While the Apocalypse – Blog

Imagine a grand tour of European museums, and a fair few destinations come right to mind: the Rijksmuseum, the Prado, the Uffizi Gallery, the Louvre. These institutions alone could take years to experience fully, but it would be an incomplete journey that didn’t venture farther east — much farther east, in the view of Great Art Explained creator James Payne. In his latest Great Art Cities video, he makes the case for Istanbul, adducing such both artistically and historically rich sites as the İstanbul Archaeological Museum, the Basilica Cistern, the Zeyrek Çinili Hamam, Istanbul Modern, and of course — as previously featured here on Open Culture — the unignorable Hagia Sophia.

Payne introduces Istanbul as having been “the capital of three great empires, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman.” In the continent-straddling metropolis as it is today, “both ancient and modern art blend elements from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, reflecting its geographical and historical positioning as a bridge between the East and the West.”

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