The building featured in this show is, in actuality, the Thomas Foster Memorial.
Another contributor makes points about "Turkey" and "icons". They are valid, but it isn't clear why they were being made. But:
a) a character uses the term "iconography" which doesn't only refer to the content of icons, but can be used more generally to discuss the symbols used within other types of art.
b) a character also used the word Turkish. It is true that the modern state did not exist in Murdoch's day, but the adjective was validly used to describe things or people from that place for many centuries, as is clear from the name of the bird native to the Americas. It's a bit like people being called Russians during the Soviet era .
a) a character uses the term "iconography" which doesn't only refer to the content of icons, but can be used more generally to discuss the symbols used within other types of art.
b) a character also used the word Turkish. It is true that the modern state did not exist in Murdoch's day, but the adjective was validly used to describe things or people from that place for many centuries, as is clear from the name of the bird native to the Americas. It's a bit like people being called Russians during the Soviet era .
George Crabtree references Detective Murdoch's fear of butterflies, as previously revealed in season 7 in "Murdochophobia."
Actual Christian icons were not stone carvings of symbols, but paintings of people, usually done on wood. Icons are used widely in the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity. This branch was based in Byzantium, later known as Constantinople, named after the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, who converted to Christianity and established a "New Rome" in Byzantium. The city was renamed again to Istanbul, and made the capital of the Ottoman Empire. In Murdoch's time was still the capital of the then-failing Ottoman Empire. Back then it would be more than 20 years before the nation-state of Turkey arose out of the ruins of the Ottoman caliphate in Anatolia.
In the same breath, Murdoch identifies the brain-injured son as "Enoch", and the architect father as "Arden". "Enoch Arden" was a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, about an eponymous fisherman who disappeared at sea. He returned 10 years later to find his wife with a new family, so to preserve her new happiness he went away again without ever revealing his true identity.