A plea for peace in white goes dark

She and Moro had conceived their project more than a year earlier, talking about how they could dramatize their peace message. They wanted to incorporate a road journey, in part to symbolize the ways in which minds can travel toward compromise. Their wedding dresses would evoke the sense of hope and life-changing possibility that a bride might feel on her wedding day.

And their principal mode of travel -- hitchhiking -- would embody the notion that sometimes one must make a leap of faith.

It wouldn't matter, they believed, that they didn't speak the language of each country through which they would pass.

They would have no set timetable. They would require very little in the way of funding. They would make new friends everywhere. They would, in the largest sense, be free. When they arrived in Istanbul, Moro and Bacca were two weeks into their journey. They had already traveled by road through the Balkans; after Turkey, they were heading to Syria and Lebanon; their final destination, still weeks away, was Israel. There, they planned to stage an exhibition whose centerpiece would be the white gowns they had worn on the road, tattered and tattooed with the dust of the long journey.

Although the project was simple in concept, it had the usual high-tech accouterments: a website on which the two charted their progress -- www.bridesontour.fotoup.net -- a regular schedule of text-messaging to stay in touch with friends and family, a far-flung network of Facebook friends who provided accommodation and contacts wherever they went.

Those who met them during the days they spent in Istanbul described the women as exhilarated, even giddy.

Istanbul was a highlight of the trip; the ancient city has a thriving contemporary-arts scene and is the frequent venue of prestigious international arts festivals. In chic galleries and unpretentious eating-and-drinking spots called meyhanes, Moro and Bacca found artistic kinship and kindred spirits.

Fellow artists considered their project, with its costume-driven allusions to peace and conflict, gender roles and sexual politics, to be provocative, but by no means outlandish. Several artists recalled a recent performance piece in which a woman in an all- encompassing chador jogged through Istanbul's streets trailed by a camera crew. People barely batted an eye.