Well, I think I'm a little tanner (maybe?) after spending two weeks away from cloudy and damp lands! And I've certainly learned a lot and gained additional perspective on global places, different cultures, and world politics. To jump right into it:
Last Monday, after printing out and submitting my two essays for Hilary term to Oxford's Exam Schools, my friend Cate and I boarded the bus to head to Gatwick airport. Our first travel destination was Istanbul, a city both of us had wanted to visit for a while. The main connections I had with Istanbul, before traveling there, were memories of my ninth grade history class, in which we discussed the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, which followed the Eastern Roman Empire (and later the Holy Roman Empire). This time in my studies is a blur in my mind by this point, but I remember discussing trade routes, the intersections of culture, and how Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, marking the end of the Middle Ages, at least according to some historians. I was fascinated by the idea of visiting the old city of Constantinople and seeing the architecture there, from Roman times through Christianization and later Islamic influence. I'd also gotten excellent recommendations for mosques and bazaars to visit, and baklava and Turkish delight to eat -- always a must to experience new cuisines!
Overall, the city did not disappoint. We arrived in Istanbul late on Monday evening and decided to take a taxi to our hostel rather than try to navigate foreign Turkish streets and public transportation systems in the dark. Notable on the drive was cruising past the old stone walls of Constantinople, and seeing the minarets of several of Istanbul's main mosques soaring upward in the dark. We both got very excited to see the city in daytime, and after crashing and getting a good night's sleep (always a must after a hectic Oxford term), we got up the next morning and gazed down our hostel's cobblestoned street to see a collection of Turkish cafes, hotels, and rug shops. We'd opted to stay in the Old City, which meant that we were near the main squares and buildings of Constantinople, the things we were most interested in. True to that interest, after a very Mediterranean breakfast of cucumbers, olives, tomatoes, and feta cheese (yes), we headed up the short hill from our hostel and straight to the Hagia Sophia.
The Hagia Sophia, followed by the neighboring Blue Mosque, was the place I'd most wanted to visit on this trip. It was first constructed as a Greek Orthodox basilica in 537, built on the site of several earlier churches by Justinian I. The name "Hagia Sophia" dedicates the church to the holy wisdom of God. For many centuries, the immense building functioned as a Christian church, but then with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 it was sacked and converted into an Islamic mosque. Later, in 1935, it was restored and re-opened as a museum. Clashing empires, centuries of history, and clashing religious creeds have gone into this place, and it is simply magnificent. The Muslims kept the main structure of the basilica when they converted it into a mosque, but installed more floral adornments and instances of Islamic art and covered up all the Christian motifs and mosaics (including ripping Christian crosses off the engraved stone, leaving scars to this day). But the restoration of the church in the modern era has uncovered those old gold mosaics beneath the surface, and visiting the Hagia Sophia is an experience in encountering those layers of history, time, and strife. Besides, it is absolutely one of the most physically gorgeous and overwhelming buildings I have ever seen on the inside, probably even the more so for its tarnish and its signs of age. The sun streams in through the many windows at slanted angles and lights up the golden interior, dancing off the carved marble columns and making the entire place look and feel ethereal. The eye cannot take it all in at once, and all the intricate detail begs for contemplation. This church did feel ancient, and did feel holy. It's one place the pictures absolutely cannot do justice to, but here I offer a few:
After emerging from the Hagia Sophia, we decided to grab some lunch before venturing to the Blue Mosque, or the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, located just across a square from the Hagia Sophia and constructed by Ahmed I in 1616 to rival the Hagia Sophia's grandness. Being a thousand years younger (though it is still quite old!), the Blue Mosque has a much cleaner and more unified appearance on the exterior, whereas the Hagia Sophia is crumbling in some places and has needed constant repairs over the centuries. It also still functions as a mosque and a place of worship rather than a museum, and as we filed inside we found that we needed to remove our shoes and cover our heads with scarves. I had brought along an ordinary scarf for the trip, and clumsily wrapped it around my head as I proceeded through the doors -- I am sure I appeared ridiculous and very American. The Blue Mosque was huge on the inside, worked in ornate handpainted ceramic tiles and patterns that boggled the eye to study and consider. Four main pillars support the central worshipping space and the dome, with several smaller half-domes and arched bays linked to the main dome, a design that we also observed in other Istanbul mosques. We spent a while admiring the intricate Islamic artwork -- yet I privately felt that the Blue Mosque didn't quite equal the splendor of the Hagia Sophia.
Next we walked through the Topkapi parks by the Topkapi Palace, which we would visit later in the week (more on that in a bit), down the waterfront to our third mosque of the day, the New Mosque, and then to the Egyptian spice bazaar and the Grand Bazaar. What a bustling place full of goods, spices, ceramics, silver pieces, and of course food! I got a pretty Turkish scarf and we bought a box of Turkish delight that, although amazing, would take us the entire week to finish. (Nom nom.) After that lengthy dose of visual overload, and after getting a bit lost walking back through the city streets to the hostel, we wound up back at our hostel, exhausted, and headed to bed after a quick dinner.
Day two in Istanbul dawned as bright and sunny as day one had been, good news since we'd decided to take a cruise ferry up the Bosphorus Strait that day. The Bosphorus is the canal of water that separates Istanbul's European side from its Asian side, and that connects the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. (Yes, we made some jokes about Ukraine and Crimea being just a bit farther up the Black Sea.) The ferry ride from Istanbul up to the farthest part of the Bosphorus, where it joins with the Black Sea, takes about an hour and a half, and we relaxed on the boat with some books (and plenty of photo taking on my part) before reaching the terminal stop, where we disembarked and got lunch. Our lunchtime spot overlooked a stretch of clear blue water, and I realized I was in Asia for the first time! Istanbul is the world's only major city to straddle two continents, so this technicality of borders and location and world geography made the visit to the Asian side rather fun.
After lunch we tramped up a hill to overlook the Black Sea, visited the ruins of a castle/military fortress built by the Ottomans to fortify the city proper from invaders from the Black Sea, and then sat in the sun for around an hour with some Turkish çay (tea) and pleasure reading. Combined with the ferry ride back, in which we got some great views of Istanbul's minaret-lined skyline in the later hours of the day, it was a relaxing day and a welcome break from the rushing about of day one.
In the morning of day three, we got up and prepared ourselves to go visit the Topkapi Palace, or the main palace complex of the Ottoman sultans of Istanbul. It's built on a high hill overlooking the ocean and in close proximity to the Hagia Sophia, which I gathered the sultan's religious advisors would visit immediately before coming to participate in a royal assembly in the palace. The outside walls and gates of the palace are right next to the Hagia Sophia, and we passed by some heavily armed guards (a more common thing in Turkey, where the display of large guns and military force is much more prominent than in the US) on our way through the external park complex en route to get tickets. After passing through, we found ourselves in a large garden, which led to a royal assembly hall that was absolutely gold-gilded and intricately worked with arches and tiles and geometric details. (This was a common theme inside the palace.)
Inside another set of walls were more state rooms, all built around a lovely garden with flowers and large overhanging trees. The open nature of the palace, and its construction around various garden walkways, made it more like Asian palace complexes, so I gathered, than European ones, which tend to be larger fortress-like buildings of interconnected state rooms and drawing rooms and royal chambers and so forth. We got another case of visual overload looking at the absolutely excessive and garish gems and jewels and treasures of the sultans in the palace museums, before stopping for lunch at the palace cafe, which overlooked the old walls of Constantinople and the Mediterranean Sea. Overpriced food for sure, but the view was astounding, so what can I say!
After lunch, we visited yet more sitting rooms and palace buildings, as well as the sultan's harem -- where all his wives and concubines would have stayed/lived in the imperial days. I found it a little unsettling to think about the life of being a sultan's concubine, locked into this ornate but still confined harem, which overlooked the city but yet felt very far from it. On that note, we left and ventured out on an afternoon mission to sip afternoon çay and eat more baklava and amazing Turkish pastries and Turkish delight.
At this point, I suppose I should say something about the "culture shock" factor of being in Istanbul. This was the farthest east I had ever been, and I could strongly feel that we weren't in the western world anymore. The men on the streets had what I would call a very entitled, very harassing perspective on women, and being obviously American (or foreign) we attracted a lot of attention from street vendors who would not leave us alone. I was rather more immune to the catcalls than my friend, due to my being deaf, which I was thankful for -- I find it very easy to ignore people when I need to! We certainly felt much more aware of our femaleness, and thus our relative lack of equality, in that society while we were there, although it didn't cause any problems besides annoyance. Traveling to Istanbul marked my first time seeing a woman in full hijab garb, and there were many of them around the city, usually if not always accompanied by men. Other Turkish women didn't wear the hijab, but dressed conservatively from top to bottom and wore headscarves everywhere, although often colorful ones. (One of my favorite memories of the trip: seeing women in hijabs wearing sparkly designer sunglasses, or sparkly shoes beneath their garments, or pulling out a snazzy iPhone or iPad to take pictures. Talk about a clash of worlds there, at least for me.) We rarely saw a Turkish woman working anywhere or selling anything, although the men were absolutely everywhere, loitering in the streets and trying to haggle tourists to enter and buy from their businesses and conversing and smoking in the corner of all the shops. To a Westerner, it was an eye-opening experience on the way gender dynamics function in some places of the world.
Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled programming. After Topkapi Palace and after gorging ourselves on Turkish sweets, we decided to culminate day three with a visit to the Basilica Cistern, which is one of the old cisterns of Constantinople, built beneath the city as a sort of aquifer and place to store water by the Romans. The Romans' extensive aqueduct system would channel water into the city from the outlying lands, and then a series of underground cisterns served as water storage for the inhabitants of Constantinople. As an example of Roman civic engineering and structural ingenuity these cisterns are very fun to visit, and have been restored and reopened to the public as tourist attractions. The Basilica Cistern is the largest one, and had an incredibly ancient and magical and solemn air inside. I felt as though I was breathing in the same damp air as the ancient Romans, as the Doric and Corinthian columns receded away from me into the darkness. There is still water down in the cisterns, and pathways have been built so that tourists can traverse the length of the underground cavern, with small lights illuminating each column. This was probably one of my favorite places to photograph:
After considering the solemnity of the ages and the passage of time (I admit, something I like to do while traveling, come into contact with antiquity), we surfaced and went to dinner to complete our day. A word here about the Turkish food. A lot of dishes are meat-based, such as kebabs and doner, although there are some amazing sauces and hummus to try. We also ate several vegetable-based dishes with eggplant and zucchini and peppers, and a lot of bread. And a lot of dessert, as I mentioned. (Have I said how good baklava is? And have I emphasized enough how many Turkish sweets we ate?)
On to day four. We'd decided to venture across the river for this stint of our travels, to visit the Galata Tower, a medieval stone tower that is one of the city's most striking landmarks. Upon crossing the bridge and walking up the narrow streets to its base, we decided not to go up top, since it was overpriced and we'd had plenty of panoramic views of the city already, and instead walked down the Istiklal Caddesi from the tower toward Taksim Square, a section of the city famed for its shops and restaurants. Many American and British shopping chains made an appearance here, there was a trolley car traversing the length of the street, and we stopped for lunch once we reached Taksim Square itself. The place is famous for its role as a gathering place for Turkish political protests, including the demonstrations that happened in Istanbul last year. It now has a strong police presence, and the large Turkish flags billowing over the square, combined with the nearby museum dedicated to the Turkish national hero Ataturk, gave the place a distinctly edgy and nationalistic feel. Nothing happened while we were there, and we soon walked down the hill to a palace beside the water to spend the afternoon reading and writing. Then back across the bridge, past a multitude of Turkish fishermen who'd been there the entire day catching fish, and on to dinner!
Day five was our last day in Istanbul before heading to Albania -- dear reader, if you've made it this far in my travel chronicle, many kudos to you. Our very first day in Istanbul, we'd been so taken by the Hagia Sophia that we'd decided we had to come back before leaving, just to contemplate and take in the aura of the place. So we paid the entry fee again, went earlier before the major crowds arrived, and spent a good two hours wandering around and staring up at its grand arches and noticing many more details we hadn't seen the first time. (We also decided, this time, that we weren't going to take nearly as many pictures, and taking that time to breathe and really
look at where we were helped that endeavor a ton. Just an interesting side note about the role of photography in modern-day tourism and engagement with global sites.) We also came across something amusing -- a Turkish cat in the Hagia Sophia itself! The city was run over with cats, and some dogs too, to such an extent that we laughed at what the cat-to-human ratio of Istanbul must be. A sampling of my week-long chronicle of Turkish cats, starting with the rather imperious Hagia Sophia cat:
After departing the Hagia Sophia, rather reluctantly, we considered going to a museum to fill up the afternoon, but felt tired out from all the sightseeing we'd been doing and the Turkish art and architecture we'd been doing already. So we spent the afternoon in the park by the Topkapi Palace, writing and reading and people-watching. (And cat-watching, too, if I'm going to be totally honest here.) I got the chance to write and reflect about the places I'd been and the things I'd seen in Istanbul, one of my favorite things to do while traveling. Having those few hours of peace was thoroughly worth it, and all too soon we headed back to the hostel to pack up, get a taxi, and head back to the airport for the next stage of our travels!
Part two of spring break travels upcoming...
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