[Yesterday as I was passing on some pictures to my students, one of them said, "Oh, look, we took the same picture," and there was hers on her screen and mine on another student's screen, side by side, and I don't need to tell you which was superior. By a lot.]
But first another picture from our hotel window, as promised, of the sun setting over the ships moored "downstream" from us, on the other side of the Fish Market.
The next day we went on a package tour, which we arranged through the hotel, which was to include another large mosque, the Spice Market, a bus tour of the European side of the Bosporus, a quick visit to a Byzantine fortress, a cruise of the Bosporus, lunch on the Asia side, and a final stop rather vaguely connected to carpets. (Some of you will have seen that last one coming.) The group included a German couple with some English, a French-speaking Quebecois couple, and the three of us. Our guide was fluent in all those languages and others, as he kept telling us, but that did not mean we were always able to understand him. Alex found it easier to understand his French than his English, and I kept catching things in German that I'd missed in English. Sometimes when there was limited time to say something, he just used English, which was okay with the others, but there was a lot of translating going on from the better-English-speaking member of each couple on those occasions. Here's a picture of him at the mosque that was our first stop. Dear guests, we go now.
I found the variety of buildings lining the Bosporus to be utterly fascinating, everything from the most ornate palaces and ancient fortress walls to waterfront Starbucks and dilapidated shacks. The boats in that third picture are moving alongside us, a fleet of fishermen heading in our direction (towards the Black Sea), and the fourth picture is of an expensive floating nightclub. There are several exclusive clubs in the vicinity of the European end of the first bridge to Asia (in the background, an enormous construction), and they have big curtains they can draw to shut out prying eyes from the water, or more precisely the prying camera lenses of the paparazzi, when the clubs are being visited by especially famous clients. As I said, I was not deterred by any of the barriers to photography, and if you're lucky maybe someday you can have a look at all my other pictures of buildings and boats. (Sounds like the title of a Talking Heads album.) For now you'll have to settle for a picture of Annabel's feet on the ground in Asia.
Our lunch view, which on a clear day would have been magnificent, was not. This was the first time setting foot in Asia for any of the three of us, and we would have liked to make more of our opportunity, but the rain at this point was coming in buckets.
Very bad traffic (i.e., typical Istanbul traffic) led to a vote to cut off a minor part of the tour (strongly encouraged by our guide), and for the rest of our tour I decided to pack the camera up and concentrate on looking directly at the things in front of me. The tour of the nineteenth-century palace was very enjoyable, although our guide's habit of repeating the same things in each room grew funny only after it was for some time annoying. The last stop on the itinerary turned out to be--no surprise to Alex and me--a pitch by some excellent carpet salesmen. Actually, it was a very enjoyable presentation, and we saw a lot of spectacular carpets, and as soon as we said we weren't buying they left us alone to our tea. But our fellow "dear guests" must have been a little more encouraging, because it took a while to get out of there. And then when we thought we were done and headed for the hotel, the elevator door opened on the jewelry floor, where we spent another twenty minutes. We managed to miss the leather floor. Earlier in the day, most of the Spice Market portion of our tour was spent in one shop where we heard another informative and entertaining pitch, and actually bought a few things. One thing about Istanbul: there was seldom a moment outside our hotel room when someone wasn't trying to sell us something. It was a little wearying at times, especially trying to make our way down narrow streets around meal times. But we adjusted.
The next day I left the camera at home, and we ourselves almost turned around just a couple of blocks from home, with the wind threatening to demolish our umbrellas and soaking us from the knees down. But we persevered, spending most of the day indoors at the older palace, underground in the amazing Byzantine cistern, and shopping in the Grand Bazaar, which was going to be closed the next day because it was a major holiday. I had been wondering about all the Turkish flags flying everywhere. Ordinarily I don't consider it a good sign if a place is plastered with national flags--seems like a sign of insecurity or a repressive regime, to me--but it turned out that some of those were specially displayed for the holiday. Not all, however. There are lots of very big Turkish flags flying everywhere in Istanbul. Interpret that as you will.
We spent the holiday visiting the newer part of town, across the Golden Horn but still on the European side, going up in the Renaissance tower that dominates the skyline there (far from the many very tall sky scrapers in the high-rent parts of the newer city), and visiting the beautiful Istanbul Modern Art Museum on the site of an old warehouse on the water. Our excursion guide had told us, when we pointed in the direction of the museum from the bus and said, "Oh, look there's the Istanbul Modern," "Oh, no, there's no museum there, that's just shopping, just a shopping area." We were confused for a while, but our dear guide was spectacularly wrong, as it turned out. The hundred-odd years of Turkish art were very enjoyable, but the building itself was the real gem.
Luckingly for us, the weather was milder on this day, and we were able to walk around with umbrellas tucked away most of the time. There were intimations of even better weather coming on our last day, as you can see by the red sky at night of yet another shot out our hotel window at sunset.
When the rain stopped we finally ventured up to the terrace on top of our section of the hotel, which wasn't used by anyone but us as far as I could tell (only three apartments in this section), and the view was even better from up there. But perhaps you've seen enough versions of this one shot? Are you sure? Okay, if you're sure.
The bulk of that last day was spent at the Archeological Museum, housed in part of the Byzantine palace complex. It included three enormous buildings, and we never even made it to the third. By halfway through the second we were moving very quickly, and I raced through a couple of floors at the end all on my own (while Alex took Annabel on the obligatory museum shop stop), including artifacts from Schliemann's excavation of Troy which I saw at the rate of about 10 seconds per each of the nine or so excavation levels. I can only give you a small sampling of the fantastic stuff we saw. I think we were all most impressed by the really old stuff, the Bronze Age artifacts from all over Asia Minor and the Near East, impressive statues mummies and plaques and altars and all kinds of smaller stuff from the Hittites and Sumerians and Babylonians and Egyptians and others. I took lots of pictures of different kinds of writing on stone, and just couldn't get over how many kinds of writing there were that long ago.
There was one huge multi-room display devoted to finds from the royal necropolis at Sidon. Alexander the Great is pictured at the far left in the fourth picture above, taken in that display, and you can still see the yellow paint on his hair, another reminder that they used to paint all that carved marble in gaudy colors. This frieze is from the "Alexander tomb," which was not actually his, but that of a general and friend of his. The mass of funerary carving in this display and others in the museum was overwhelming. There is a whole suite of rooms dedicated to an imaginative reconstruction of Byzantium at the peak of its Roman power, including many of the artifacts on which the reconstruction was based. Plus a couple of floors of Christian artifacts from Constantinople in the middle ages, that huge Troy display I raced through, and who knows how much more that we never even saw. It would have been a thoroughly satisfying way to conclude our Istanbul trip if we weren't nervous about getting to the airport. We ought to have allowed two days for this museum.
Eric had a window seat aft of the wing for the flight back, and took enormous pleasure in picking out landmarks below, including the island of Lesbos, and tracking from the air the ancient water-route to the sprawling modern city at Byzantium. As you can tell from this final shot of the Blue Mosque, the weather on the flight back was conducive to landmark-spotting, all travel by taxi and plane and bus and taxi again was routine, and before we know it we had left the Greek-capital-in-exile and were back home in the Greek-capital-by-default, having learned no Turkish whatsoever and actually relieved at being in a place where we could sort of read some of the signs and understand a little of what we were told in the native language.
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