” takes place in and around a village inside old İstanbul that sounds as if it must surely have been made up.

Yerabatan Sarnici

Set inside an ancient cistern dating back to the fifth century, it’s a self-contained and almost absurdly quaint place in which houses peep out from amid the luxuriant foliage growing out of crumbling antique walls. Could such a place ever have existed? Well, actually it did well into the 1970s when, in “Strolling Through İstanbul,” John Freely and Hilary Sumner-Boyd described it as a “very picturesque little farm village whose housetops barely reach to the level of the surrounding streets.”
They were describing the Cistern of Aspar, a giant hole in the ground in front of the mosque of Sultan Selim I as you approach it from Fatih and Çarşamba. But what on earth was this cistern, and what role did it play in city life?

Way back in 1978, I remember being taken by a Turkish friend to visit the Yerebatan Sarnıcı (Underground Cistern) close to the Aya Sofya in Sultanahmet. At that time, it was not officially open to the public, and we stood at the edge of a dark space that seemed to stretch back into infinity, peering at the dim shapes of 336 soaring pillars topped off with elaborate Byzantine capitals; a steady sound of dripping provided the soundtrack to our visit. It was a sixth century cistern, my friend told me, although at the time that meant absolutely nothing to me. Now, of course, the Yerebatan Sarnıcı is one of the city’s main attractions, kitted out with walkways, suitably evocative lighting and the haunting sound of the ney (reed flute), and always crowded with visitors who gaze in awe at the sea of columns and at the fish swimming in the water beneath them, before trekking along the walkways to inspect the upside-down head of the Gorgon Medusa adorning the base of a column at the rear. However, probably not one person in a hundred really appreciates the part that the cistern played in ensuring that first Byzantium, then Constantinople and finally İstanbul were kept supplied with water. Read more…