Cosmic Multicultural Bucharest in the Pandemic (28):
A Little Byzantine in Bucharest
By Andrei Dorian Gheorghe (astro-photo-poem-essay) and Florin Alexandru Stancu (design)
On February 9, 2021
a beautiful solar halo above the Cocioc Hill (former ski resort in the 1930s) made me remember the round shapes of Hagia Sofia in Istanbul, the emblematic building of Byzantine architecture.
So I climbed on it to see a chapel with some Byzantine roundness and the Ash Palace, also made (in the 1920s) in Byzantine style, with old Egyptian and Syrian elements.
Although the Orthodox Church of the Byzantine Empire was even more conservative than the Catholic Church regarding the geocentric system (the author of “Almagest”, Claudius Ptolemy, was a Greek astronomer, however!) - despite the efforts of Theodore Metochites and Nicephorus Gregoras for freer astronomy in the 14th century -, I gladly returned there one evening to catch the Moon above the two Byzantine buildings.
Heaven itself rewarded me for these expeditions with a Crowned Moon!
#poetry