Episode 317 - The Byzantine Legacy with David Hendrix

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the history of Byzantium, episode 317: The Byzantine Legacy, with David Hendrix.

I first visited Istanbul in 2018.

I was sent there by you, the kind listeners who supported my Kickstarter.

I went to see the sites for myself, to make films about them, and to meet potential tour guides.

And it was all very daunting.

Fortunately for me,

a well-informed listener recommended I contact David Hendrix, the man behind the Byzantine Legacy website.

David is an American who settled in Istanbul and was inspired by the story of the Byzantines, as so many of us have been.

Thebyzantinelegacy.com is an amazing website.

On its pages, David has maps showing you where all the remaining Byzantine sites in Istanbul are, along with pages dedicated to each site, chronicling what has survived and giving a brief history.

The site goes on to tackle Byzantine sites elsewhere in Turkey as well as Greece, Italy, and beyond.

Even for those of you with a mere passing interest in Roman sites, you will enjoy David's photography, which captures the amazing ruins which survive.

David and his work were invaluable to me.

It was a great geeky thrill to agree to meet in the Hippodrome on my first day in the city.

And David then accompanied me and my wife around the city on several days of our trip.

He also introduced me to Sheriff Yenin, the tour guide who now organises the podcast trips around Turkey.

So I owe David a lot, and at the end of all my YouTube videos, I direct those watching to check out the Byzantine Legacy.

Which you can now also do on Facebook, Instagram, X, and YouTube.

I really like David's YouTube videos.

He's chronicling all the Byzantine sites still standing and some of the places that you can visit are in really isolated spots and he captures the atmosphere

and the sound around those obscure survivals really well.

David is a regular guest on my tours in Turkey and he's also leading a tour around Byzantine Macedonia next year.

So check out all the links in the episode description or at thehistoryofbyzantium.com including including links to that tour.

I asked David to come on the podcast to talk about his background and his project,

and that's what we're going to do now.

If you want to immerse yourself in the ancient world, as David has done, then check out the Paidea Institute website to find out more about learning an ancient language.

The link is also in the episode description.

and I'll talk more about what they offer after the interview.

David Hendricks, welcome to the History of Byzantium.

Thanks, Robin, so much for inviting me to talk to your listeners.

And of course, I'm a listener as well.

Brilliant.

Well, it's a pleasure to have you on.

Why don't you tell the listeners who you are, where you're from, and what led you to Roman history?

Okay, so

as you've already mentioned, I'm the creator of the Byzantine legacy, and I'm an American.

And I'm able to do this project because I live in Istanbul, the former capital of both the Byzantine and Ottoman empires.

I guess to kind of give a little bit of my own background and tell you how I kind of come here, I can tell you a little about my, you know, childhood or whatever.

So I never really felt like I had a hometown, even though I basically grew up in the suburbs of Dallas.

I have cousins who are from, I mean, really from Wisconsin, Mississippi, California.

My brothers live in Austin, Texas, and Birmingham, Alabama.

And I guess this kind of like feeling like ruthless to a certain degree has kind of made me interested in other places and in history.

I was curious about my own family history, you know, learning, for example, that the Hendrix moved to the American College of the New Netherlands in the 1660s.

I also had other family members who moved to the U.S.

more recently.

So, for example, my great-grandmother was a nurse from Glasgow, Scotland, and she met my great-grandfather,

who was from the Lake District of England in New York.

Another thing about my family, except for some people who went to the war, only my grandmother and her sister really traveled abroad.

So my grandmother, for example, visited the Soviet Union, including Georgia and Armenia, around the time I was born.

This kind of thing always fascinated me ever since I can remember.

However, I grew up working class, meaning I always had to work even during university when I studied philosophy and psychology.

This background actually is really important in my project.

I want to give people the ability to see other places in the world, even if they can't afford going there.

In order to follow my dream of traveling

to other countries, I moved to South Korea to be an English teacher in my mid-20s, and I've lived abroad since then.

I moved to Istanbul about a decade ago when I had plans to be a writer.

They looked for a project.

I spent my time, my free time, learning more about history, art, culture, philosophy, religion.

I can say that the art videos, for example, of Smart History were one of the many things that prepared me for my own project.

Definitely, I was inspired by what they're doing at Smart History.

Now I have a kind of modest life.

I work freelance doing things like proofreading, editing texts for academics.

This simple lifestyle allows me to put a lot of energy into my project, The Byzantine Legacy.

So

tell the listeners, what led to the Byzantine legacy?

Why Roman history and why did you end up in Istanbul?

I actually had a kind of list of places I wanted to live.

I wanted to live in a country that had a kind of Buddhist background, South Korea, which also Confucian, et cetera.

A Muslim country, Turkey.

My idea was actually to live a year or two, maybe three in these different places.

Then I'll be in Greece, maybe Italy, and sometime at some point in time, find a country in Europe that I want to settle in.

And I've always been an interest in Roman history,

basically all kinds of history: ancient Egyptian, ancient Mesopotamian, medieval history.

So, yeah, that's, I have really good Turkish friends living in the US, and we spend a lot of time talking about Turkey.

And

I think I would really like living here for a couple of years or something like that.

And

then I can get to kind of how I actually decided to create this project.

So

I've been living here for a little while, but visited some places, some Byzantine or Ottoman monuments, whatever.

And

I first visited Athens.

I really wanted to see.

the Athens of Pericles and Socrates.

It's a classical city.

I had visited Ephesus and Nicaea and things like that.

But I finally went to Rome about a decade ago and I was so excited.

It's a place I had wanted to see for a long time.

I actually basically and I had a couple of day layover on the way to see a friend in Madrid.

So I was only there for a couple of days, but I made this long list of places I wanted to see.

I did a lot of research before what could I see, where could I see it?

And so I spent as much time just exploring the city's city's monuments, whether it's ancient Roman or Renaissance churches or whatever.

So there I was, finally in Rome, the place I had wanted to see since I was a child.

However, the whole time I was exploring Rome, I kept thinking to myself, why haven't I done this in Istanbul yet?

So when I was in Rome, I decided I would hunt for the new Rome in old Istanbul.

And so the next couple of years, I really began to explore Istanbul.

And I also realized that I should actually visit some other kind of key Byzantine or late antique cities like Thessaloniki, Mistras, Ravenna.

And while I was especially exploring Istanbul or even places just outside of Istanbul like ancient Thrace, ancient Bithynia, I kept realizing there's so many sites in this area.

that are very hard to find out anything about or did they even exist.

And so for example, I came across the work of someone who would later become a very good friend, Dr.

Karemal Tu, who has documented over 150 cisterns just in the old city of Istanbul.

And since I've gotten to know him, I actually learned a whole lot about the Byzantine archaeology of Istanbul.

So, yeah, I just kept finding all of these amazing sites that exist in the city

are not known to the public.

But then I also started to realize this is not just the case in Istanbul or just in Turkey.

Byzantine heritage is often overlooked in general.

While there's a dozen Byzantine churches in Athens, for example, most tourists don't really take notice of them.

Even I did that in my first visit to Athens.

I wanted to visit the classical city.

Athens is presented as a classical city, but it actually has a very long history, including the Parthenon being a church for about a thousand years.

So this project really has changed the way I saw cities, landscapes, and even the whole continent of Eurasia.

I don't think Europe and Asia are separate, they're together, and the Byzantine world is in the middle of it, booking with a Silk Road towards China and also to the Holy Roman Empire and all the medieval states of Europe.

And

yeah,

so basically, in many ways, the Byzantine legacy is kind of an accident.

As I started going to all these different places and learning about it out of my own interest, I thought other people might be interested in it as well.

And so I kind of went down a rabbit hole.

I visited over 150 sites, archaeological sites across Anatolia, remote castles and monasteries,

all important cities like Thessaloniki, Arta, Mistras, Trabzome, Nicaea, Sofia, and so many other places.

Yeah.

It's fantastic to go through your website to see, to learn more about these places.

The maps are fantastic.

And it must be quite rewarding now because

not just tourists, but academics are coming to you.

Anyone who's opened Anthony Caldellis's new history will see your name repeatedly on the photo credits.

But also, Sergei Ivanov, who we've spoken to, has written a brilliant new book

with kind of...

all the details about where to visit things in Istanbul.

And you worked closely with him on the English translation, is that right?

Yeah, I'm officially credited as the editor.

So I helped him.

I mean, some serious changes happened.

For example, with the conversion of Aya-Sofia, how to talk about it.

Also, living here, maybe organized the route this way instead of

that way,

that sort of thing.

And also,

I don't know, 90% of the photos in it are mine as well.

I actually, I guess I was first credited either in an earlier Russian or Turkish version of his book, and I really love this.

I'm the professional amateur.

So that's his description for me.

And

yeah, my photos are in dozens of publications now.

A lot of more obscure academic articles.

But also, even one book recently came out, and my photo is book cover.

So, it's

yeah, a lot of academics have contacted me.

Of course, the pandemic is what really

kind of

played a big role here.

I was really surprised to learn during the pandemic, especially that a lot of academics were using the website as an educational tool.

Right now,

because I'm really the only one writing it, the quality and content of the text, especially, is quite random.

I'm not a big fan of actually how the Iosophia text is, but visually it is very detailed.

And I'm actually hoping in the future to have a lot of help

from academics to improve the quality.

But yeah, basically, I was, I mean, I had people actually reaching out and contacting me and thanking me.

Wow, you helped me so much.

I would have waste so much time making this presentation.

basically they save time they can just pop over to the website presented in class instead of working hard to put together the images themselves.

So it's

yeah, and of course, lots of people who come to the city and visit, there's you know, conferences and things like that.

I've been very fortunate to meet a lot of amazing scholars,

some that you would know, some that do a lot more obscure work on the old topography of the city.

They're important, but not necessarily so important for narrative history, architects, architect historians, art historians, and that sort of thing as well.

But yeah, it's been, yeah, really,

this was surprising because I was mainly aiming for the general public and I didn't imagine that I would get to know dozens and dozens and meet dozens and dozens of scholars.

And yeah, it definitely makes my life interesting, I can say.

Yeah, well, I mean, you've become vital, I think, because Istanbul changes so rapidly.

You know, I made, although people may be only seeing them now on YouTube, the videos I made of guides to Byzantine sites in Istanbul was in 2018.

And I mean, maybe one or two of them are still pretty much the same, but very few of them.

Most of them, people will message me and go, you know, it's all different now.

And it doesn't look anything like that.

Or you can't access this bit.

And I'm like, yeah.

And

so you being there on the spot to keep updating information and pictures for people has proved vital.

So, I mean, you've kind of already achieved a lot with the project that you may not have anticipated.

But did you have like a goal in mind that you wanted to achieve with the Byzantine legacy?

I mean, right now, I'm really hoping to find some proper funding because I'm definitely

not getting rich, let's say, very much the opposite.

So I would like to have more funding to not only for myself to do more traveling, but also for others.

It'd be really great to have some funding, to have some help from other people as well.

And I actually, my goal would be at one point in time, perhaps to have it in translated into Greek and Turkish,

maybe other languages.

I don't know.

Yeah, no, it's

one way I describe it is basically it's kind of like a sinking ship that I'm just constantly, you know,

taking the buckets of water and splashing it out so it doesn't sink.

I had some ideas, but it's kept changing.

And also, I don't have a clear line where I am going to include and not going to include

as well.

So that's also a kind of, say,

theoretical kind of issue.

But

the goal was to provide accessible information to the public, to give

the public also more reliable information about places.

I've kind of now expanded that into really hoping to

kind of give more publicity to scholars' work and maybe even their projects.

That's

kind of a new aspect.

But yeah, it's

definitely

done a lot to give the public access to information.

I get very surprising

kind of comments from different people or messages about how they're using it to organize visits around the area.

I have a map of Byzantine churches embedded on the website, and it's been viewed over 300,000 times.

Basically, it's the only map like it.

So everyone goes to it, whether they're a local who just wants to go visit some places or scholars who didn't know that there's this obscure

church ruin somewhere uh in the city so

um

yeah this is

this is yeah quite surprising i can say um yeah but well we can get people you know let's get listeners uh moving to your channels to support you so uh at thebyzantine legacy uh

on on Instagram and at Byzantine Legacy on Twitter or X now.

And

they can follow you on YouTube and support you on Patreon.

So do you want to talk about those last two?

Because I'm a big fan of your YouTube videos.

Yeah, so

if you go to the Byzantine Legacy YouTube channel, you'll see quite a few videos, but there's a lot more that are only accessible through Patreon.

And

I do some kind of overview of different kinds of artistic pieces, sculpture, whatever.

I recently did one.

I guess this is actually on public.

The royal mantle of Roger II, which is a very interesting combination of Byzantine silk and Islamic, actually has an Arabic inscription around it, but with probably Byzantine silk.

I guess the Monomocos crown in Budapest is only available on Patreon, but also many, many different different sites in Rome, in Greece, in Turkey, a lot of much more obscure kinds of places as well.

A new public video I shared is an interesting remote castle in Ankara province in Galatia, and it's been suggested it is actually a

Galatian king's treasury.

that was later abandoned and rebuilt or restored when the Arabs started raiding, perhaps abandoned again, and then rebuilt when the Seljuks started to attack.

And it has a stunning canyon going around it.

So this is, it's a remote place.

You don't see almost anyone except maybe your farmer or a shepherd with this amazing canyon underneath the castle, kind of forking around, not forking around, going around

almost three sides, these sheer drops down into the river valley below.

So these kinds of things are there.

So you can get an idea from the YouTube channel, and then you can take a look at the Patreon and see what else is there.

And it definitely would be very helpful if some people would go there and support the Byzantine legacy on Patreon.

And

yeah, so that's the YouTube channel is a more.

I have something I started doing in the pandemic, but I'm really developing it more recently.

And you can,

I guess, by the time this comes out, you will have a new video on the Dome Dome of Agia Sophia that will be available to the public as well, discussing, you know, it collapsed when it was built

in Justinian's time.

It partially collapsed twice after.

And its art, the details of the mosaics, which you can barely see with your eye and that sort of thing.

So take a look at that.

Yeah, fantastic.

I'm a big fan of your videos, particularly the way you kind of convey the atmosphere of the surrounding

country, because that's something that I think a lot of people who like to travel to obscure sites

like to soak up that kind of atmosphere.

So,

you're not a tour guide that's reserved for Turkish nationals, but you do work with a lot of tour guides and companies over the years.

So, how can people kind of gain access to your

knowledge and maybe see some sites with you if they're traveling that way.

Well, I just did a tour with our friend Sheriff Yenyin

last Saturday.

So we are also planning on doing another one.

So you could kind of keep an eye out for that or go to his social media or website, that sort of thing.

You can also definitely contact Sheref or Mi about tours.

So yeah, definitely feel free to contact me and see what I can organize.

I also know many other guides that I can recommend

and also some guides that really help me have access to things that are not open to the public very easily.

Recently, an Italian archaeologist was told, hey, reach out to me.

He asked for an Italian guide.

And I know.

Because of my connections with other guys, I was able to help him find an Italian-speaking Turkish tour guide in Istanbul for he and his group of friends.

I also would like to announce

a tour that I'm going to be doing in September.

So, I'm going to do a tour of Byzantine Macedonia with Orthodox tours.

It's going to be 11 days and it will include Thessaloniki, the second city of the Byzantine Empire, which is absolutely a spectacular city.

Amazing fortified fortifications.

Its walls are mostly intact.

It's got Roman, Diocletian era kind of monuments

from

the 5th century all the way to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and to the Ottoman conquest of the city.

It's got everything, basically every period of church you can see from the classic basilical churches to the more ornate kind of late Byzantine churches.

So it's definitely an amazing city.

So if you're interested in joining us there, we will start in Scopio and we'll visit other amazing cities like Ohrid and Castoria, the monasteries of Medeora.

So, yeah, if anyone's interested, they can contact me at the Byzantini Legacy email or any social media platforms

to learn more about that.

But yeah, and generally, people can contact me or

if they're interested in some tours.

And maybe it's not about Istanbul or some other place, maybe I also can help out with other places.

So I also have contacts throughout the Balkans and other places as well.

So, happy to help.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'll put all the links in the show description and on the History of Byzantium website.

I think you've also got plans to kind of

get some interviews going amongst the academics that you know.

Yes, I'm really excited about this.

This is something I've kind of had in mind for a couple of years,

but I've never really actually actually done it.

And I say, okay, now it's time to do it.

I've talked to, I guess, as many as 10

different scholars about doing this.

So, the basic idea is that I will interview

different.

Actually, I'm planning on not doing it.

I'm planning to actually introduce lots of different academics who they will be primarily interviewing a scholar working on different sites.

This will be archaeological sites, buildings.

So, we get to understand more about what kind of work is going on,

what they are defining and that sort of thing.

So the first talk should be about survey work on uninhabited islands off the coast of Mercen, historic Cilicia.

I was actually invited to visit Bosak Island, the Bosak Island project back in 2019.

So I'm really excited about introducing their work.

It's basically

there's a couple of islands and some more stuff

on the coast that they're studying.

So, a late antique settlement, churches, quarries.

It's very close to a very important pilgrimage site as well.

So, they're trying to understand how all this fits into the bigger context.

So, they are able to do amazing things because these are uninhabited islands.

So, that have had probably no one living there in any serious numbers for quite some time, and a lot is there for them to just survey and document.

So, I'm hoping to do a lot more of these kinds of things.

I think it's possible this summer I might actually be actually at archaeological sites while they're working and have these kinds of interviews.

So,

yeah, that's something I think a lot of people will find interesting.

It's going to be aimed for the general public, so I don't try to make it not too technical.

So, we can have a really interesting idea about what wonderful things people are finding in the area.

And also, probably I'll do some about certain cities or certain buildings and that sort of thing.

So, I'm hoping that a lot of people have more access to the wonderful kind of scholarship that is being done and in a way that

is accessible for the general public.

So, that should be coming out in the next

few weeks.

I guess maybe by March,

the first one

could be released.

Fantastic.

Well, I have three

more light-hearted questions to

finish the interview today.

Could you tell the listeners about a place or a site that you visited that was the most surprising or surprised you the most?

Well, I will say a couple of different places or let's say my own tours that I did.

But of course, I think that some people who joined you on your tours to Cappadocia were just like, just absolutely amazed by the stunning, even kind of weird, almost alien-like landscape that Cappadocia is.

That was definitely a place, even before I was even thinking about this project, I had visited and just was amazed.

But for my project, I think there are these two kinds of really just

surprising and amazing places that I visited that inspired the project.

The first is a kind of intense site visit.

I kind of made a whole list of places I was going to visit.

I guess it was like my second or third time to do something like this after walking along the walls and visiting the hippodrome, that sort of thing.

It is significantly informed by a Byzantine 1200 book on the Great Palace region.

And

it showed you where you could go to visit all these underground structures that are part of the kind of Great Palace remains.

I ended

that day going quite a bit further west to the former Moralian monastery and its huge cistern, which was then a kind of very interesting kind of little shopping area.

This huge cistern is actually remains of the second largest Roman rotunda in the entire Roman world after the Pantheon.

And it's there hiding completely almost out of sight and not very well known.

The same day I visited this, what was then a carpet shop.

To be honest, I am not even sure if it's open to the public now it was recently a hotel that closed so I actually had need to find out what's going on with it but anyway I walked one floor after another going down to find this fragmentary mosaic floor and under that is an underground chamber with a flowing holy spring and a frated fresco of the Virgin Mary I was absolutely stunned that

There's this, you know, fresco of the Virgin Mary, two or three floors underneath a carpet shop.

And

also, by the way, that site also had very important Hellenistic and Roman necropolis.

This was outside the walls of Byzantium, but inside the palace area.

So

this, yeah, there's a very interesting urban archaeology that's been done in Istanbul.

And that's

also the people who discovered it were quite surprised as well.

My second just surprise just was Ravenna.

So I realized that Ravenna had all these amazing mosaics and I should go visit it.

But there's just simply nothing like it.

I would say, especially for the mosaics of the Mausoleum of Galloplosidia.

It's a small, modest kind of brick building on the exterior, but once you go inside, it is absolutely astonishing.

There's no way that anyone can video or photograph how breathtaking it is.

And of course, right

around the corner, you get to meet Justini and Theodore face to face in the nearby San Vitale.

Ravenna is just not nearly as famous as it should be.

It basically was when I was in Ravenna, I knew, okay, I need to make some kind of Byzantine project.

So Ravenna is just

spectacular.

Yeah, fantastic.

And is there a kind of hidden gem of a site that few people visit that you would recommend?

I wouldn't say, I will actually have to say more than one.

But kind of, first of all, just to kind of give a more general impression of, for example, what you can see in Anatolia, Asia Minor.

It's there's just depending on what kind of thing a person wants to see, I can recommend different things.

So

you talk about trekking or places by the sea or whatever.

The landscapes of Anatolia are incredibly rich and diverse.

You can drive, you know, a couple of hours hours and pass by multiple microclimates and different types of topographies, forests and flat farmlands, semi-arid canyons and river valleys.

Just for example, one time

a couple years ago, driving from the north down towards Miral, the Demre,

where St.

Nicholas's church is located, one valley after another, they're completely different.

One is completely barren, one has like a little lake in it, another one is grasslands, another one is completely going up to the kind of arid tips of the kind of mountains in the area, another one's completely forested.

These are just the same series of valleys.

Unbelievable.

So, if you're going to different places, you don't also know what else you're going to find.

There could be a Neolithic settlement, or a Phrygian or Hittite monument, a hidden Seljuk tome or a Roman road.

It's just absolutely stunning and amazing how much

how much is in Anatolia.

But I would say, I kind of, just like, for example, for Istanbul, there's even major sites that are not visited by many people.

I would say this is even true for the Theodosian walls.

There's almost, I mean, I've walked on the walls many, many times,

and you very rarely see anyone actually exploring them.

However, I will say that recently Istanbul Municipality has made this kind of curated open public spaces for a couple of the gates.

So now you can see even locals feel like this is a nice place.

You can now climb along the walls and that sort of thing.

But I would, I guess, say one specific gem that I do highly recommend.

It's a place recently visited.

There's a place called Lake Baffa.

It's formerly Mount Latmos.

This is just south of Ephesus and somewhat near Milotus.

This lake actually used to be a part of the Aegean Sea.

The river basically silted up and cut it off from the sea.

So much of it is a natural park with untouched landscapes.

Although, unfortunately, mining is changing this in some areas now.

The region is dotted with monastic complexes and ruins, often with fragments of their frescoes.

They are scattered all around the mountains and on several islands in the lake.

In addition, you also can find a huge number of prehistoric cave paintings, abandoned abandoned Ottoman villages, Byzantine castles, ancient roads, and even two ancient cities side by side in this area.

It's a wild, remote, rocky region.

It almost feels like it belongs in the Dali painting in some times.

It's just

very interesting.

So it's

basically an early version of Mount Athos, and visiting it involves very serious trekking.

For any listener who wants to learn more about it, they can go to the Byzantine Legacy YouTube channel.

I've actually made several videos on different monasteries in the area, which I visited either by trekking or by boat.

And many of these places,

you're just going to see a random shepherd, some cows, or wild boars, or who knows what.

It really takes hours of trekking to get to some of these places.

And it is, it's, there's nothing quite like it.

It's, it's, it's an incredible area.

Fantastic.

That is a great recommendation.

Well, final question.

It would seem strange not to ask you.

What's been your experience of living in Turkey as a non-Turkish person?

Well, I mean, first of all, like Seoul, where I lived before, Istanbul is a megacity.

It's only comparable to places like New York or London.

So there's Turkey.

and then there's Istanbul.

And of course, like living in big cities, it can be very intense.

Also, Turkey is very polarized, like the UK and the US, I could say.

And Istanbul is a tough place economically for many people to live.

The old city, Constantinople and its walls, is very different from the rest of the city.

It's not really central to modern Istanbul as most people experience it.

Most people live in areas with high-rise apartments, shopping malls, crowded highways, far away from any historic monument.

A huge percent of the people live at least an hour away from the old city.

And Istanbul also has some of the worst traffic.

So there's many difficult things about the city.

But I have a very different kind of life than many people.

I live closer to the old city, and I can even see it from a park near my apartment.

So I have this wonderful actually view of Sulimaniyeh Mosque and even the Column of Constantine sticking out about

five, six kilometers away.

I spent a lot of time in the historic peninsula.

And so that means I just am interacting with the city in a very different way.

I'm also really privileged to know many local scholars and graduate students in Istanbul.

We often get together and go on walks in the old city.

So

I'm really experiencing the city in a very different way.

So I are going around and looking at the old city's history and its monuments.

And I'm talking with different people who are from very different backgrounds and getting very different perspectives but from this kind of very different perspective than the daily life of the city

also

i have many friends who either live here or used to live here or regularly visit from hungary greece sweden bulgaria serbia spain germany iran etc so I've also made many connections to nearby places and

because of being here, that I wouldn't necessarily have that experience in another place in the world.

And all of this makes the city really wonderful for me.

But of course,

it is a tough city for many people

as well.

So basically, I can say more that I see Istanbul more like a base.

And of course, I'm from the US.

Everything is very, very far away.

And so it's really different for me.

I can easily, you know, go to Bulgaria or Greece for the weekend and visit some friends.

I can even do this, and I do quite frequently visit Iznik for a day trip.

I can go and come back the same day.

So that

makes Istanbul something kind of different for me as well.

Ankar is also close, and I often use it as a secondary base to visit other places.

I've done that a lot in the past year or two.

Also, what is this city?

It's the capital of the Byzantine Romans, Romans, the Ottomans.

So, the shadow of Istanbul as the capital of the Romans and the Ottomans goes deep into the Balkans.

It can be deeply felt across the Eastern Mediterranean, and that's how I kind of see Istanbul.

So, you could say, I guess, that I'm more like Basil II or the Cominians than Justinian.

I might live in Istanbul, but I'm always planning a trip to go somewhere else.

And from Istanbul, I visited over 150 places.

So, yeah, I have a very different relationship with the city and

this makes Istanbul a very, very interesting place for me to live.

Fantastic.

Well, I think you've made your mark on

New Rome with the Byzantine legacy.

David, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

So thank you so much to David Hendrix.

Check out thebyzantinelegacy.com to learn more about his brilliant project.

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