Realm: Touristing – Subrealm: Istanbul I
Apr. 20th, 2006 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
choco_froshBackground: Some time ago, our fearless adventurers decided to take advantage of several days holiday at the archive and visit Istanbul, where we’d never been but always wanted to go. And hey, vacationing in Turkey is a classic German thing to do!
So yeah, our train was delayed by an hour. Fortunately, we found a friendly train conductor who re-routed us by a direct train to the airport. And as it turned out, our plane was delayed by half an hour anyway!
We got to Istanbul at about 2:30 AM. We were mostly asleep on our feet, but we managed to buy our visas, find an ATM, and get in a taxi, whose driver drove like a bat out of hell into the old city, via the Golden Gate (a roman triumphal arch later incorporated into the 5th century walls), and Kennedy Cadesi, to our hotel in the (extremely touristy) neighborhood of Sultanahmet. The drive would have had wonderful views by day; as it was, we got some idea of the splendor earlier, when our plane circled around Istanbul, seeming at times likely to crash into a dome…
Grüner Donnerstag: got up late, and had breakfast on the terrace of the hotel. This involved vast quantities of bread (Turks eat more bread per capita than anyone), as well as hard-boiled eggs, olives, little things of cheese, and tomatos and cucumbers. And copious amounts of tea, the real national drink of Turkey. Than we bought one of the hotel’s enormous 1 Lira bottles of water, and headed off (getting a little lost on the way) to explore the city.
Byzantion was founded by Greek colonists in about the sixth century BC, on a hill between the sea of Marmara and the best harbor on the Bosphorus, the strait linking the latter with the Black Sea. Most of that site is now occupied by the garden of the gigantic Topkapı Palace , founded by Sultan Mehmet II after he conquered the city in 1453. (Since then, it’s usually been known as Istanbul, from the local Greek is tan polin [stupid LJ not reading text in greek...], "into the city", from the days when it was THE city in the region.) We passed its fortified walls as we walked up that morning, in search of the most famous monument of the city between Byzantion and Istanbul: Constantinople, the (mostly) Christian city that Constantine the Great re-founded as New Rome in the fourth century. Aya Sofia, its cathedral, actually dates from the sixth century, when it was rebuilt on a revolutionary plan after burning down during a riot. Justinian I’s architects suspended a dome 100 feet wide over the middle of an open, rectangular space, using a complicated series of half domes and pendentives (and a couple pairs of massive buttresses). The effect was a little spoiled for us by the scaffolding erected in the middle to do something to that dome--possibly structural repairs (it's collapsed three times over the years: not so much the design as a combination of too much bad cement and being on an earthquake zone), or something to do with the ongoing process of recovering the medieval mosaics from under the Turkish overpainting. Also by the fact that our camera's batteries were flat, so we couldn't get pictures of various fathers of the church looking aloof, or the imperial donors looking smug, in the various surviving mosaics. The effect of the whole building was a lot more striking from the galleries: everything's on such a huge scale that it's a bit hard to take in, but up there you realize exactly how far off the ground you are, while the ceiling (with its compbination of islamic caligraphy and byzantine seraphim) is still quite a long way away...
We looked around for the viking graffiti, but didn't find them.
Update:
The area in front of Aya Sofya is a square (or maybe a road, or a bus parking lot--it's a bit hard to tell), with some Roman remains on one side and a park fronting the famous Blue Mosque (Sultanahmet Camii) across the way. It’s mostly full of people trying (aggressively) to sell you things. This is characteristic of pretty much ALL of Istanbul. The mosque (which gives its name to the area) was built by Sultan Ahmet I to rival Agia Sophia. And he knew how to make an effect: it’s right across the square from it, and positioned so that it’s outlined by the gate of the palace as you’re going out; it’s got six minarets, and it’s gigantic. In plan, it’s a near copy of its rival, though marginally smaller and over a thousand years later. It’s a little simpler (and has the advantage of not having as many tombs, extra buttresses and random excretion added), so from the outside it’s rather more impressive looking. Inside, the effect is somewhat spoiled by the obviousness of the four ginormous columns that hold everything up, but the interior decoration is gorgeous, with patterns of blue tiles. Trouble was, what with being misled by touts and unfamiliar with the prayer schedule, we didn’t get in til two. In between, we walked down to Little Ayasofya (SS. Sergios and Bacchos), an earlier work of Justinian’s that is unfortunately closed for renovations, but has a handsome former madrasa (Islamic school) courtyard which now houses a cheep, tasty restaurant where we had imam bayildi and stewed lamb. We also dropped by one of Constantinople’s cisterns, built underground with an odd assortment of reused columns and capitals (inc a couple of giant Medusa heads), and still providing a home for some enormous carp. Finally, late that afternoon, we dropped by the famous Spice bazaar, where I resisted vendors trying to sell us dried fruit, and instead bought some chillies for Adam and some sumac just for the hell of it. Grace bought soap.
After resuming the shoes we’d taken off to visit the mosque, we hiked down to one of the tram stops to purchase some public transportation tags (Akbil). In theory, a weekly pass on one of these is a fantastic deal, since you can use it on all trams, buses and ferries in the city. In practice, this is somewhat complicated by the fact that no-one in the public transportation business appears to speak English. As a result, it took the intervention of a passing Turkish businessman to explain to the guy in the booth what we wanted, and even then (since he didn’t want to deal with us, and you apparently need a special ID card to get a weekly pass anyway) we were given what we thought was a weekly pass for two, but turned out later to be simply that amount of money loaded on an (Akbil. This caused some difficulties when the money ran out. Fortunately, everyone else was just as confused as we were, so we road several ferries that we weren’t entitled to before someone figured out what was going on... But at this point we didn’t know about this, so we just got on a tram for Galata.
More updates to follow shortly!
So yeah, our train was delayed by an hour. Fortunately, we found a friendly train conductor who re-routed us by a direct train to the airport. And as it turned out, our plane was delayed by half an hour anyway!
We got to Istanbul at about 2:30 AM. We were mostly asleep on our feet, but we managed to buy our visas, find an ATM, and get in a taxi, whose driver drove like a bat out of hell into the old city, via the Golden Gate (a roman triumphal arch later incorporated into the 5th century walls), and Kennedy Cadesi, to our hotel in the (extremely touristy) neighborhood of Sultanahmet. The drive would have had wonderful views by day; as it was, we got some idea of the splendor earlier, when our plane circled around Istanbul, seeming at times likely to crash into a dome…
Grüner Donnerstag: got up late, and had breakfast on the terrace of the hotel. This involved vast quantities of bread (Turks eat more bread per capita than anyone), as well as hard-boiled eggs, olives, little things of cheese, and tomatos and cucumbers. And copious amounts of tea, the real national drink of Turkey. Than we bought one of the hotel’s enormous 1 Lira bottles of water, and headed off (getting a little lost on the way) to explore the city.
Byzantion was founded by Greek colonists in about the sixth century BC, on a hill between the sea of Marmara and the best harbor on the Bosphorus, the strait linking the latter with the Black Sea. Most of that site is now occupied by the garden of the gigantic Topkapı Palace , founded by Sultan Mehmet II after he conquered the city in 1453. (Since then, it’s usually been known as Istanbul, from the local Greek is tan polin [stupid LJ not reading text in greek...], "into the city", from the days when it was THE city in the region.) We passed its fortified walls as we walked up that morning, in search of the most famous monument of the city between Byzantion and Istanbul: Constantinople, the (mostly) Christian city that Constantine the Great re-founded as New Rome in the fourth century. Aya Sofia, its cathedral, actually dates from the sixth century, when it was rebuilt on a revolutionary plan after burning down during a riot. Justinian I’s architects suspended a dome 100 feet wide over the middle of an open, rectangular space, using a complicated series of half domes and pendentives (and a couple pairs of massive buttresses). The effect was a little spoiled for us by the scaffolding erected in the middle to do something to that dome--possibly structural repairs (it's collapsed three times over the years: not so much the design as a combination of too much bad cement and being on an earthquake zone), or something to do with the ongoing process of recovering the medieval mosaics from under the Turkish overpainting. Also by the fact that our camera's batteries were flat, so we couldn't get pictures of various fathers of the church looking aloof, or the imperial donors looking smug, in the various surviving mosaics. The effect of the whole building was a lot more striking from the galleries: everything's on such a huge scale that it's a bit hard to take in, but up there you realize exactly how far off the ground you are, while the ceiling (with its compbination of islamic caligraphy and byzantine seraphim) is still quite a long way away...
We looked around for the viking graffiti, but didn't find them.
Update:
The area in front of Aya Sofya is a square (or maybe a road, or a bus parking lot--it's a bit hard to tell), with some Roman remains on one side and a park fronting the famous Blue Mosque (Sultanahmet Camii) across the way. It’s mostly full of people trying (aggressively) to sell you things. This is characteristic of pretty much ALL of Istanbul. The mosque (which gives its name to the area) was built by Sultan Ahmet I to rival Agia Sophia. And he knew how to make an effect: it’s right across the square from it, and positioned so that it’s outlined by the gate of the palace as you’re going out; it’s got six minarets, and it’s gigantic. In plan, it’s a near copy of its rival, though marginally smaller and over a thousand years later. It’s a little simpler (and has the advantage of not having as many tombs, extra buttresses and random excretion added), so from the outside it’s rather more impressive looking. Inside, the effect is somewhat spoiled by the obviousness of the four ginormous columns that hold everything up, but the interior decoration is gorgeous, with patterns of blue tiles. Trouble was, what with being misled by touts and unfamiliar with the prayer schedule, we didn’t get in til two. In between, we walked down to Little Ayasofya (SS. Sergios and Bacchos), an earlier work of Justinian’s that is unfortunately closed for renovations, but has a handsome former madrasa (Islamic school) courtyard which now houses a cheep, tasty restaurant where we had imam bayildi and stewed lamb. We also dropped by one of Constantinople’s cisterns, built underground with an odd assortment of reused columns and capitals (inc a couple of giant Medusa heads), and still providing a home for some enormous carp. Finally, late that afternoon, we dropped by the famous Spice bazaar, where I resisted vendors trying to sell us dried fruit, and instead bought some chillies for Adam and some sumac just for the hell of it. Grace bought soap.
After resuming the shoes we’d taken off to visit the mosque, we hiked down to one of the tram stops to purchase some public transportation tags (Akbil). In theory, a weekly pass on one of these is a fantastic deal, since you can use it on all trams, buses and ferries in the city. In practice, this is somewhat complicated by the fact that no-one in the public transportation business appears to speak English. As a result, it took the intervention of a passing Turkish businessman to explain to the guy in the booth what we wanted, and even then (since he didn’t want to deal with us, and you apparently need a special ID card to get a weekly pass anyway) we were given what we thought was a weekly pass for two, but turned out later to be simply that amount of money loaded on an (Akbil. This caused some difficulties when the money ran out. Fortunately, everyone else was just as confused as we were, so we road several ferries that we weren’t entitled to before someone figured out what was going on... But at this point we didn’t know about this, so we just got on a tram for Galata.
More updates to follow shortly!
